Observing comes naturally to us. Maybe it’s so natural to us that we take it for granted, our eyes and ears and noses just consuming surroundings so automatically that we’re seldom consciously aware of the act. Yet, what’s “seen” is loaded with interpretation and clouded by limitations that are important to be attuned to.
Early on in my teaching career I came across and immediately assigned an essay by Samuel Scudder, a well-known 19th century scientist and student of the famous Louis Agassiz 1 . In short, Scudder tells the tale of him entering graduate school, ready to begin his life’s study of the world of insects, when Agassiz welcomes him with an old fish specimen to observe. Scudder spends days on the task, always thinking he’s seen all there is to see, only to find later that he’d missed stunning numbers of details and critically important patterns. Agassiz would come and go, almost never to be found when Scudder was looking to make a report of his findings or when he felt stumped, and we’re left to imagine whether this was a character trait of the scientist or a kind of covert pedagogy.
The story traces its roots back to scientific study being done two centuries ago, and yet it feels just as applicable now as ever. It reminds me and my student scientists of some basics of observing. The act of seeing takes time and reflection; observation needs to be deliberate and practiced; a pencil refines how you see a specimen; seeing is an assembly of patterns; and some of the most obvious things are, in hindsight, the easiest to miss while also being the most essential. In working with the alcohol drenched fish, Scudder had for days completely missed the obvious and magical symmetry of his specimen’s paired organs, even though he had that information plainly before him the whole time. I have my own students observe bubbles, and they almost always overlook the clear fact that bubbles are round2, even though this feature is immediate and nearly as consistent as gravity or green leaves.
When I first came across Scudder’s piece about 20 years ago, someone had given it the heading, “Learning To See” as the orienting title in my reader. I’m not sure that these were actually Scudder’s words, but they helped me think about the thesis of the essay, a necessary component of scientific inquiry, and an inevitably critical part of learning. This is the learning component that I’m enamored with here and now.
There’s a paradox in teaching that has me continually going about in circles chasing my tail. Authority and reality are out there with information and models for understanding, and I could defer to these sources, have them just give me the information I need to know. “Seeing,” then, would be a matter of looking at the fish, reading the book, listening to the lecture. But none of that, by itself, is really that valuable—otherwise education wouldn’t be that hard after we’d handed out some books and maybe a couple of graphic displays. A collection of facts about the number of scales on a fish, the next step in a dance routine, the name of the effect that makes the sky blue3— none of these is inherently useful on its own. As Agassiz preaches in Scudder’s account, “Facts are stupid things until brought into connection with some general law.” I’d go further to say they aren’t only “stupid,” but pointless and void of any true meaning until they mesh with other gears of understanding.
At the same time, we (myself included) push for student centered learning, learning-by-doing, hands-on learning, project based learning, inquiry based learning—and whatever else—and all of this feels like it should be right and meaningful. It’s experiential and personal; and yet it won’t by itself do anything for learning something that has some external basis. It’s the myth of lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps, in this case in the cognitive sense. And, why should we have to learn everything in a totally firsthand manner that’s without the use of some expertise and experience of another, anyway?
So, this “seeing” that I’m imagining has to be a cycle of both the external and internal, given and constructed. How these two scaffold or weave together is a central question of my career and the entire dance of teaching and learning. Coming to know something in a personal and useful way is both seeing a thing as it is and experiencing it through the self.
What unites the things that I’ve learned most deeply is how they each have required huge amounts of time and experience, with the addition of monumental models and mentoring from others. It’s only through the combination that I’ve come to understand some particularly important ideas as well as all that I have yet to comprehend. Lately, I’ve recognized this especially while staring up at cliff faces and geological fault lines, but also in the midst of seeing the color of peoples’ skin and our societal fault lines. Deep time and deep divides are hard to understand, and I suspect knowing a bit about how these are learned can help my teaching and learning in other domains.
- I like to point out that it’s a nice hike to Scudder Lake, which sits in a basin in the shadow of Mt. Agassiz in the Uinta Mountains here in Utah. The naming of these geographical features is no coincidence. ↩
- I have my students start out observing bubbles and then, after sharing observations, reading Scudder. When they return they use Scudder’s experience and revelations to improve their own observing, and this naturally enhances what they see. I also have them read a poem about a plated fish by Billy Collins, and then they observe as poets or other artists. This makes the point that “observation” is laden with some value and purpose, and your lens changes the very nature of what you see. ↩
- “Rayleigh scattering,” in case it matters. ↩
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