The roots of my curious, scientific mind or…
The Freedom of my early childhood.
For today’s #DailyWritingChallenge on #Freedom I am sharing a previous piece of writing. Between 2016 and 2018 I wrote the first seven autobiographical chapters to a book titled, “The Accidental Scientist.” The first chapter is titled “Freedom.”
The catalyst behind writing the book was the very apparent disconnect between the semantic underpinnings of science education and the character, personality and intellectual traits which made me accidentally fall into a seventeen year long (first) career as a scientist.
I strongly believe that it was the freedom of my early home life and schooling which triggered my innate propensity for curiosity and imagination, perhaps coupled with my cognitive development via the medium of education in Latin, History and Maths that made me a scientist: a creative and analytical thinker and not the content of the science curriculum.
I acknowledge that the curriculum content enabled conversations and a common language in science but I don’t think for a moment they enabled my capability, creativity nor even my cognition as a scientist.
For a daily post of recommended 500 words this is somewhat indulgent (at over 5000 words), but I encourage you to read it, for it contains, what I believe to be a valuable reflective insight into what the freedom of childhood can make possible. When dreaming of a renewed, refreshed and re-vitalised education system in a post-Covid-19 world it may offer some clues to the direction we should be headed in; or it may just reveal the roots of another floaty, directionless, creative and Nomadic dreamer!
Having not read what follows for over two years, prior to my immersion in #eduTwitter and all the recent discussions about semantic and episodic memory, about knowledge and imagination, about cognitive load theory and all that gubbins…I hope this helps to explain where my obtuse and convoluted thinking comes from on all this.
I will, more conventionally and concisely, explore Freedom as a concept in juxtaposition with the Loyalty theme in the #DailyWritingChallenge tomorrow. For the time being please enjoy immersing yourself in the roots of my free thinking mind, my freedom and how this freedom has shaped what I have become. I hope it triggers some reflection of your own.
The End (beginning of the preface to “The Accidental Scientist”) – to place chapter 1 on “Freedom” in context…very brief…
2400 scientists filled the cavernous, modern, three tiered space of the Campus gateway – a statement of multinational financial success and prestige. The global head of Research started speaking. He skipped through a few corporate slides from his powerpoint presentation. Then he said it, “Pfizer intends to exit from the Sandwich site.” Despite years of warning, there was an audible gasp in the room.
That was the moment – 1st February 2011 – when I ceased to be a scientist. The beginning of the end of seventeen years in industry. Fast forward eight turbulent years and I’m settling into a second career as a science teacher. After a brief period in the wilderness, my journey into teaching was planned. Mapped out. Considered. And now I’m teaching some enthusiastic young minds, I feel compelled to write this book, to try and work out how, why and when I became a scientist in the first place; for this is considerably less clear than the aforementioned life-changing endpoint.
It is my hope that the reflections on my journey into, through, and out of my time as a scientist, offer some insight for the young minds I teach, their parents and many of my teaching colleagues, into the real world of science; way beyond a school science lab, Bunsen burners and multi-coloured powders with strange names.
Freedom – chapter 1 of “The Accidental Scientist”
Unless something seriously weird happened, we all tend to think of our childhood as normal. Everyone else’s is alien. This sometimes becomes apparent when we spend Christmas with our partner’s family for the first time. Looking back, my early childhood was idyllic, blissful and happy yet far from normal. In comparison with my own children, I had more freedom, I was more socially privileged, I was far less integrated with my local community and I was (subconsciously) trapped in an isolated, bucolic paradise.
For my father, I was child number six and the first product of his third marriage. His life was far more worthy of biography than mine: born in 1917; son of a vicar; boarding school; Cambridge – kicked out; Wye agricultural college; 2nd world war – Italy and North Africa, a Lt. Col in the Royal Artillery; 1st marriage – 2 boys, wife committed suicide just after the war when one was 3 years old and the other just 3 weeks old; new wife – three more children; a pioneering and much respected farmer in Devon; sold the dairy herd and experimented with intensive pig farming, failed, sold farm; invested in a failed golfing contraption; separated from second wife; long affair; played lots of golf; spontaneously married my Mum, 24 years his junior, where we pick up his story, because it is mine too.
For my mother, I was child number one of two in her first and only marriage. She left her London life behind to marry my father, following an apparently spontaneous decision to ditch her affair with a married man. They bought a ramshackle North Devon farmhouse with some semi-derelict, disused farm buildings and seven acres in May 1971. I appeared in August 1972 and a younger sister joined us, as my childhood sparring partner, in October 1974.
