The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures in Scientific Curiosity

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And being interested can be powerful even in difficult tutoring situations, when a writer is under stress or even at a crisis point. The other day, for example, I met with a writer who was quite unhappy with both her course and her assignment and was telling herself (and me) that there was no way she could write this paper. Though she had not started drafting, she was quite knowledgeable about the topic of the course and had been doing a lot of reading. I kept asking her questions, and—despite her conviction that she could not write the paper—the writer began explaining her ideas about the role of apocalyptic rhetoric in the fall of Constantinople. (Really interesting.) As I continued asking questions, she interspersed her explanations with negative pronouncements about how she couldn’t write the paper less and less often. She started writing things down. She came up with an outline. My interest in her ideas and her situation as a writer had helped break down the negative messages she was telling herself by tapping into a powerful resource—her own interest in the topic. Curiosity across the curriculum But our curiosity also invites faculty to articulate those concerns more clearly, to be more explicit about generic conventions in their fields, and even to reflect on their own writing processes. In working with more than one instructor on a collaborative lesson plan, I have found that a conversation about student writing, the goals of the lesson, and the conventions of the discipline often turns into a conversation about the instructor’s own writing process. That is wonderful: if she takes an interest in her own writing process, an instructor is more likely to realize how integral writing is to her own thinking and, therefore, how much her students can learn through revision and a thoughtfully planned, multi-stage writing process. Being interested all together

The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures in Scientific

Brilliant. Loved this selection of essays on science - struggling with trying to understand the deepest parts of all subjects when this is so not your thing. I completely relate! You want to know more about how things work / why they happen, etc. and you end up in a rabbit hole of exploration. Absolutely fascinating. The clincher for me was the comment, "I would hope that those private companies that are now financing space missions have not build up their fortunes needed to become extraterrestrial by skimping on tax or employee rights and benefits", that's exactly what they've done - it's well documented. I think maybe the last three chapters of this book don't use "right wing" as shorthand for "ignorant" at some point. Most of the other chapters do. The same can be said for the pejorative use of "nationalist" , or the interchangeable way in which "religious" and "fundamentalist" are applied. To be fair, a number of these uses are to be found in quotes, but from a structuralist point of view, we can learn a lot by the quotes that were not selected. The book also includes talks to many eminent researchers in their field, astronauts who have had a very unique perspective of earth and those who have had their own stories to tell when it comes to scientific curiosity. With that and Robin’s own thoughts and experiences, it made for very informative and great reading. A very worthwhile read! I loved it.

Smith JL, Brown ER, Thoman DL, Deemer ED. Losing its expected communal value: How stereotype threat undermines women’s identity as research scientists. Social Psychology of Education. 2015; 18:443–466. doi: 10.1007/s11218-015-9296-8. [ CrossRef] [ Google Scholar] And I think any tutor—even the most non-exclamatory sort—can express interest most essentially by asking good questions. Which is to say, questions that emerge from and engage with the details of the student’s draft, ideas, or talk. Not the questions we routinely ask when opening a conference, not broad questions about the student’s concerns or general questions about the course or assignment, important as those are. But questions that dig in to the nitty-gritty of the student’s thoughts about the topic or rhetorical situation of their writing. Questions we ask without any kind of follow-up advice in mind—questions that are not designed as lead-ins to where the tutor thinks the conference to go next. Questions that we ask because we don’t know the answer, and we’re interested in what it might be. At several points reading this, my wife asked me what interesting facts I'd just learned and my reaction was usually "Erm..." Many people think science is for ‘others’. For people with an Einstein level IQ and those who were born with a quantum physics book in their hand. But science is everyone’s. Robin really goes a long way to show that and this book is beyond perfect to rekindle a curiosity in science. It can enrich your life and how you think, and can be nothing but a benefit to those who retain their curiosity about the world and the universe through science.

The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures in Scien…

U.S. Department of Education. Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): A new education law. 2015 Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/essa. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’ll repeat that Robin is entitled to his own opinions and biases, just as I am. It’s only the fact that he talks a lot about right-wing (ignorant) detractors of science being blinkered because of their politics, without ever once recognising the splinter in his own eye.

