My Frustration

Normally I'm not inclined to come here and vent in exactly the way that I'm about to. However, I'm in the middle of angsting about what I'm going to teach on the island this coming week. I have a goal, a sort of intent that I place behind every lesson I plan, and that goal is to get kids to think. It is something that from my point of view should be relatively easy and straightforward. There are an infinite number of terribly interesting questions and issues in biology that are worthy of deep and intense critical thought, even at what qualifies in the parameters of high school biology curricula. However.... Another goal is to try and make the lesson material relate directly to my students, make it relevant and interesting. So with these two goals in mind I have for some time been trying to set up my kids and the materials so that we can do a major study unit on the brain. You know, the brain. It has a certain novelty to it that adds to it's interest level. It is something that everyone has so how it works and what it does is terribly relevant to everyone. I would think this to be particularly so considering the fact that most of my students have learning disabilities which implies something that is working a bit outside the norm with their brains. That is also the case when you consider the meds they're on and the drugs they recreate with and are addicted to.

The problem is abstraction. If you want to learn and think about all this stuff in any kind of meaningful way that would be genuinely interesting, meaningful, etc. you have to be able to work with a lot of abstraction. Whenever we cross that line into the abstract I can guarantee that I will completely lose half of my students. Lately I've been trying to use concrete examples to demonstrate certain comparable genetic phenomena but my students don't get it. All they see is: yeah I'm mixing up and counting colored gaming chips and it has something to do with genes. But what they are representing in terms of the genes, the very real cellular, genetic, and population mechanics that this stuff is representing is going 110% over their heads. And despite doing things in a way that is as hands-on as I think it could possibly be made, in a way that would allow for any kind of real-time experimenting that the kids could deal with, it is still inadequate to getting them to cross that barrier and really SEE what in the world it is we are trying to talk about here.

At times, when I encounter this situation, my inclination is to shift gears to pick the whole process apart and get into the gritty details and break it into pieces and chunks small enough that the abstraction is simple enough that they couldn't help but understand it. The problem with this is the invariable outcome that reiteration and lack of context are going to make it all a big boring and irrelevant mess to my kids. How? How in the world am I supposed to make them care? For me it is all inherently interesting and the big picture is valuable and important enough to grind through the details (which sadly are interesting enough on their own). But also, I don't have the difficulty they do in trying to deal with the abstract so grinding through the details is a lot less effort for me. This has been the story time and time again. I can have them engaged doing stuff and not really learning anything or, I can fight like crazy and suffer to get unbelievably picayune but genuine thinking.

So, here I've been trying to put together this really cool stuff on genetics and behavior, highly relevant considering all the research that comes out in the news these days on this stuff, but I'm chucking the whole idea because I know that they can't deal with it. I'm going to go practice some kata and get some of the rage out of my system now.