Dewey Dykstra, Jr.

Department of Physics

Boise State University

Boise, ID 83725-1570

What is the point? One reason for the "deer in the woods" is to point out that it is an example which illustrates that generally different people find different suggestions as to how to "see the deer in the woods" useful. Some find they can see it by following the pointing behavior of the first person who sees it. Others see the deer when somebody says, "Look above the big white rock." Still others don’t see it until somebody else says, "It’s moving to the left." Because the PHYS 100 course is so different, I try to encourage students to look beyond me to figure out what the course is about, to look to their peers, anyone who seems to "see the deer," who seems to be successful in the course.

One could say that this course is about seeing something "again, for the first time." One difference that higher education should attempt to make in people is that they develop habits of mind which involve critically examining the world around and within them. The term "critically" is not intended to mean "negatively." Instead, the phrase "critically examine" is intended to mean: to examine in a careful, analytical, principled, rational fashion. In the context of the title, it means not only to notice the woods, but to look for and notice the "deer," what it is doing, and much of the rest of the "flora and fauna" and how they inter-relate.

At the end of the semester some of the students say things like the following:

"Leave the "Deer in the woods" … out, it has nothing to do with physics."

"Don't spend so much time with the "deer in the woods" stuff. Leave metaphor for the English Department. I think college students (at least some of us) are advanced enough to take certain ideas as a given, such as the concept that science does not deal with absolute truths. I felt like "Yea, so." This can be stated & left alone. … Also, sometimes a straight answer is called for." [Ed. note: To which I have to ask, "What is a ‘straight answer,’ but a kind of absolute truth?" So, does "stated & left alone" mean stated and then ignored?]

Some students apparently perceive need for external validation…

"… we have learned that an instructor tells us what to learn and "learn it." This was a tough class because I never really understood what I was supposed to learn."

"Some students do well with this type of teaching style; however, others aren't. Those that aren't shouldn't be expected to "change" or "keep in mind" how the rest of the class is or thinks. I am who I am and shouldn't have to adapt for others."

"Need text. [Ed. Note: The course has no required text.] It's too late to break the conditioning of book learning for college students. This class (well its style) might prove useful for the elementary student who hasn't been in a conditioned routine with text (regurgitated) learning as long as the college student."

"My personal learning experience would have been greatly increased if Dr. Dykstra would have affirmed or denied claims being made about the graphs. Because the graphs do function in a certain way, this was not too much to ask. Nothing was confirmed until the exam was given as to what was actually happening in the graphs. At that point I had confirmation regarding the activity in the graphs. I saw the "deer in the woods."

"Yes, the teacher should give the students the correct answer. This helps us learn, because I have not been told what the correct answer is and I am going to throw it all out for I do not know what is true and what is not so it is no use to me."

"I believe Dr. Dykstra should not tell the correct answers, at first. This is definitely why I spent more time in this class & made sure I was here all the time. Maybe the correct answers would help. I feel like I don't know if this is right or wrong. Should I remember this or forget about it."

"[The instructor should give correct factual information] because that is what this society lives on. If you want us to stand out and be misfits (which I don't like to be different), teach the way it is now."

"…in the study groups we focused on the answers that would get us points on the exam. I need to hear the right answer in order to study."

It would appear that for the students commenting above school, science in particular, is not supposed to be about metaphor. Apparently school is supposed to be about being given the truth and being able to repeat it back. It is sad that they have had so little exposure to knowledge other than as absolute truth. Although this is a 100-level course the students are usually pretty evenly distributed from freshman to senior. It is clear that many of these students are still in the early positions of Wm. Perry’s scheme of intellectual and moral development.

Where can they have learned these "truths" about the nature of science? Where else but in school? Lewis Thomas, department Chairman and Dean in prestigious medical schools and later President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of New York City has made the following comments about science education in an article titled, "Humanities and Science," published in a book titled, "Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony" (1983, Penguin Books, New York, pages 146 - 148).

"But even today, despite the amazements that are turning up in physics each year, despite the jumps taken from the smallest parts of nature–particle physics–to the largest of all–the cosmos itself–the impression of science that the public gains is rather like the impression left in the nineteenth-century public mind by Kelvin. Science, in this view, is first of all a matter of simply getting all the numbers together. The numbers are sitting out there in nature, waiting to be found, sorted and totted up….

