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Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Chasms in our Educational System
June 4th, 2009
As I move from being a young adult to someone fairly well experienced in a lot of areas that are normal for a successful person in mid-career, I marvel at how dumb I used to be for otherwise being such an objectively smart person.
What am I talking about?
Things like buying houses and cars. Investing money. Having success with the opposite sex. Maintaining a house. Computer security. Using a wide range of software. Real education about physical fitness, health, and nutrition instead of what passes for “gym” class. Negotiation (e.g. jobs and raises). International travel.
And more specifically, for my field, writing job applications, grant applications, giving talks, technical writing, etc.
There are all kinds of things that are vitally important to do well in life. Screwing up investing or buying/maintaining a house can financially destroy you. Never learning how to make yourself as attractive as possible and get laid and have relationships can jeopardize your social and family life and perhaps leave you devastated in all sorts of ways following divorce or, worse, alone your whole life when you don’t want to be.
The job skills specific to a field are often not taught in college courses, or advanced courses in graduate school or elsewhere. Scientists, doctors, and lawyers rarely get formally training in ethics (although that seems to be improving a little), and business training can be important for those who want to work independently.
We don’t teach any of this stuff formally. We basically teach variations of a classical education that hasn’t changed much in a century (or if it has, it’s gotten dumbed down, at least at lower levels, forcing universities to do more remedial stuff as a greater fraction of less prepared students go to college now than in the past).
There have been some changes for the better, I admit. Computer science exists now and is recognized as important, for instance. But I can’t think of a lot more dramatic improvements, only continuing failure.
A lot of times people are just supposed to pick this stuff up when they need it, from talking to their parents, their siblings, their friends…who are also likely to be clueless on these subjects.
It’s a damn sight easier and better with the internet to inform yourself quickly about these important topics, but also easy to swallow bad information and be led astray. Hell, there should be “Using the Internet for Life-Long Education” courses, which would probably need serious modification every few years, but come on. I can usually tell now if I need to go see a doctor or not, whereas in the past I would have likely waited until I had a very seriously obvious problem.
The internet itself has a lot of risks that should be taught. Getting harassed on MySpace until you commit suicide or biting on a new Phishing scam can mess you up pretty bad, and we as a society do a piss poor job about educating the public about these things and many others. Hell, just knowing how to buy and sell things on the internet safely is important to learn, and learning the hard way can be costly.
I’m all for a liberal, classical education, but sometimes lament how there isn’t any room made for practical matters. Getting a percentage point lower on a home loan can save you tens of thousands of dollars, while discussing the symbolism of the 30th novel you’ve read in school gets you what?
I’ll grant that there doesn’t seem enough time to teach everyone everything, but in our modern world why are we using ancient formulas? I mean, nobody told Socrates that hemlock is poisonous (sorry, Steve Martin), but Johnny can read and use the internet and someone should teach him to at least check Wikipedia before trying hemlock.
Those Idiot’s Guide to… and Stuff for Dummies… and similar practical books serve a huge gap in our traditional education. Perhaps it’s beneath Ivy League universities and any university with serious pretensions to teach people how to negotiate a real estate purchase, but one class like that could potentially pay for a big chunk of that college tuition. About the only place I see courses like what I suggest are continuing education courses, sometimes offered with affiliation with colleges, but there’s little oversight here or quality control (I once had to write in protest about an anti-evolution Creationist course offered by my own University through such a program).
I’ve rambled/ranted enough about this and suspect I’ve more than made my point.
Maybe I’m wrong to want to shoehorn this into K-12 or college, but I don’t see anywhere better to put it. You want to have access to these things early in life and few people find the time or money to do it out in the real world, so you have ridiculous things like the ultimately unaffordable subprime loans, unnecessary emergency room visits, items sold and/or bought for prices way too high or way too low, lonely people who don’t know how to meet anyone, and at the more specialized end, really talented professionals without the political understanding or communication skills to have the success they should.
My own students, I make sure to teach them these practical skills in order to transition to the next stages in their career. My friends, I give good advice when I can (sometimes I have to tell them I’m as clueless as them). But I can’t teach the world, and as helpful as friends and family are, no one knows everything about everything. We as an educated community should do better.
