I should have loved biology
jsomers.net
I should have loved biology
1–10 of 306 posts
Re: I should have loved biology
#2I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy.
I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless.
Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory.
The course was so much about WHAT and never about WHY.
I don't know if I was immature, or if the biology course was a "weed out" course designed to filter out all but the most dedicated, or if biology education is off the rails.
I do know that every subject would benefit from a little storytelling, a little excitement and a good helping of why.
Re: I should have loved biology
#3I did like biology but at the time couldn't connect it with the impact the field creates in human living.
today I'm obsessed with understanding proteins because predicting protein structure, behaviour, interaction are really hard problems that would unlock huge medical advances if fully solved
Re: I should have loved biology
#4>Separate things of different sizes using gels and magnets. (“Gel electrophoresis.”)
Just a minor point, electrophoresis uses electric fields not magnetic fields - hence its name, "electro-" as opposed to "magneto-".
Re: I should have loved biology
#5I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy. I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless. Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory. The course was so much about WHAT and never…
honestly i prefer the boring course, but everyone’s different, so at our school they offered the fun one as a regular credit and the boring one as an AP, and i think that worked out well for everyone
Re: I should have loved biology
#6If you want to study biology, study evolution. Darwin. Dawkins. Gould. King. Biology only makes sense in light of evolution, and boy howdy is it beautiful.
Re: I should have loved biology
#7On the other hand, one is more likely to rise to success in biology if memorizing countless and ever-increasing mountains of facts is not a taxing chore as you wait to accumulate enough context and experimental expertise see a pattern somewhere and know which assays lend to feasible testing of ideas. Intro biology classes (e.g. cell biology) can in this way often be weeder classes, sadly.
Re: I should have loved biology
#8I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy. I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless. Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory. The course was so much about WHAT and never…
> The course was so much about WHAT and never about WHY.
Biology is pretty notorious for most stuff being arbitrary. There is no model. People who say there's a model, they're talking about something else - sometimes, a literal Platonic ideal of biology, that makes for an appealing pop science course, but not knowledge that like, helps you design experiments or better use drugs or whatever.
From the article:
> It was hard to get through a sentence without having to consult Wikipedia. In immunology in particular the nomenclature is expansive.
This is a common refrain. "Paternal allo-antigens" for example, straight from the literature: people who do immunology research know what that means, they do not get tripped up like this author does.
Programming computers and being good at math does not prepare you at all for understanding this stuff! Watson and Crick were not math savants. They did not have natural gifts.
Re: I should have loved biology
#9I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy. I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless. Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory. The course was so much about WHAT and never…
I think there are a few problems that result in this sad state of affairs, and unfortunately they are not constrained to biology (eg 'why isn't mathematics taught with wonder?').
1. Teachers are required to do evaluations, and the way we have settled on doing evaluations is giving students giant, shitty tests. In order to pass these tests, lots of rote memorization is required.
2. Five years of being forced to teach-to-the-test latter, your original wonderment for the material is not going to shine through in period 5 bio.
3. The average teacher is over-worked, over-stressed, and worried about a lot of other baggage that comes along with being a teacher. This last point is true of teachers from public elementary schools all the way to professors at big research institutions (where many lecturers are researchers halfheartedly box-checking a teaching requirement).
4. Teaching - particularly pre-university - is viewed as a relatively low-status career (with a commensurate paycheck), at least in the US. A lot of the people who feel wonderment for these subjects and could teach them well end up being driven away from teaching as a result.
There are teachers who manage to bring joy and wonderment into the classroom, despite all of the problems that lead us here. But we need to address these problems if we want the average bio classroom to be taught with wonder, instead of being 1-hour mind-numbing sessions where you pretend to be studying from your index cards.
Re: I should have loved biology
#10I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy. I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless. Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory. The course was so much about WHAT and never…
Yeah, it's pretty crazy how much I hated biology in high school but how much I love reading medical papers, drug mechanisms of action on wikipedia, watching Chubbyemu or Thought Emporium etc. There's just so much that I would have loved to learn in the field, but the practical starting points were just uninteresting rote memorization I guess so I could never enjoy it or see a practical use case. It seemed like the least interesting science to me, but now I wish I got more out of it.
That or perhaps I can consume an absurd amount of pop-sci garbage.