"I suggest that the scientific community is to blame [for this impression]. …I believe that the scientists are themselves responsible for a general misunderstanding of what they are really up to.

"Over the past half century, we have been teaching the sciences as though they were the same academic collection of cut-and-dried subjects as always, and–here is what has really gone wrong–as though they would always be the same. …

"Moreover, we have been teaching science as though its facts were somehow superior to the facts in all other scholarly disciplines, more fundamental, more solid, less subject to subjectivism, immutable. … The facts that underlie art, architecture, and music are not really hard facts, and you can change them any way you like by arguing about them, but science is treated as an altogether different kind of learning: an unambiguous, unalterable, and endlessly useful display of data needing only to be packaged and installed somewhere in one’s temporal lobe in order to achieve a full understanding of the natural world."

Thomas would probably agree that it is sad that students learn from science education as-it-is that scientific theory is about truth. Unfortunately, scientific theories are essentially metaphors which explain our experiences. Theory is populated with mental constructs which in science education as-it-is are given the status of real existence similar to that of a table or chair in the room where you are reading this little essay.

But, mental constructs are just that, mental. Take for example, the construct, "force." In most discussion in physics classes forces are taken as real entities. The same is true in everyday life interactions. Yet, can we actually measure a force? All of our devices to "measure" forces actually measure motions or deformations of objects. We claim these motions or deformations are the result of forces, but we do not, cannot measure these forces, themselves. Sometimes, we "measure" certain forces by declaring that these forces "add up" in a certain way, hence a force, which we have not determined by a motion or the deformation of an object, must be such-and-such in order to be consistent with our conjecture that forces always "add up" in this certain way. How do we know they add up in this way? It certainly is not because we have ever actually measured all the forces, themselves, to see. Not even once. Are forces anything more than something we invented to explain motion and the deformation of objects?

Force is but one of many fundamental entities in scientific theories with the status of mental construct. Can we really leave metaphor to the Arts & Letters? When we do, we cease to understand or do Science.

Thomas follows his indictment of science education as-it-is with at least the beginnings of an antidote for science education as-it-is. His suggested "cure" is sketched in the following from the same essay (pages 148 — 155).

"And it is, of course, not like this at all. In real life, every field of science that I can think of is incomplete, and most of them–whatever the record of accomplishment over the past two hundred years–are still in the earliest stage of their starting point…

"It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in science awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code.

"…Every age, not just the eighteenth century, regarded itself as the Age of Reason, and we have never lacked for explanations of the world and its ways. Now, we are being brought up short, and this has been the work of science. … Science will, in its own time, produce the data and some of the meaning in the data, but never the full meaning. For getting a full grasp, for perceiving real significance when significance is at hand, we shall need minds at work from all sorts of brains outside the fields of science, most of all the brains of poets, of course, but also those of artists, musicians, philosophers, historians, writers in general.

"It is primarily because of this need that I would press for changes in the way science is taught. There is a need to teach the young people who will be doing the science themselves, but this will always be a small minority among us. There is a deeper need to teach science to those who will be needed for thinking about it, and this means pretty nearly everyone else, in hopes that a few of these people…will, in the thinking, be able to imagine new levels of meaning that are likely to be lost on the rest of us [scientists]. …

"I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known. …

"The worst thing that has happened to science education is that the great fun has gone out of it. A very large number of students look at it as slogging work to be got through on the way to… Very few see science as the high adventure it really is, the wildest of all explorations ever undertaken by human beings, the chance to catch close views of things never seen before, … Instead, they become baffled early on, and they are misled into thinking that bafflement is simply the result of not having learned all the facts [or, sadly, more often their own imagined personal inadequacies.] They are not told, as they should be told, that everyone else–from the professor in his endowed chair down to the platoons of postdoctoral students in the laboratory all night–is baffled as well. …

"An appreciation of what is happening in science today, and of how great a distance lies ahead for exploring, ought to be one of the rewards of a liberal-arts education. … Part of the intellectual equipment of an educated person, however his or her time is to be spent, ought to be a feel for the queernesses of nature, the inexplicable things.

"And maybe, just maybe, a new set of courses dealing systematically with ignorance in science might take hold. The scientists might discover in it a new and subversive technique for catching the attention of students driven by curiosity, delighted and surprised to learn that science is exactly as Bush [neither George nor George, Jr.!] described it: an "endless frontier."

