Psst. Hey Students: Science Can Be Sexy

I just read Emily's post on the Stop Global Warming blog, "While We Dink Around, Antarctica is Melting," and it made me think of science education in our schools.

From the "Telling My Students What I Wish My High School Teachers had Told Me" Department:

Science can be downright sexy. It struck me a few months ago as I watched the following video on CNN about scientist Carl Hodges, of the Seawater Foundation, which I promptly found online, bookmarked on Diigo, and noted:

Use rising oceans from global warming to reduce greenhouse gases and create food and green jobs? Scientists are the sexiest saviors in the world.

Watch the video, and ask yourself how, when a science career can lead to a lifestyle at once enjoyable, profitable, and socially valuable, students today are lukewarm about pursuing careers in science:

I'd chew off my left arm to live life like the Seawater group. Yet, when I try to get students to see the beauty and the excitement of where science careers can lead, they look at me like I'm trying to sell them on a Sony Walkman over an iPod.

The explanation for this, as usual, has to lie in part on how schools all-too-often teach science: linear, memorized, non-contextual units covering what science knows, garbage in, garbage out, with little to no focus on the more exciting stuff - those challenges science has yet to meet.

Injecting case studies of scientists like Hodges into classroom discussions might tip students more toward science. Emphasizing the creativity and lateral thinking of Hodges' connections of global warming, rising seas, food and fresh water shortages, and desertification, and the beauty of his transforming a cause of global crisis into a possible solution for it - this bit of sexiness may seduce more students to become the future scientists who might save us, down the road, in different ways.

(And if you have your own "sexy scientist" heroes - or science teachers - do us a favor and drop them in comments.)