Tag Archives: explanations

Precision vs pedantry

Over the last few years, making all these demo films, I’ve found myself thrust back into the world of school education. It’s a bit of a shock. I’m young enough to have taken GCSEs myself, but old enough to have been in the first year to sit them. Much has changed.

One thing I find slightly baffling is the obsession with extremely precise terminology. There’s a natural inclination to precision in the sciences, but some of what I’ve seen veers towards the obsessive. It’s not precise, it’s pedantic. And it’s nerve-wracking. I can’t write a sentence of script without the fear of somehow mis-stepping, of treading on some unseen toes and bringing down some unrelenting diatribe about how you can’t use that specific word there, only this one.

Now, I’m old enough and weary enough to battle through such pressures. There are also times when I can dimly recall enough of the physics I once did to be reasonably certain that not all of the advice I receive is… umm… correct.

But if I find myself staring at an explanation with that stomach-knotting dread of you’re doing it wrong, how is a twelve year-old supposed to cope? Respect due, we’re raising them tough these days.

My assumption is that pedantry has crept in because it’s quicker and easier to assess whether the student can recite rote-learned material accurately than it is to judge their understanding against the examiner’s (also-flawed/incomplete?) knowledge.

But that really is an assumption. So, some questions:

  1. Am I right that school science is increasingly pedantic?
  2. Does being able to parrot a very particular definition demonstrate understanding?
  3. …or am I falling into the category of “people who don’t know much about education, but inexplicably think their opinion has some value anyway”?

Self-siphoning beads

I really like this demo. It is simple and surprising, yet deceptively subtle and complex.

It also draws my attention to explanations. The first time I saw Steve present this he didn’t explain it, but I was transfixed. Effective demonstrations don’t always come with explanations. Sometimes less is more.

I’m no physicist, but I’m not fully satisfied by the explanation of what’s going on here. In that sense, despite the beautiful slo-mo, I preferred the first version I saw. I find this demo intensely pleasing despite it leaving me hanging.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating that we all go around deliberately producing unsatisfying explanations or consistently refusing to give any at all, but what works for me is that I’m left wanting to get my hands on a set of these to test it out, to explore and investigate the phenomenon to try to understand it better. Surely that’s one of the indicators of a great demo?