Ch. 4: The Essence of Understanding

             This chapter was very interesting to me, and it discusses one of the reasons why I love science so much. I have found in my experiences that when you read something, your brain skips pieces of it and doesn’t always hang on to everything (or even most of the passage) that it read. The reason that I love science so much is that it almost always comes with a very heavy hands-on aspect to the class. It is never just read-and-lecture, there is always something to be tested, something to be examined and explored; something that the students can do to further engrain the concepts and ideas into their long-term memory. In particular, the labs that we did in high school were particularly interesting and I can still remember almost all of the concepts learned in those hands-on lab days. My teacher would give us the lab report the night before, and we would have to go home and read it. After reading over it, we would come back to class and the teacher would discuss the concepts with us and make sure that we understood what it was we were supposed to do. Once we started the lab, which was always fun and had to do with something pertaining to our daily lives, we would begin to see how the concepts applied to everything around us. Filling out the lab report at the end along with the expansion and critical thinking questions with our groups only helped to further our understanding of the ideas presented that day.

                The same applies to some of the labs that I am a TA for at Olivet. I TA for an entry-level Biology lab, and the particular lab that I work in has an excellent professor. She is very enthusiastic and will even interrupt the “pre-lab lecture” to elaborate and find ways to wow the students so that they can connect the information with their emotions. This helps the students to really think about their lives and how it all connects together, everything from the food we eat, to the trash we throw out, and to the children we will someday have. These connections help to establish discussion and really allows the students to truly engage in the subject, so that they will always remember the importance of Life Science.