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Re: classroom analysis of disasters



At 8:40 -0400 9/19/01, Michael N. Monce wrote:

On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Hugh Haskell wrote:

On the other hand, if done properly (I'm not advocating making the
classroom look like the blood and gore that one finds in most
computer games that our students are addicted to), it can have
exactly tho opposite effect. It can promote the notion that
scientists are willing to devote every effort to trying to make the
world a safer place by finding out what went wrong in earlier
> disasters.
>
Well, I must be a real bungler as that was exactly my intention.
Please tell me how one approaches such a subject "properly" so that
student reaction is not what I experienced.

That's the trouble with lists like this. People keep asking you to
support your assertions. And when faced with such a request, I have
to admit I've never run into the problem. Since I don't teach
college-age students, they tend to be more reticent about objecting
to what we talk about, and perhaps their sense of what is appropriate
isn't quite as accute as older students'.

I have talked about disasters, however, and always in the context
that studying them will help us to avoid their repetition if we take
the lessons to heart. Whether they like it or not, students do need
to know that what we talk about in class isn't just for fun. We use
the word law frequently, and if we fail to clarify the distinction
between a law of nature and a law of humans, then students can leave
class with the bizarre idea that the laws of science are optional and
if you don't get caught, you can violate them with impunity. They
need to know that the laws of science, and in particular physics are
something that govern how things *are* not how things *ought to be.*
Treating them in the latter way is not just a game, it can be fatal,
and I often point out how ignoring the way things are has cost people
their lives.

Having said that, I suspect that delving into the gory details of
Sept 11 is probably not a really good thing to do at this point,
unless the class is asking the questions. I don't have too much
problem with analyzing the fall of the WTC building, if students
express an interest in knowing how it could have happened. But I
don't think I would use that as an example without expressed student
interst, at least for a couple of years, maybe longer. I agree that
using a video clip of a person falling from the building is not
particularly seemly, especially when there are other, more benign,
examples of free-fall that can be used. It is not untoward, however,
to point out what happens to those who ignore the precautions taken
by sky-divers and the like. I assume that someone jumping from a
burning building is fully aware of their fate, but feel that is
preferable to burning to death. But there are bizarre examples of
people doing things like that with every expectation of surviving,
usually because of some supernatural intervention that they have been
led to expect. I suspect those people are really surprised when the
intervention doesn't occur--for at least a microsecond or so.

I may have spoken a bit too quickly in my posting on this subject (I
am wont to do that sometimes), but my main point was that the issue
of what is appropriate in class is not as cut and dried as some
posters here have implied, and that teachers need to sometimes
stretch their students' sensibilities in order to make their point in
class. I don't have much sympathy with students who recoil in horror
when someone tries to apply the lessons of their discipline to
disasters, in the hope of helping the students to understand better
what went on (or at least to let them see that it is possible to
figure out what went on, and these things don't have to remain
forever mysteries, so that we are condemned to suffer them again and
again). In the final analysis, I believe that understanding is better
than ignorance, even if the understanding is painful. But obviously,
there have to be limits to the pain one is willing to inflict in
order to promote learning.

As with most things, this is not a black and white issue.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

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