Every chapter introduces a "mindf***" concept from the world of science (largely cosmology) and prompts the reader to muse on its implications for the big questions of life through a series of humorous vignettes and dialogues. It encourages you to adopt science not just as a means to an end, but as a religion that can bring depth and inspiration to your life. While there's no explicit atheist agenda, it does assume that the reader - like the writer - is interested in gaining the comforts of faith through science. In and of itself, the attitude is admirable and the reasoning sensible, but I find some passages, in which faith and science are presented as competing forces, to be rather one-dimensional.

The Importance of Being Interested – Atlantic Books

In this erudite and witty book, Robin reveals why scientific wonder isn’t just for the professionals. Filled with interviews featuring astronauts, comedians, teachers, quantum physicists, neuroscientists and more – as well as charting Robin’s own journey with science -The Importance of Being Interested explores why many wrongly think of the discipline as distant and difficult. Renninger KA, Hidi S. The power of interest for motivation and engagement. New York, NY: Routledge; 2016. [ Google Scholar]

I'll start by saying I like Robin Ince, he's a great co-host on Infinite Monkey Cage, and his intelligence and humour are normally engaging. Unfortunately, his book on being interested, just wasn't, well, interesting. Belland BR, Kim C, Hannafin MJ. A framework for designing scaffolds that improve motivation and cognition. Educational Psychologist. 2013; 48:243–270. doi: 10.1080/00461520.2013.838920. [ PMC free article] [ PubMed] [ CrossRef] [ Google Scholar] But the improvisational part of tutoring—which is to say, the fun part—involves being interested: being curious about the student, their project, their discipline, the guidelines and constraints they’re working with, and what we each might learn or realize in the course of our conversation. For me, the best conferences—and they aren’t rare—are those in which I’m learning something that is of no practical use to me, something unrelated to my own scholarly work or to tutoring pedagogy. Something that’s just interesting. Being interesting and being interested “Bookcase, Ruth Mendez Home, New York, New York, 2000.” Photo by Susan Carr. In documenting the homes of people who had lived in one house for forty years or more, Susan, my aunt, had to cultivate an open-ended curiosity about and interest in whatever she might find in each home she photographed. Teacher preparation policies and practices are useful only insofar as they translate to action in the classroom, which suggests incentivizing the design and adoption of interest interventions and rewarding faculty for the downstream benefits of their efforts toward enhancing student motivation. Getting down into the weeds of creating instructional opportunities that promote and sustain students’ interest or facilitate utility-value connections is time-consuming and requires careful attention to intervention implementation details ( Yeager et al., 2016). Various evaluation policies could reward educators who use evidence-based motivational science to inform their curricula and instructional methods, for example, by providing professional development funds, creating organizational teaching awards, and other meritorious recognition for such efforts.

The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures in Scientific The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures in Scientific

To celebrate the publication of Robin’s new book, ‘The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures in Scientific Curiosity’ the award winning comedian is joining us on his tour of 100 independent bookshops around the UK. About the Book Robin may not be quite smart enough to be a physicist himself but he's intelligent enough to ask all the right questions from all the right people, resulting in some extremely engaging, thoughtful and thought- provoking musings on science in a way that the non-scientist can understand. This is a book about science and thoughts for the average person. I really did not get a whole lot from this and I hated the writing style. It was written by someone who's not a scientist but interviews thought leaders in several different areas. Therefore it really didn't go that deep.Michelle Niemann is the assistant director of the writing center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 2013-2014. Her first tutoring experience was in the writing center at Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne, in 2003 and 2004. She recently defended her dissertation and will receive her PhD in English literature from UW-Madison in May. Michelle bird-watching at Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin. Photo by Liz Vine. Being interesting is, quite rightly, the coin of the realm in advanced scholarship. And I’ve absolutely, nerdily loved the opportunity to pursue my interests in poetic form and sustainable farming by writing a dissertation about organic metaphors in both fields. But I’m also grateful that I’ve been working in the Writing Center, because tutoring constantly reminds me, and indeed requires me, to look up and notice at least some of the other interesting things going on around me. Brophy J. Developing students’ appreciation for what is taught in school. Educational Psychologist. 2008; 43:132–141. doi: 10.1080/00461520701756511. [ CrossRef] [ Google Scholar]