Paul Feyerabend, noted philosopher of science, has also commented on his view of what education should be in his essay "How to Defend Society Against Science" reprinted in the volume, "Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science" (Klemke, Hollinger, Kline eds. Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY 1988). The essay was originally published in the journal, "Radical Philosophy" (no. 11, 1975, pp 3 — 8).

"The purpose of education, so one would think, is to introduce the young into life, and that means: into the society where they are born and into the physical universe that surrounds the society. The method of education often consists in the teaching of some basic myth. The myth is available in various versions. More advanced versions may be taught by initiation rites which firmly implant them into the mind. Knowing the myth the grownup can explain almost everything (or else he can turn to experts for more detailed information). He is master of Nature and Society. He understands them both and he knows how to interact with them. However, he is not the master of the myth that guides his understanding.

"Such further mastery was aimed at, and was partly achieved, by the Presocratics. The Presocratics not only tried to understand the world. They also tried to understand, and thus become the masters of, the means of understanding the world. Instead of being content with a single myth they developed many and so diminished the power which a well-told story has over the minds of men. The sophists introduced still further methods for reducing the debilitating effect of interesting, coherent, "empirically adequate" etc. etc. tales. The achievement of these thinkers was not appreciated and they certainly are not understood today. When teaching a myth we want to increase the chance that it will be understood (i.e. no puzzlement about any feature of the myth), believed, and accepted. This does not do any harm when the myth is counterbalanced by other myths: even the most dedicated (i.e. totalitarian) instructor in a certain version of Christianity cannot prevent his pupils from getting in touch with Buddhists, Jews and other disreputable people. It is very different in the case of science, or of rationalism where the field is almost completely dominated by believers. In this case it is of paramount importance to strengthen the minds of the young, and "strengthening the minds of the young" means strengthening them against easy acceptance of comprehensive views. What we need here is an education that makes people contrary, counter-suggestive, without making them incapable of devoting themselves to the elaboration of any single view. How can this aim be achieved?

"It can be achieved by protecting the tremendous imagination which children possess and by developing to the full the spirit of contradiction that exists in them. On the whole children are much more intelligent than their teachers. They succumb, and give up their intelligence because they are bullied, or because their teachers get the better of them by emotional means. …

"There are marvellous writers in all languages who have told marvellous stories–let us begin our … teaching with them… Using stories we may of course also introduce "scientific" accounts… But science must not be given any special position… Both reasons and contrary reasons will be told by the experts in the fields and so the young generation becomes acquainted with all kinds of sermons and all types of wayfarers. It becomes acquainted with them, it becomes acquainted with their stories, and every individual can make up his mind which way to go. By now everyone knows that you can earn a lot of money and respect and perhaps even a Nobel Prize by becoming a scientist, so many will become scientists. They will become scientists without having been taken in by the ideology of science, they will be scientists because they have made a free choice.

"But has not much time been wasted on unscientific subjects and will this not detract from their competence once they have become scientists? Not at all! The progress of science, of good science, depends on novel ideas and on intellectual freedom: science has very often been advanced by outsiders (remember that Bohr and Einstein regarded themselves as outsiders). …" [all italics original]

Not all the students finish the course with the strong dependency on external validation. Are they this way because of the PHYS 100 course? Did they "see the deer in the woods" because of this course? It’s hard to say. What is not hard to say is that as long as courses fail to engage students in "looking for the deer in the woods" most students will remain blissfully unaware of the "deer." …and the university will have failed in one of its fundamental responsibilities to these students.

Here are the comments of some students with a different view of the process in class…

"It's good there is not a textbook or math involved. … In the end, it has made me really appreciate and enjoy physics even though I was pretty turned off to it before because of all the math. There needs to be Chemistry courses like this also. This structure of class really helps people learn versus just remember for the test. Thank you."

"Originally I thought the phenomena of science could only be explained one way -- that way being the view held by the majority of the scientific community around the world and then passed on to the rest of the population."

"What is right? (right?) No, I believe in the instructor’s goal to get people to develop intellectual inquiry about science… I realize that he trying to get people to come up with their own opinions instead of taking a generalist opinion. And he teaches the fact that no theory is safe from possible disproof."

"Since the students are "trained" to learn from "correct" answers given from an authority -- it's hard to change."

"A lot of effort was put forth by the professor. I think it was the most effort that I have ever seen a BSU professor put into teaching. Good job!"