Until I was four, my Dad worked as secretary and head green-keeper at the Royal North Devon Golf Club; after that he grew vegetables – at home – for local hotels. In the early 1980s when I was about 10, he started growing flowers for drying and my parents set up Withacott Dried Flowers, a small local business. Initially it was a small, sustainable project but it soon spiralled into quite an enterprise, in fear of the never-ending school fees my parents chose to pay. He worked bloody hard. He was out in the garden, or the barns, from dawn to dusk, except for the 1 o’clock news and his afternoon nap. He was a farmer; a grower. He was an ideas man. Apart from his army days in the war, and two years managing a farm for someone else before he bought his own, he was his own boss and a free spirit. He wasn’t a businessman. Before I went to boarding school at twelve, he was always at home. He was a constant presence in my early childhood, yet he was somehow distant as well.
While my father was busy doing, my mother was everywhere. She was the dominant figure in my childhood and she did everything for us. Our home life was informal, with TV suppers, and a constant throng of activity around the Aga in our rustic farmhouse kitchen. She drove my sister and I fifteen minutes each way to school, to the beach on sunny days, and for occasional visits to friends’ houses. We spent a lot of time in the car. Our cars were third hand old bangers. Our biennial holiday was a visit to an old friend of my Mum’s in the Wiltshire countryside for a weekend in May. Our food was simple and not lavish. The only thing my parents spent money on was private school fees. My Dad received a small private income (inherited from rich spinster Aunts) and made some pocket money with his various enterprises. Family heirlooms were sold and money was borrowed against the fantastic – yet flawed – dried flower business.
I started school immediately after my fourth birthday at St Joseph’s infant and junior school, the junior school to Stella Maris convent in Bideford, North Devon. It was very similar to a traditional primary school, with thirty children in a class, generally a fairly matriarchal female class teacher and a small playground (which seemed plenty large enough at the time) but it was heavily subsidised by the Roman Catholic Church. Most of us were not Roman Catholics. So it was a private school, but the nearest I ever came to going to a local school with my local(ish) community. I don’t remember studying any science at St Joseph’s at all. I remember learning some natural history, particularly focussed upon the extinct Sabre Tooth Tiger (for reasons I’m not entirely sure of); learning why Thursday was called Thursday; I remember wincing when I had to read an excerpt from a Peter and Jane book to class; and I remember being in class full of Sarahs!
I particularly remember Sarah Norburn, the very clever daughter of a local dentist. With hindsight, most of the children in my class were either from the professional classes (there were several Doctors’ and Dentists’ kids), the more affluent local farming community and some local businesses. So while the school was far less socially elitist than my subsequent schools, there was an underlining of academic elitism in comparison with the wider North Devon demographic. Socially, I was not a big fan of school. I think I was quite a Mummy’s boy. I never knew the correct answer to which football team I supported, a question I still don’t know the answer to today. I wasn’t a typical boy. After school, we never went to play in the park, instead we drove eight miles home to our rural paradise, coincidentally the exact amount of time it took me to eat a packet of Frazzles.
Though I didn’t realise it at the time, I learnt a lot at St Joseph’s – mastering long multiplication and learning to read proficiently, though not lovingly. My mathematical foundations were particularly strong. Aged 8, I moved schools to a prep school called Buckland House School, five miles from home. When I started in September 1980 there were about 120 children, mostly boys including about 12 girls. Some of the girls were more like boys than the boys. There were over 100 full time boarders and about fifteen of us were day boys, or “gay boys” as we were (un)affectionately known.
I don’t remember loving Buckland House, but I liked it a lot. It was a pretty magical place. The main building was a Regency mansion built in the shape of an F, by the Fortescue family. The classrooms were in the old stable block and it had a wonderful science laboratory, with a beautiful oval window. There were 8 classes. Class 1 and 2 had a fixed class teacher and classes 3 – 8 had subject specialists who rotated around the classrooms. I joined the school in class 2 with Mrs Wingate-Something or other; she is particularly memorable for incorrectly correcting my spelling of combine harvester to combined harvester. After three weeks, it became clear that we were not destined to be together, so I was elevated to form 3. While the classes were by default organised by age, we were accelerated or held back depending upon ability.
The following year I moved to class 5, jumping a year. I was one of the younger pupils in this class, so found myself with an abnormal amount of prep, at least half of which my Mum did for me – copying out Bible stories, or analysing complex books like Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, or most bizarrely – and this put me off reading until my late twenties – 1984 by George Orwell. I always did my own Maths preps. Mum could not help me with these. Dad was good at maths but he’d had far too many children to see the worth in doing my work for me! Once I was rock solid on my times tables, maths was a constant diet of arithmetic, fractions, decimals and algebra – with a lot of geometrical constructions too – a fusion of maths and art that is now dying out in the computer age. I didn’t love it, but I was good at it; and this I mostly attribute to Barry Hocking, probably the best teacher I ever had. He wore sandals, had a straggly black beard and he had an incredibly accurate throwing arm: he could land the board duster just a couple of centimetres from your hand, if you temporarily lapsed into a daydreaming state.
