Get out of your comfort zone. Test your beliefs.
I have been thinking lately about teachers. About my teachers. About teachers I know or work with. About myself as a teacher. In my experience, a good teacher gives you knowledge but a great teacher gives you the ability and desire to acquire knowledge. Even after you’ve left their classroom.
I was lucky to have many great teachers. One that has been on my mind lately is my 7th grade science teacher, Mr. Rose. Mr. Rose was a balding, 30-year old hipster with an earring and a sense of humor. It was in his class that I first learned the scientific method. Observation, hypothesis, experiment, conclusion. Repeat. I struggled to grasp the process at first thinking it was a step-by-step procedure that must be memorized. It wasn’t until he told me the simple essence of the scientific method that I understood. You have an idea about the world around you. You make a conscious effort to find out if it’s true. After that, if it doesn’t make sense to you, you change your original idea. Then, test it against the world again. Not a process leading to a definite conclusion, but a never ending way to seek better, more accurate knowledge. Usually, of course, leading to a realization that you are wrong. Always finding more questions that answers.
Science was never my best subject, nor math. Any subject with a clear, distinct right and wrong answer never suited me. So, even up to my last science class in college I never thought much about the scientific method outside of the laboratory. Then, when I began to travel a few years ago, I realized that what Mr. Rose had taught me was not a method of science, but a method for all knowledge.
You begin with an idea, a hypothesis, whether from your own mind, from your parents’ mind, or from a book. You make a specific effort to use your eyes, your ears, your hands, your brain and your heart to examine the world around you – your experiment. You will discover, either your idea holds up or it doesn’t. Your conclusion. You choose to hold onto the hypothesis or reject it and form a new or revised one. But, like in science, you are never finished. You must continue to expand your data base. You must test your ideas and beliefs again and again and again by getting larger and more diverse samples. How do you do this? By traveling. The more you travel, the larger your sample size. Get out of your town. Get out of your country. Get out of your comfort zone. Gain a larger sample size by seeing, hearing and experiencing as much as you can. You may find yourself constantly revising what you thought you knew, but you always be moving towards more precise, accurate knowledge of the world around you. A hypothesis, a belief, left untested or under-scrutinized is not a fact, but only a guess. You must test everything. Accept nothing blindly. Question anything that disagrees with your senses, with this experiment we call life. What Mr. Rose taught me, was not a method for science, but a method for life. Thank you, Mr. Rose for giving me that revelation, even 10 years after I left your classroom.