P.S. A couple of more obvious dumb things. Why do we still have summer vacation? Why don’t we teach spanish (or other appropriate languages) in elementary school when kids can learn to speak without accents? Why do most high schools require more years of english than math and science? Why do colleges serve as the minor leagues for sports like football and baseball? Why are sports scholarships so much more plentiful and large compared to merit-based academic scholarships? And who invented liquid soap and why?
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June 4th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
In case the last question was genuine, it’s most likely for ease of bulk handling. Solid soap requires more packaging and more fuss, plus more gets wasted in those irritating shards of soap that you throw away. Commercially, it’s easier for employees etc to steal a bar of soap than a pocket full of liquid soap.
But for us hippies it’s because it has more soap per gram or litre than solid soap, and therefore fewer contaminants for the sewer system to deal with. If you’re doing something other than pumping it out to sea this becomes important, because one of the major bulking agents using in solid detergents is salt. Not so critical with liquid soap where it’s mostly just fat or oil which is biodegradable, but for laundry detergent it can wipe out any aerobic system and poison your soil.
June 4th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
That wasn’t the question I most wanted answered, moz, but thanks! I learn surprising things every day. Google the phrase and/or watch the movie “The Sure Thing” for where that last question came from…it’s late here, and I still have to do my Portuguese homework.
June 5th, 2009 at 2:01 am
Um… the rest. Partly it’s risky because giving real advice runs the risk of being wrong. There’s generally multiple approaches and no politically acceptable way to evaluate which count as good. Specifically, there are common delusions that have strong opinions on certain topics. Often surprising ones - there are apparently even Christians who still think that usury is wrong, for instance. But most blatantly there are things that you just can’t explain to kids until well into the indoctrination process.
Try explaining to an under-ten that it’s a good thing that most people in the US have really bad healthcare and live in fear of getting sick. And that that is one of the things that makes the US the greatest country on earth. Keep insisting until they have you committed.
Kids work on very basic, pure standards of “fair”, and partly that’s because they start out as the youngest, weakest person around and so are very used to getting the short end of whatever deal is going. And they don’t like it (incidentally this is also an argument for multi-child families). So before you can justify the obvious unfairness in society you have to lay a lot of groundwork. Not just teaching them to be selfish, but that losers deserve opprobrium as well as missing out.
Personally, I like the “you cut, I choose” approach. Obvious and easy for (say) Israel-Palestine, but also works with healthcare - the day you lock elected officials into healthcare that matches the lowest level enjoyed by their voters is the day… you further compromise your emancipation. But anyway, the broad idea works.
More generally, look at the interest groups who would oppose any given reform. Can you imagine public education beating the real estate industry, let alone the banking industry? I mean, they already suck at defending what they have from the finance sector…
June 5th, 2009 at 7:08 am
I think about this topic all the time. I think K-12 schools should set aside an hour a day for learning practical knowledge. There are so many things I wished I had learned sooner. I think the most importance is the value of work and discipline. But another bit of knowledge that I wished I had acquired much sooner, is how females think different from us males. I think if real -world work was combined with education just after I finished elementary school I would have been a much better person. Also, I think they should start teaching kids ethics and comparative philosophy/religion every day, starting in Kindergarten. I could go on and on.
I hated school and wasted so much goddamn time. I hated that learning was so abstract and impractical. Hell, I wouldn’t learn to read until they gave me some interesting books. My parents sent me to a special summer school for reading between 3rd and 4th grade. All the guy did was give me books on WWII, dinosaurs and submarines. If only they had given me a reason to use math when I was seven.
June 5th, 2009 at 8:49 am
I definitely agree that we should teach some more of the practical basics in school though I believe the reason we don’t is that it is generally believed that the parents should do that, regardless how clueless they are. I’m eternally grateful to have a girlfriend who knows alot about buying a house because I’m clueless there. Hell I would’ve just settled for an apartment and not deal with the hassle of the house.
As for the P.S. summer vacation is great for a break. I didn’t mind school, actually did pretty well, but yeah summer vacation is pretty necessary when you have to go to elementary and high school. I think the year round approach might be a bit better, even though I personally never went to a school that took advantage of it, just for the fact that you will retain the information longer because you’ll be away from school in shorter intervals.
*redneck*We don’t teach Spanish in elementary school because this is ‘Merica!*/redneck* Seriously, I have no idea why we don’t do that especially since it’s been proven that children can learn other languages so much quicker and learning another language and ultimately another culture will open them up to a whole other world view. Considering how xenophobic this country is of Hispanics in general, I don’t think that will happen any time soon.
