Over the past few days, I’ve been talking to a classmate at WW about the order of the biology curriculum (fascinating stuff, right?). But actually, it was a lot more interesting than I expected, and I left with some new thoughts about the meta-structure of biology.

Normally, the standard grade school curriculum goes something like: biochemistry, parts of a cell, cellular respiration, DNA [replication], central dogma [transcription + translation], mitosis and meiosis, genetics, evolution, ecology. It simply goes from small to large scale. Seems reasonable enough.

But then questions come up. The whole middle part is a bit odd – who’s to say where mitosis and central dogma go relative to one another? While some parts of the curriculum are tightly linked (e.g. genetics leads so well into evolution), others pieces seem to be able to flip flop around (e.g. all the stuff between parts of a cell and genetics); others don’t seem motivated at all (why learn the parts of a cell? that membranes are “security guards” and mitochondria “powerhouses”); and there are entire reams of biology that don’t fit into this hierarchy. For instance, where do we teach anything physiological? How about all the stuff about plants? Or classification?

And why does anyone care about those, anyway? “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, said Dobzhansky – a sentiment I’d like to agree with – but I don’t really see how differentiating a sponge from a protist (if protists are even still a thing) makes much sense in the first place.

After wrestling with a rough curriculum map a bit more and trying to convince my classmate that evolution is more important than the central dogma, I settled on a slightly more satisfying axis to classify biology curriculum. One part – the part I like – talks about why things are they way they are (e.g. the principle of natural selection; the way ecosystems are balanced and function as networks). The other part talks about what the things actually are, like how our respiratory system happens to look, or how fungi are structured, or what the parts of a cell happen to be. These are things that came about by chance, and could exist fairly differently in a different organism, ecosystem, or planet.

A month or so ago, I also prepped for the physics MTEL. (Think of it as…around the same difficulty as trying to get a 500-600 on the SAT II.)

For background: I’ve told myself this narrative of “I’m bad at physics” for so long that I’m almost unsurprised it didn’t raise a red flag in my head. (The phrase “I’m not a physics person” should’ve set off a TAP.) But ever since I met self-declared physics aficionados JM and AP back in high school, I knew I wasn’t like them. And so I claimed that I couldn’t see the beauty in it, that I didn’t know how to appreciate it. It truly wasn’t as exciting to me as, say, biology or astronomy.

Sitting down for the practice exam, though, I finally had a chance to actually apply theory, problem solving skills, and heuristics for symmetry to simple problems for the first time. And though it was far from a breeze and I made many mistakes, I finally believe that I a) learned something by taking undergraduate physics, b) can easily pass a high school E&M class, and c) can see the beauty in physics. And all this through just one evening of sitting down with easy problems! [And an extremely helpful tutor, I suppose. Not to trivialize his (admittedly vital) role in it.]

I walked into the exam confident – I could say the phrase “I’m competent at physics” to myself without laughing, a welcome change from a mere 24 hours ago. I was able to do the 90 multiple choice questions in 100 minutes, which was my goal, and felt amazing doing the free response (a basic circuit analysis question) – all my knowledge was just synthesized in one problem! Though results for this test are still pending, I’d be pretty surprised if I didn’t pass.

Still, I didn’t appreciate (a)-(c) fully until I read a physics pedagogy paper about learner models and preconceptions:

Many of our students do not have appropriate mental models for what it means to learn physics… Most of our students don’t know what we mean by “doing” science or what we expect them to do. Unfortunately, the most common mental model for learning science seems to be:

• Write down every equation the teacher puts on the board. • Memorize these, together with the list of formulas at the end of the chapter. • Do enough homework and end-of-the-chapter problems to recognize which formula is to be applied to which problem. • Pass the exam by selecting the correct formulas for the problems on the exam.

I call the bulleted list above “the dead leaves model.” It’s as if physics were a collection of equations on fallen leaves. One might hold F = ma; another, F = kx. Each of these equations is considered to have equivalent weight, importance, and structure. The only thing one needs to do when solving a problem is to flip through one’s collection of leaves until one finds the appropriate equation. I would much prefer to have my students see physics as a living tree (Redish 1994)

I don’t see physics as dead leaves – in fact, I never have! Instead, my problem is that my leaves are all blank, or I’m too far away to see any of them. But thanks to course 8, I do appreciate the living tree, the structure between the parts, and something vague like “how physicists think”. In particular, I’m glad that I can appreciate and start to articulate its aesthetic, even if my sense of it will never rival that I have for other sciences. I guess my major wasn’t a complete waste of time after all…