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I would like to argue that the very first statement Professor Grobstein proposes in his Education and the Brain: New Challenges and New Direction piece only holds true in retrospect. He himself has said that the goal of science is to get the answers about life, the definitive description of reality, less wrong. So with each successful attempt at reaching that goal, of that closer approximation of the “truth,” we are temporarily picturing the factuality of this world. What I believe Professor Grobstien is trying to suggest is that at no point can we come to a single, definitive, absolute, and complete depiction of different aspects of the world, which I completely agree with.

The reevaluation of a student’s misconceptions about science holds the biggest impact on the students learning especially when the misconception comes from their previous educational experiences like with the concept of the scientific method. This, I have to admit, was one of the biggest, for the lack of a better word, revelations I experienced while undertaking Professor Grobstein’s Bio 103 course last year. Because for a certain time saying the “hypothesis is true” remained peacefully in the back of our minds and now that we aware of the fact that it does not satisfy our more accurate understanding of science students such as myself are finally taking a more active, more conscious role in what gets established in the classroom.

Looking at the way in which Gorstein’s reevaluate the definitiveness of the scientific method closely, exhibits a good example for which a class discussion should be conducted. Rather than feeding the student the question meant to be answered by the end of the class, usually posed in the Aim or hypothesis, the students should be introduced to a summary of related observations and be given the opportunity to derive a certain question to see whether that sum remains consistent. Because the summary itself is always subject to change, the certainty of the uncertain outcome should help to work as a driving force, motivating the students to come to a general conclusion that either rejects or supports the assumption from the question made.

If what I believe to be the distinction between science and art to remain true, where science is more focused on persuading its audience of a certain claim, than steering away from “dry” scientific stories would be most logical. Admitting to and interweaving more humane components (i.e. fallibility) into scientific stories like records and models renders the findings to be more realistic and therefore believable to the audience. But at the same time I can see how complications may arise in the classroom setting because it will allow the students to potentially be more sympathetic to the scientific situation I suppose, releasing them from their analytical stare of the less “objective” science story.

Just as an interesting little tidbit to end this post, when I finished the last words on the separation between the body and mind by Mary Midgley, “source of habit,” I mistakenly read force of habit and instantly thought back to the similarly deep separations between Art and Science I posed in a previous post.