Today was my first experience watching the video called A Private Universe. The short film addresses how individuals fail to truly internalize and learn science. Harvard graduates and High school students alike, when asked to teach about the cause of seasons, find it difficult to explain and reveal their actual misunderstandings.
This video made a big impact on me. At the first, it brought to my attention the predicament of how to teach science to students. Then it made me realize that I didn't really know what causes seasons, tides, or lunar eclipses myself. But for me, the most fascinating observation was a comment made in the discussion of the video, that when individuals start explaining something, suddenly gaps in their knowledge or understanding become prevalent, and the mind has to come up with some explanation to make their understanding believable and functional. It made me think of knowledge as a dense, small object which is transferred from a teacher to a student in a conversation, which, when received by a student, expands to be a less-dense object, with many gaps in understanding that have to be filled by either further discovery, previous understanding, or best guess.
I think this "gap knowledge" is very prevalent in all areas of learning, including religion. I know many people who do not believe in God or His love or mercy because somewhere along the way they've "filled in the gaps" of mystery with their own conclusions which are incorrect. But when comeone believes those, as the movie suggests, it is very difficult to un-learn an idea, because it becomes the scaffolding to other beliefs and ideas. It is in this way that each of us in our own minds truly creates our own perspective of the world and how things work; our own private universe.
1 comment:
Wow Jana, this is pretty heavy stuff! I like the diagrams in your earlier post, but I couldn't understand them very well.
But overall it looks like you are in a great class and reading great material!!
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