Science, tricky stuff

When I taught, I tried to encourage kids to experiment. Often, what you were required to teach was scripted and measured. True science is creativity, messy kid stuff, a keen interest to find out what you don't know and the willingness to suffer setbacks. Now, the science kits they have at school are nice, but generally speaking, they are not designed for kids to dive in, be a mess from head to toe, then doing it again. While sending home gooey, messy, filthy kids is intolerable to most parents -- there's where science is.

I saw an interesting video on iambored with dry ice and soap. There were some people quite notable for the Youtube diet coke and mentos. This is science. It is a series of calculated risks with questions wanting answers. Take, for instance, a child on a swing. The first part is, how to swing. Once that is mastered, a person might want to find out how to swing slowly, high, spin, and many other novel concepts. This is science. I fear that many people are not given the latitude to experiment with things to be smarter and wiser.

Now, that is not to say that if you find a scar-heavy person that s/he is smart, but rather science-smart people generally have a history of doing, sometimes having no safety protocols. This, of course when young, might make some candidates for Darwin Awards or reckless people. When you have average intelligence people doing dangerous things with large materials involving others, is when you have more casualties. "Hey y'all, watch this", is a catchphrase for those about to die.

When I was a kid, I wanted to know what happens when you mix chemicals together. I wanted to know what accelerated and retarded fire. I wanted to know directionality and causality, the height I could climb and the height I could fall. I learned how to fall so that I hurt myself less severely. Despite my roughhousing, boyish destruction and rowdiness, I have never broken a bone. While useless in a practical sense, I learned how to mix flammable and non-flammable ingredients to hold fire in my hand without getting burned.

Science can hurt, but it requires experimentation.