As for the sports thing, it’s because they make money. I’m sure there’s some deal going on between the NBA and colleges everywhere for them to create the best talent. I really hated it in high school how there was no real art program but of course everyone would be psyched about the football game. Blah.
June 5th, 2009 at 11:01 am
I do remember learning about how to write checks in 6th grade (a bit early!) and about using a pay phone. Not a lot more of that sort of thing.
One confession here. I almost didn’t go to graduate school because I thought for years it was like med school and law school. Expensive, requiring tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. Who would do that for a relatively low paying job like astronomy? I did not know that tuition was usually waived and you could get teaching and research assistantships, so that it was essentially like having a low-paying job part time, with time for research and study. I was only able to stay in astronomy in grad school because I double majored, but when I made that choice I didn’t understand all the issues and might have skipped the engineering major. I always do too much and usually do it well, but sometimes it is better to focus and do fantastic.
I mean, it isn’t like most college counselors in high school sit students down and explain academic paths beyond college, unless it is for doctors and lawyers. I mean, most of them don’t have a clue about specialized fields like astronomy.
June 5th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Oh, and back to my science-based approach to solving problems. We should constantly be conducting small experiments in education and replicating those the lead to success while jettisoning those that fail.
On the summer vacation issue, I see lack of retention in the fall a lot at the college level for physics and astronomy majors even. We should have school year-round with more short-term breaks instead of one huge one. Too many people and institutions with a vested interested in keeping the system as is, I am sure. I like summer break myself, but don’t believe it benefits most students enough to keep it.
On the sports thing. Yeah. It’s the money. Prioritizing money screws up a lot of things.
June 5th, 2009 at 11:53 am
There’s at least some schools teaching Spanish at an early age - my son started Kindergarten this past year and he gets Spanish every week from someone from Mexico (and we’re in rural PA - not exactly a hotbed of radicalism).
June 5th, 2009 at 11:57 am
That’s great to hear, Natalie. I hope it’s more than an hour a week, which doesn’t sound like enough to me.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Parents can do alot too. I don’t homeschool, that would honestly be a disservice to my kids in my particularly unorganized case, but I do believe in discussing lots of topics with children. I don’t treat them much different from other adults. They sit at the table while I do taxes and pay bills, we discuss how a purchase affects our ability to make other purchases, they learn math by helping me measure flooring and we discuss how staying in Youth Orchestra will get them to DC for free. They also get to eat what they want but after googling images of dietary results (diabetics with gangrened feet for example, and no this isn’t child abuse, kids gravitate to gore anyways) they chose pretty wisely. We also don’t have TV in our home or video games, so to entertain themselves they find Rosetta Stone fascinating and speak pretty decent Spanish.
I was told I “parentify” my kids when a psychologist friend watched my 5 year old make her own scrambled eggs and toast (he’d really die if he saw them start a generator by themselves at 8 and 10), but to me having practical knowledge is important. I am not saying how I parent is correct - for all I know I’m ruining their little psyches, but it’s what I currently feel will ultimately be most beneficial for my children. Is there really a correct way to parent anyways?
On a sidenote, alot of young people don’t know how to use a land line phone. We got lost last summer hiking and when the 19 year old with us found a house she didn’t know to dial a “1″ before the number, so I’ve made a mental note to hone my kids payphone skills.
June 5th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
What Sherrie is doing sounds fantastic and I think that’s where a huge problem comes in for the children. This country is all about the ‘children’ how to save and protect them. What we’re doing in reality is coddiling them so much that they really don’t learn how to function in the real world. Yeah it’s great for kids to have fun and goof off but they really should be taught in a similar way to what Sherrie’s doing. We as a society tend to insult the intelligence of children, whom are actually quite bright and smart.
June 5th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
One other thought: given how badly most schools work at all, does it make sense to add more things to the cirriculum? Specifically, how would you test these skills and ensure that they were useful after teachers taught to the test? That’s going to happen, so think about it now.
Kids doing stuff themselves seems obvious to me, but I’ve never been to the US and the kids I deal with have hippy parents who are into self-reliance (they have skills like chicken-herding and poo-not-stepping-in from an early age).