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I am not an educator. However, I just read a fascinating article that just screamed "education issue" as I read it. The article was:
The point of the article is that I and almost all other students of engineering or science were taught that the Tacoma Bridge (known as Galloping Gertie) collapse was due to resonance. However, the peer reviewed science many years ago showed that this explanation is dead wrong. Read the article yourself. It's very clear and the language is simple, even if engineering is not your field.
The article cites examples, where the resonance myth continues to be taught today, and that it has negative real world consequences as new things are designed incorrectly. On one hand, it seems hard to blame the teachers. Probably none of my peers, none of my teachers, none of the senior faculty, and none on the certification or accreditation boards ever heard any explanation (other than the false one) for the Tacoma bridge failure. If they never heard it was false, how could they correct the teaching? So widespread is the myth, that it is generally accepted knowledge. Indeed, the article said,
The educational issue that shouts out to me is this. How does the educational system systematically discover and eradicate factually incorrect and false lessons from being taught in the class room? Perhaps there is something I'm not aware of.
I don't mean subjects where the truth may be subject to legitimate differences of opinion or of political hot buttons. But I do mean cases like this one where no generalist teacher can hope to read all the peer reviewed literature to discover where common knowledge is wrong. The literature is too voluminous and too compartmentalized for that.
If there is no such feature in the educational system, then the Tacoma Narrows case sounds like a perfect basis for a research project in education theory. It could begin with an audit; how many classrooms at any level from K-12 through doctoral are perpetuating the resonance story? Step 2, how should the system discover and eradicate these teaching errors?
It could be described as a quality control issue for education. If we strive for six-sigma quality improvement in industry, why not in education?
I'm not trying to be insulting to educators. I'm just suggesting that here we have an ideal case up which to do research to improve the educational system.
The Strangest, Most Spectacular Bridge Collapse (And How We Got It Wrong) WRITTEN BY ALEX PASTERNACK
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-myth-of-galloping-gertie
The point of the article is that I and almost all other students of engineering or science were taught that the Tacoma Bridge (known as Galloping Gertie) collapse was due to resonance. However, the peer reviewed science many years ago showed that this explanation is dead wrong. Read the article yourself. It's very clear and the language is simple, even if engineering is not your field.
The article cites examples, where the resonance myth continues to be taught today, and that it has negative real world consequences as new things are designed incorrectly. On one hand, it seems hard to blame the teachers. Probably none of my peers, none of my teachers, none of the senior faculty, and none on the certification or accreditation boards ever heard any explanation (other than the false one) for the Tacoma bridge failure. If they never heard it was false, how could they correct the teaching? So widespread is the myth, that it is generally accepted knowledge. Indeed, the article said,
How did the incorrect explanation persist for so long? In their paper about the event, Bilah and Scanlan cite 30 sources that mention resonance as a cause of the bridge's failure. Ultimately, they point their fingers at a mix of rough, semi-empirical guess work and the "telephone" effect. "The primary reason for all this, we believe, is that many post facto accounts or investigations were speculative or reviews of still other accounts," they write.
The educational issue that shouts out to me is this. How does the educational system systematically discover and eradicate factually incorrect and false lessons from being taught in the class room? Perhaps there is something I'm not aware of.
I don't mean subjects where the truth may be subject to legitimate differences of opinion or of political hot buttons. But I do mean cases like this one where no generalist teacher can hope to read all the peer reviewed literature to discover where common knowledge is wrong. The literature is too voluminous and too compartmentalized for that.
If there is no such feature in the educational system, then the Tacoma Narrows case sounds like a perfect basis for a research project in education theory. It could begin with an audit; how many classrooms at any level from K-12 through doctoral are perpetuating the resonance story? Step 2, how should the system discover and eradicate these teaching errors?
It could be described as a quality control issue for education. If we strive for six-sigma quality improvement in industry, why not in education?
I'm not trying to be insulting to educators. I'm just suggesting that here we have an ideal case up which to do research to improve the educational system.