Illiterate

I was a history major in college, which is a great major if you want to be interested in your subject and do well in trivia games for the rest of your life.  It's not a good major for actually working in your field.  After graduating, I went off in the world and was astounded at the amount of Americans I encountered who don’t know basic US History, let alone European History, let alone World History.  I’ll never forget the time some coworkers and I were listening to the song “All That Jazz” from the musical Chicago.  There’s a line in the song where the singer says, “I bet you Lucky Lindy never flew so high.”  This flummoxed my coworkers.

“Who the heck is Lucky Lindy?” one of them asked the other.  She shrugged.

“Charles Lindbergh.” I called over.

“Who?” they both said in chorus.

“Charles Lindbergh.” I repeated, to confused stares.  “You know, the guy who was the first man to fly a plane solo across the Atlantic?”  Nothing.  I switched to tabloid media history.  “The guy whose son was kidnapped from his bedroom, was missing for a while and eventually found dead?”  Nothing.  I could have gone on about his support for fascism during WWII, or his wife the poet, but clearly they had never heard of the man.

Encounters like this are not rare in our country.  In fact, about every five years, someone publishes a newspaper article and or book about the massive gaps, or complete illiteracy in the historical realm.  I find American’s disinterest in history odd as I see history as made up of interesting stories and stories are the things that we consume in the form of TV shows and movies, but that’s a topic for another day.

Because lately, I’ve been getting the creeping sensation that I too, am illiterate. 

It started with the Vlogbrothers Crash Course.  The Vlogbrothers make weekly videos about whatever interests them.  Last fall, they started a new series of ten-minute videos with John taking Western Civ and Hank teaching Biology.  I was ready to watch, glad to review Western Civ—a course I took in high school and college—and shore up my biology, a class I avoided both for the dissection of frog and for the finger prick blood type lesson.

It was interesting to note my differing reactions to each subject.  With the history course I nodded along. "Yep.  Yep. Oh, interesting, I had no idea. Yep."  If the history course was a review, the biology course was wandering far into the unknown.  "Huh?  What?  Wait, what was that word? " Aside from the “historic scientist” segments, I didn’t follow much. I’d like to say that I buckled down,  watched the videos again, memorized the vocabulary and finally learned all that biology I’d missed.  But I didn’t.  I just stopped watching.  Without the base of knowledge, I couldn’t find the topic interesting.  And since there was no grade attached to the outcome, I didn’t bother to acquire the basic knowledge to know if I enjoyed the subject.

My realization about illiteracy continued with a letter to the editor about composting.  Portland had recently adopted a residential composting system which delighted me and made a lot of people very angry.  One of the reasons cited by the city for the adoption of the food composting system is that food waste thrown away with other trash makes methane.  A letter writer pointed out that the food waste either made methane with the regular garbage or while being composted, so why do we have to go through trouble of composting?  I think that he’s wrong, that food waste composted makes something other than methane, but I don’t have any idea of going about finding the answer.  Except perhaps the handy google search:  “Does food composting make methane?” [post first draft note:  I googled that phrase and found this article.  It did not answer my question. Ask Ashley had a better answer.]

So I’m a bit dumb in science.  I see this as a bad thing, because it has closed off careers to me. For instance, there was a brief period of interest in becoming a civil engineer, but a quick look at the coursework squelched that.  There is a lot of soil science involved with being a civil engineer.  But this lack of knowledge means I walk through the world not understanding things.  I’ve arranged my life so science is not a part of it, but am I missing something?  Do smart science people pity me the way I do people who don’t know the great stories of history?

I feel like I was exposed to science as a child.  There was a period of intense interest in Chemistry, mostly fueled by the coveting of a chemistry set I was too young to have.  When I came of age, (10) I did perform experiments with the set, but my enthusiasm waned in proportion to how dirty the test tubes became (there was no test tube brush included with the set*) and I wandered off. I also checked out books from the library of the “kids explore science” variety and I did some exploring.  But it didn’t seem to translate into interest in science as a subject.  I preferred reading about young scientists in my biography series about great young Americans.

The other thing that has happened to me is that science seems a bit made up.  Because I don’t understand it, I survived my five science classes in Junior High and High School by memorizing things, nodding along as teachers explained things the same way I do when crazy people are talking to me.  Then they were promptly forgotten.  So when I encounter science today it seems rather magical.  I can see why some people who did understand science back in the day used their knowledge to perform “magic” for the masses.  I would be nearly as amazed.

I will say that the subject of Geology seems very real to me, as I can see it around me. But the science subject that does seem real to me is also the topic I find the most incredibly boring topic in the universe.  I would rather look at actuary tables than discuss Geology.  Except for a brief visit to Yellowstone with someone who had taken a course in the Geology of Yellowstone, any time someone brings up Geology I get a trapped, panicked feeling and pray for them to stop talking quickly.

So what will happen with my science illiteracy?  I’m guessing not much will change.  I’m an adult and adults are good at paying bills and saving for the future and having a better idea of who they are then when they were 15, but learning new things from scratch is not a big thing about being an adult.  Plus, most grown up desire to learn about new things comes from interest, like say, learning to play the stand-up bass at 50 when you’ve been thinking about it since you were 13, or taking riding lessons so you can finally have that pony.  Because science doesn’t interest me, I doubt the status quo will change for me.  I find this troubling, but not enough to do anything about it.

*The lack of a test tube brush frustrated me.  The instructions referred to one, but I was supposed to procure one for myself.  Where the heck is a ten-year-old supposed to find a test tube brush?  And how is she to afford one once she finds them?  The lack of access to a test tube brush made the object grow in my mind to something rather fantastic. When I took chemistry in high school** and encountered my first test tube brush I felt a great letdown.  This little thing was all it was?  And why did I never have one?

**Admittedly, the whole of high school science may have gotten off on the wrong foot simply because I refused to take Biology as a sophomore as all sophomores did at my school and vaulted myself straight into Junior-level Chemistry.  As a sophomore, I was still developing high school study skills, which most of my classmates had already probably mastered.  So when we had to memorize the entire periodic table early on, I flailed and faltered and it was downhill from there.