Let me first tell a little about myself. I'm not a teacher. I have a
great respect for the teaching profession, and I don't know if I would be
a very good fulltime teacher if I tried it myself. Also, I'm not a
professional author, and I'm aware of the huge amount of skilled work
needed to produce a good book (as opposed to throwing together a website
like I've done.) What I am is a professional electronics designer. I'm
also still a science student, and hope always to be one.
Where did my Textbook
Misconceptions List come from? No, I'm not just a professional
nitpicker who can't stand tiny flaws. Instead there is a story behind
this. I was one of those students
who developed a deep love of physical science. Over the years I slowly
learned to "dance" with the subject, to find massive interconnections
between separate parts, until physics eventually became for me like a vast
ballet, or like a gigantic puzzle where most pieces connect together in a
deeply satisfying way. It all made SENSE, and it had the depths of
esthetics like gourmet food or profound art.
Then during my science museum exhibit design work in 1988 I acquired a
stack of elementary school textbooks. I wanted to find out how to explain
electricity to 6th-graders. When reading the books I was totally stunned.
The electricity chapters were wrong. Terribly terribly wrong, and it
wasn't just simple factual errors. Also, they weren't wrong in the way
that "atoms are little solar systems" is wrong; this was different. The
authors had no grasp of their subject. The
books' electricity chapters were teaching bizarre things. If
"electricity" is like a gas, then the books were doing the equivalent of
teaching us that wind moves at the speed of light, or that sound waves are
the same as air molecules. Or that air is a form of invisible energy.
The authors of those books clearly suffered from many electricity
misconceptions usually limited to beginning students. Unfortunately, the
authors were not
students anymore, they were science experts, and they were teaching their
misconceptions to huge numbers of students and teachers. Could any K-6
students ever avoid acquiring a misconception, if that misconception has
the stamp of approval of the ultimate authority: their science textbook?
And, could any teachers dare to really understand a subject, if in
order
to understand the subject, they must distrust and reject the information
in their science textbooks? (Later I found that RP Feynman had a
similar encounter. See an excerpt from Judging Books
by their Covers. Fascinating)
After my encounter with those books, I slowly realized that my own
understanding of basic electricity was flawed and incomplete. So I sat down
and started re-teaching myself the subject. I became aware of the source
of my problem: I myself had learned a bunch of electricity misconceptions
as a child. Those early misconceptions gave me a faulty foundation on
which to build further knowledge. As a result, any accurate information
learned later became distorted in my mind even as I learned it. If the
foundation is distorted, then the "building" cannot be built. It was like
trying to build a brick wall on top of a garbage pile: the incoming bricks
are perfectly good, but they simply did not fit upon earlier concepts, and
any structures that I managed to build kept collapsing.
My solution as an engineering student had been typical: dive into
mathematics, understand electricity in the form of interconnected
equations, but without having any real, visual, gut-level "feel" for the
concepts. I was turning my brain into a Spice program, a math simulation.
But this didn't help me explain electricity to the
public! I couldn't even explain it to myself. So... should I just tell
everyone "first learn algebra and calculus, and a bit of Quantum
Mechanics, then come back and ask me about Electricity"? No
way!
As an experienced adult who was re-examining his childhood misconceptions,
I found that it was fairly easy to root out the bad stuff and to
construct a sensible view of the world of "electricity." Slowly I came to
look at electrical physics and circuitry in a new light, seeing them
not as abstractions or just some math models, but instead I learned
them in a direct, visual, gut-level way. I'd never been able to do this
before. I'd been blind for decades. Until finally I learned to "see"
again, I didn't realize how poorly I understood this aspect of physics!
Yet as a degreed electrical engineer, I was supposed to be an
expert...
These experiences made me realize that the entire general public is in the
same
predicament as I was, but without having the benefit of a physics
education to teach them all of the math. Think about it: Why couldn't I
understand electricity? Because I had misconceptions about it. Why was
this? In part it was because of those normal, expected misconceptions
that most students pick up accidentally and then carry forever. But the
majority of my
misconceptions had been specifically taught to me. The misconceptions
appeared in children's books, in my K-12 science textbooks long ago, and
they
were still in most modern textbooks. My books had given me a set of
serious, nearly unbreachable learning barriers. Similar books were still
out there at present, giving everyone else the same barriers!
Clearly Something
Must be
Done! [grin!]
At first I tried writing letters to textbook and encyclopedia publishers,
but that was an uphill battle. Who was I, that I could tell them that
their books were wrong, especially when all other books also say
the same thing as theirs? I used the
extensive misconception list while
designing electricity exhibits for Museum of Science. Later I did some
consulting work for a more tolerant
publisher, but the company moved to Texas and the whole project was
suddenly cancelled after much unpaid work. I gave up in frustration.
