February 09, 2007

sociochemistry?

My group interactions will be characterized in terms of chemical constituencies until i figure howdt what i'm getting to. The Woolley class was NaF - sodium fluoride - a very stable salt with a regular structure. There were two adults, nine students, so the class multiplyer will be slightly greater than one, mebbe 1.25. The Redile meeting at the arts center yesterday was O - oxygen. Eight people, three students, so no group multiplyer is in effect. However - the group assembled had a potent all inclusive conversation about the mechanism of delivery - a level seven/eight topic. Two of the three students made significant contributions and the third listened and tracked.

The key point to me is that the value of participation comes in the time spent at the experience, and the more advance prep time you place into getting the skills to be able to attain maximum value, the more value you should accumulate from the learning system. The people who know give a hand up to the people who don't know, but knowing requires active individual participation and can't be garnered from somebody just telling somebody something. It has to be integrated back into the basis set, and applied in another form before the demonstration of understanding takes place.

Eye opening to expose that level of thinking to high school students - gives them a target for how people actually get by and accomplish what they do : role models demonstrating the roles by their interplay within them. Too much of school is about giving access to only the information on the curriculum, as though the rest of life disappears because they don't see it there. Observing how others approach challenges always brings experience of different points of view.

Point of view is so important in science. The outside observer sees thing quite different from the inside observer, who is lost in the activity of the day-to-day process. As a scientist, you set up the experiment as an outside observer and then you let it go. Until the results are collated and assembled, the plan has to roll with the punches of fate and go forward to a conclusion, or end because it just didn't work. Too often the plug is pulled by the inside people, who do not have the perspective of whether it is working or not, because that doesn't matter in the experiment itself. Mixing chemicals causes reactions, but there is a pattern to the madness based on the periodic table and the properties of atoms.

We are all atoms. We resist having our plugs pulled or our chains yanked.

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