Astronaut-Hopeful turns Science-Hater?

When you ask a little kid what they want to be when they grow up, many of them tell you they want to be a superhero, race car driver, firefighter, or a princess, but a good amount of them will also tell you things like "i wanna be an astronaut!" Preschoolers and elementary school students generally love the sciences, from astronomy to marine biology to chemistry to earth science and back. When we're young we have a curiosity about the world around us that only dissipates as we grow older. Children hunger for knowledge and ask questions about anything from the stars in the sky to the core of the Earth, and everything in between. They want to know what's going on inside their bodies and where they came from, all the way back through their own history to prehistoric times. Even for all of the answers adults give, they have another question to follow it up with, even if the question is as small as one word, "Why?" 

Although our primary schools are filled with tiny scientific minds just waiting to be nurtured and molded into scientifically literate adults, we lose this hunger somewhere along in the schooling system. I remember in elementary school, we had a science swap for an hour once or twice a weep, during which time we would travel as a class to the classrooms of other teachers of students our grade. Each teacher was a different type of "scientist" and every time we swapped rooms, they would have a hands-on lab for us to learn about earth science, electricity, chemistry, etc. Specifically, i remember making our own ecosystems in the earth science section in transparent glass Tupperware containers. We layered different types of dirt and sand, a little grass, and water, then covered the top with plastic wrap and put them all by the window, so that they would get sunlight. A couple days later, when we went back to check on our ecosystems and we could see the clouds (condensation) in the sky (plastic wrap) and when the condensation dripped down it would rain in the ecosystem and water the grass seeds in the dirt.

It is this type of hands-on, visual science that interests children and makes them want to learn and get excited about the new information they absorb. As children grow up and the science they learn becomes more difficult and complicated, they lose interest and no longer have this hunger for knowledge. Children become adolescents and young adults who are bogged down with learning facts and formulas that just confuse and get in the way of the things that interested them about science in the first place. There comes a time when the technical information that teens have to memorize comes to the forefront and the intriguing part of science falls to the back.

The science writer has a responsibility to get the original intrigue of science back into the minds and hearts of adolescents and young adults by tugging on their imagination and helping them get back the love of knowledge that they had as kids. Writers have the power to make words come alive on the page, and because of this they have the responsibility to use this power for the academic minds. They can make scientific facts, theories, and research findings into something worth reading and enrich the public's scientific literacy.