Along comes internet. Finally! A simple way to get this
information out
into the world! I wrote up my "misconceptions" page and I've been adding
to it ever since. Then A. B. Frazer linked my page to " BAD SCIENCE" and
the hitcount really soared.
Am I just a pedantic science-nitpicker? No. I'm a student who has
discovered great personal flaws, who has gone through a recent traumatic
learning experience, has stumbled on some important keys to understanding.
And now I want to benefit the other students by telling them what I
learned. My experience occurred after I had become an adult, so it's
still fresh in my mind, and I can explain how I achieved the breakthrough.
I originally didn't understand simple electrical physics at all, but
I didn't know it (this after getting a BS in Electrical
Engineering!) Later I finally figured out what was wrong, fixed my
problems, and now I understand it pretty well. In an attempt to aid other
people, I examined myself, I assumed that others might have problems like
mine, and so I put my old "learning barriers" in a list so that others
could eliminate theirs as well.
Of course my list isn't 100% perfect, so I hope that it will form a basis
for improvement and conceptual change, rather than becoming just another
textbook, just another source of 'Ultimate Truth.' This is a list of
misconceptions which tripped me up personally. Other people will have
different lists (although I believe I've hit upon some common, widespread
misconceptions and not just my own quirky mistakes.)
"We cannot define anything precisely! If we attempt to, we get into that
paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each
other, one saying to the other, 'You don't know what you are talking
about!' The second one says 'What do you mean by know? What do you mean
by talking? What do you mean by you?', and so on." - R. Feynman
I certainly don't want to set myself up as another ultimate content
expert! After all, that's one reason the misconceptions got into
textbooks in the first place: our over-reliance on the expertise of
others, and our lack of critical thought given to presumably-authoritative
printed words. If I can make people take a critical look at their
textbooks, I also expect them to take a critical look at *me,* the critic.
And finally: "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth
and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
-Einstein
Back to the purpose of this message. I receive two main classes of
response about my miscon page. One small group says "These aren't
*really* errors, only a nitpicker would care about them?!" The other much
larger group says "After thirty years of being confused about electricity,
I finally understand it! Thank you!" And many of the second type
of messages come from technical people.
The second type of response gives me grave doubts about accepting the
message of the first. So, be warned. If some educator reads my lists and
thinks "These aren't real errors, they're just nitpicking", that
person might have reasons to trivialize these genuine errors. That person
might be threatened by this information, since it reveals that they've
been misleading their students. Or perhaps they're like I was: their
misconceptions make them blind, and they can't see the errors until they
start re-teaching themselves the correct concepts.
At the very least, perhaps they avoided these misconceptions during
their own student career, and now they're trivializing the importance of a
major learning barrier which many others encounter.
I can say all the above because "trivial nitpicking" of unclear
terminology certainly doesn't attract large numbers of emotional "thank
you" letters!
Obviously all these misconceptions recorded in my lists don't give serious
learning barriers to everyone. But they surely did for me. From the
email I receive, as well as from talking to fellow engineers and
electronics techs, I find that these misconceptions give serious learning
barriers to a majority of technical people. Since most of the
misconceptions come from science textbooks, it makes sense that different
people would end up with the same misconceptions that I did. If I show
others how I cured my particular misconceptions, then it could cure theirs
as well. Maybe.
Yes, my lists are criticism, constructive criticism I hope. As with all
criticism, there is a danger that other authors and educators will ignore
them because at first glance I seem to be doing a sort of namecalling,
namecalling
possibly motivated by anger. I admit there is a bit of this aspect to my
writing, but just a bit. I feel ripped off by my K-12 classes, and I see
the same thing happening to students even now. But I can't blame the
teachers for this, any more than I blame myself for becoming 'infected' by
the same misconceptions. The disease affects the teachers too, not just
the students. We shouldn't think in terms of blame. We should think in
terms of recognizing the existence of the "disease", and of breaking the
cycle of 'infection.' We should attack the "disease", not its victims.
And please don't get turned off by the huge problems my lists imply! If
you would, see them as constructive criticism, as suggestions for change,
not as a hostile attack on the science teaching profession.
There is another lesson here: if textbooks contain errors and
misconceptions, and if the problems can never be entirely eliminated, then
there is only one cure: students and teachers must learn and practice
Critical Thinking.
We must attempt to teach students to question authority, to distrust their
own textbooks, to look
suspiciously at parents and educators. :) People and books are always
imperfect. If we have a good, solid, well-written textbook, maybe we can
put 95% of our trust in it, but we should never trust anything 100%. We
should cultivate distrust in published authority: critical thinking
requires that no expert be above criticism.
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
-RP Feynman
Finally, we should always remember that when something seems complicated
and very hard to understand, much of the time it really is a tough
subject. But sometimes the problem is caused by misleading explanations
or wrong explanations.
Thanks for listening to my rants!
- Bill Beaty
.