Why so difficult?

A few years ago wspn (our student 'newspaper') ran tips about midyear exams and it turned out that students were mostly concerned about their science exams.¹  My own experience as a student of science was the same throughout my own education: Science was always my hardest class.  Now as a science educator, I think about this a lot:  Why is science class so hard?

I think part of the issue lies deep within how we as humans communicate and think. We have languages and mental models that evolved to describe our subjective experience of the world.  How could it be otherwise?  We receive a limited amount of information about the world through our meager five senses. From this information we construct some mental models of what it all means in our lives.  Specifically, we need to be able to construct models of what might happen to us in our own lives in the immediate future.  We have had no evolutionary need to understand the microscopic, or objects spanning beyond the horizon, or time scales shorter than half a second/longer than 100 years, etc.  What this means in a practical sense is that we are not in natural possession of mental or linguistic devices for these other (science-y) things.  Words are metaphorical in nature, not precision instruments.²  Even math, the “language of science”, is a logic structure invented in the minds of humans.³

So, unlike the other subjects we study in school, all of which are well suited for the mental schema we have evolved to describe the events in our lives, science is about the objective reality “out there” and not our subjective experience of it.  This means the study of science will be innately difficult as we struggle to retrofit words and ideas that have subjective origins to describe the objective reality science has uncovered for us “out there”.

Difficult, but rewarding! So, students, stick with it and take comfort from the fact that you are trying to do something unnatural whenever you study nature!

1 https://waylandstudentpress.com/53260/articles/how-to-survive-midterms-and-second-semester/

2 Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By 1980

3 Lakoff & Nunez, Where Mathematics Comes From:  How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being 2000