My parents were both elementary school teachers. I was born in 1969.<p>My dad had a 40-year career teaching science to 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. Think model rockets, aquariums, microscopes, chemistry sets, rock collections, and all the wide-eyed kids being exposed to that (myself included).<p>We'd play a card game called Space Race, and I had a really cool model of the spaceship from Space: 1999. It was all quite wonderful. My dad would bring home copies of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics from the school library at lunch (yes, we walked/rode our bikes to and from school and went home for lunch back then).<p>The chemistry sets were insanely cool and dangerous at the same time, and my dad would bring home vials of poorly-labeled powders for me to experiment with. I made gunpowder. I blew fuses in the basement by shorting a cobalt chloride-soaked cork in an electrical outlet (I don't know why I did that). Phenolphthalein came with my kit, as did an alcohol burner. At least half the stuff was carcinogenic. Needless to say, gloves and safety glasses were not in use in the basement :)<p>I was exposed to that at home, and I wanted nothing more than to be a chemistry professor from a very young age when I learned about the degrees and higher education.<p>So I earned an M.A. in geology and a Ph.D. in chemistry and was briefly a professor. The research years in academia leading up to that point were certainly the highlight of my working years. I published. I worked for and with brilliant people. I played with high explosives (Master's work) like HMX, RDX, and TNT. I had access to great facilities and instrumentation. I worked on a Cray Y-MP and every system that came along.<p>Anyway, just a walk down memory lane and a nod to the title of the post/article. I certainly had a predilection for science, but being thrown into it certainly pushed me in that direction.<p>Thanks dad (and mom, who tolerated this)!
> As many other studies have shown, when children hear descriptions of categories, whether “apples are red” or “scientists are smart,” they infer that members of those categories have special, exclusive characteristics.<p>My friend in college had a mannerism that when he was about to give up on understanding something he was saying "it's for smart people to figure out". It always elicited visceral reaction from me "No, eff that. We are the smart people. We can figure this out."<p>I guess our upbringing was somewhat different.
I remember being interested in sciences as a kid, but every time I asked for a chemistry kit or anything practical, I just got books and documentaries. Don't be those parents.
To the people posting about having good chemistry sets as a kid: what were these sets and where did you/your parents get them? Where are the good sources today?<p>Everything I remember growing up in the 90s was pretty dumbed down at best, and if you wanted to order any of the interesting chemicals or equipment, you needed a company or school letterhead with a PO account. Things got better in the 00s when eBay was still pretty open in terms of what you could find, but that seems to have been clamped down on more recently. Fear of litigation most likely.
Why would you want to get kids into science? It don’t pay for shit and career/life prospects are grim. Grind out a phd for 80k starting salary? Hard pass
To get kids into science, make the education system better. Less memorisation, more practical work. Accelerate things for those interested and remove those that aren't. I wanted to be a chemical engineer or pharmacologist but got so bored that I moved on to something else. Now I fiddle with code and do nothing of real value to society. At least I get paid well I supppose.
My friend Jerry and I and some friends have done a whole set of experiments on various aspects of making coffee, and if I can ever get him off the dime we'll be publishing them here.<p>So yeah, we Did Some Science. So can you. You can stop reading all these "experts recommend" stories about, e.g. not keeping your beans longer than two weeks, and just carry out a proper experiment on whether <i>you</i> can tell the difference. Who cares if the general population can tell if you can't?<p>"Doing science" means applying some basic techniques that anyone can learn. Especially the kids.
We shouldn't push kids into science if that's not their interest in the first place - just saying it since apparently some people need to hear it.
I remember my first "real" science experiment in school. We determined the saturation point of salt in water depending on temperature. Our teacher somehow managed to get us into a spirit where it was as if we were the first people to attempt to measure this. Nature would reveal its secrets to us!<p>It was just about the perfect experiment for 11 year olds, probably. We could understand what we were trying to find out and it seemed something that might actually be worth knowing! At the end of the class, would our measurements correspond with the figures in the book? If not, why might they not? And the Bunsen burner gets to come out, too! Very exciting. I think it might have been the first time I realized, oh, I could actually determine this myself, if I had to, using a scientific approach.
My hot take: early science classes are almost completely useless, infotainment-type courses. Much better to engage the interested young with math. Then they can get into real science courses when in highschool.
Related paper:<p><a href="https://www.princeton.edu/~sjleslie/Subtle%20Linguistic%20Cues.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.princeton.edu/~sjleslie/Subtle%20Linguistic%20Cu...</a>