In the K class we did an actual experiment. Often we do demonstrations, which people who are not careful about language may misidentify as experiments. I figure if I already know how it's going to come out, it's not an experiment. I also think people get through school with absolutely no idea how hard it is to do an experiment, or how valuable it is; and I blame this partly on sloppy use of the word experiment to describe any mundane exercise they happen to be assigned on an average school afternoon. Real experiments are often hard to design, chaotic, and tend to collapse into a chaos of illegible results on the first dozen tries. Real experiments are driven by a maddened curiosity that simply will not let you quit trying until you get some kind of answer.
What's that? Step off what? Oh. That soapbox. Under my feet.
Okay.
The experiment concerned a child's question about the smartness of birds. As an example of how smart birds (especially corvids) are, consider the stashing behavior of the Pinon Jay.
Every year the pinon trees release a huge yield of pinon nuts (AKA pignolia nuts at Central Market) in a short season, and the jays have to make that food last all year. What they do is hide the seeds, one by one, until after a few weeks' work they have stashed some ten thousand seeds in ten thousand hiding places in the landscape. Months later, when they are hungry, they actually remember where each seed is hidden. Experiments have shown that they do not just go on random searches. They know exactly where to go when they need a snack.
So, my experiment was on human intelligence. I gave one child a peanut, and asked him to hide it. Then we chatted about something else, like comets or dolphins. I asked the child to go find the hidden peanut, and he remembered where it was. I gave the next child three peanuts to hide. We chatted about something else, like the inside of the sun. I asked the child to go find the three peanuts, and he remembered all three. The next child hid nine peanuts. As soon as she was done, I asked her to go get all nine. She showed considerable difficulty, and relied on associative clues (" . . I have no idea . . I think there was one over here somewhere . . wait, I remember it had something to do with the trash can . . YES now I remember, it was behind the trash can. . "). In the end she retrieved eight of nine. So the experiment shows that human five- and six- year olds are very clever indeed, even if they can't quite match what a jay can do.
At this point we have three children who have received peanuts, and a dozen feeling a bit left out. This is where one child suggested I give one (1) peanut to absolutely everybody, which shows that human five- and six- year olds are also creative and empathetic, and explains that peanut you found in the lunchbox that afternoon.
In Silver Surfers, I brought along some specimens for the compound microscope. I am very pleased with my invention (see last week) and wanted to just look at . . well . . stuff. The big hit of the day was this nematode
found in a bit of sludge from my compost bin. We also looked at blood (mine) (I have a glucose test kit which makes it easy) and onion skin (of course). The enthusiasm was delightful. Do microscopes make learning fun? No. Learning is already fun, and microscopes let you do it.
No comments:
Post a Comment