Ken teaches both Advanced Freshman English courses as well as Theory of Knowledge (a course designed to make you think about how things work), and he takes his passion of teaching to a level that no other teachers or professors I've been with in the past have matched. He has always taken the responsibility to make sure each individual student uses their minds to the best they can and really helps (or helped me) get on the right academic track. His personality is eerily similar to that of Benjamin Linus' when Benjamin was a high school teacher in the alternate universe.
Alas, I digress. During lunch this past summer, Ken asked me if I'd like to lend my scientific input in to his Theory of Knowledge class; an advanced elective filled with Juniors and Seniors in high school. I unhesitantly agreed, telling him that I was sure I could teach kids about how science works in real life. I know our research pretty well... how hard could it be to teach how it works?
A month or two had passed, and I began to prod at when would be a good date to come up. Ken told me October... and come late October, he said Early November... which eventually turned to mid November (11/13/12). Because of budget cuts and extra days being taken out of the schedule, the class had fallen way behind. Once we settled on a date and it was a week out, I realized I had no idea what he wanted in this lecture or how long I was supposed to talk for. His latest email said that they weren't quite on science yet, but rather that I should discuss fallacies of reasoning and logic, fallacies of inductive reasoning and what we do to eliminate such fallacies.
Well shit. I'm no Yuji when it comes to reasoning and logic. Heck, I'm not even Dan (this may be the first time I publicly concede the point that he is more logical).
However, what I lack in logic I make up for in my bull shitting skills. I would classify myself as an expert bull shitter, most likely in the top 95th percentile in the world, and this lecture wouldn't prove to be difficult to put together. Neither the students nor Ken knew anything about science, and even if I were to be telling something untrue, they likely wouldn't catch it.
The night before the presentation, I threw together a couple of words, placed some big, bold pictures in it and talked about our research. Since the point of the lecture was to inform students about logical reasoning, I made the whole story of the presentation to be "How do you know what is knowledge" i.e. how can we interpret results and science to be information.
As I gave the lecture, a few kids were little shits in the back corner, but overall there was a sense of bewilderment and curiosity. There were a lot of questions from a lot of kids (although most questions came from Ken, who in all seriousness had no idea about how science works), and I think that everyone learned a lot... or at least I hope they did. I was a little disappointed when no one in the classknew what a scientific variable was, but other than that they were engaged and were pretty on their games with all the questions I asked. Overall, it was fun returning to my Alma Mater to teach and pay it forward. I could never see myself teaching high schoolers for a living, but just for a day it was a pretty fun thing to do.