Neither of my two science teachers were particularly inspirational. Commander McFarlane was about eighty and rather doddery. He was a charming old chap. After him came Mr Barron, who was Commander McFarlane’s apprentice and very much taught according to the physics, chemistry or biology text book. The most memorable part of my science lessons were long visits to the school lake – looking for (and finding) water boatmen; pond skaters; dragon flies; tadpoles and red water mites which I always called red water spiders. We seemed to spend the whole summer down there, and it developed my observation skills and helped to embed a deep love of nature. Before I was twelve, I remember lots of demonstrations and quite a lot of practical activities. I remember seeing mercury poured on the bench, I remember a fractional distillation demonstration and I remember learning about density and the different packing arrangements of atoms in metals. To attribute my later interest and specialism in materials science and the X-ray diffraction of molecular crystals to this moment is perhaps rather tenuous, but being exposed to real science, and learning science in a real lab from the age of nine definitely left an indelible imprint upon my mind.
Another subject I enjoyed at Buckland House was Latin. Mr Manning was fairly terrifying but I liked learning all the grammar rules, and the vocabulary. Many argue it serves no purpose in the modern world, but considering we forget the vast majority of what we learn at school, that is missing the point. Latin trains both language and mathematical skills, it exercises and develops the mind and provides a lot of the root words in scientific vocabulary.
While academic learning predominates during the school day, it is what we learn outside the classroom that we cherish and take with us through life. This is what I remember Buckland House for. Before lunch, we had a daily 35 minutes of playtime, but it was no ordinary playtime. It was called “smocks and jeans” because, yes, you got it, we put on our smocks and jeans. No one played sport during this time; we went out and explored. Some played hide and seek in the trees, some climbed trees (right up to the top), some built camps, some of us swung from the “flexi branch” and for a period of time, some of us built dams, across the stream feeding the lake.
There was a lot of Sport in the afternoons, which wasn’t really my thing except for cricket in the summer and the famously enjoyable sports day obstacle course. I now look back with warped fondness for running the torturous Ruston Rectangle, an unfeasibly long, muddy and painful cross country run, in a running vest during a hail storm. At the time, I wanted to die. There was one afternoon a week when we went into the woods to build dens, or play freely in the “avalanches” – an old muddy landslide that amused us for hours. My love of the outdoors was nurtured here and there was time to imagine, to invent and to play, without any material gadgetry for (concentration or daydream sapping) stimulus.
Two other activities were particularly important to me: Photography club and Woodwork club. In the former I learnt how to optimise aperture and shutter speed; to develop 35mm film and then to enlarge and fix my photographic prints. This outmoded process was deeply rooted in chemistry, and though I didn’t necessarily embrace the deep scientific principles behind the art of photography at the time, I loved diluting and mixing all the photographic chemicals. I used to find breaking the heat seal on a new plastic bottle exciting, and the smell too – especially the fixer. Mr Cowgill, the French teacher and deputy headmaster, was a great mentor here. Photography club may have been a more important scientific seed than any number of school science lessons.
As an adult, I have very few discernable practical skills: my wife can attest to this. I am not the man to paint a wall, put up a shelf, or repair a broken appliance. My lack of practicality has tripped me up in the lab on numerous occasions, and I am living proof that there are lots of ways to be a scientist other than the development of practical skills, on which there tends to be an over-emphasis at school, as it offers some variety from sitting behind a desk and learning stuff. Anyway, from the age of 9-12, I made bookshelves, bowls and chopping boards in woodwork club and greatly enjoyed the practical creativity. Two of the bookshelves are still going strong over thirty years later.
With hindsight, it was at Buckland that I established that I had a good memory. What do I mean by a good memory? I suppose I mean the ability to retain information that I have been asked to learn by rote; or – in great contrast – to remember facts about things I’m interested in. My perennial 100% in the Hamilton spelling competition is testament to my ability to be able to remember stuff. I was never an avid reader as a child, so most of the vocabulary I never used or encountered; and teaching reading via the medium (and tedium?) of phonics hadn’t been invented in the early 1980s! So I repeated these words to myself: words like phenomenon, Autumn, embarrassment, assimilate, and remembered them for life. A well tuned working memory, that helps lock stuff into our long-term memories is a very useful pre-requisite to school learning. Since spelling and times table tests, I have put my memory to use in remembering laboratory notebook references of original product formulas in industry; friend’s telephone numbers before the advent of mobile phones; I have remembered what people did or didn’t say in meetings and I have an uncanny knack in remembering set lists from favourite gigs, or the sequence of my favourite albums’ track listings.
If memory skills are genetic, then I inherited them from my mother who has an almost infinite store of people’s birthdays in her mind, including those of some very minor members of the Royal family! The only useful thing her memory skills have been applied to was passing her French O level in 1958! I sometimes wonder how helpful a good memory is. It can make us overtly nostalgic, or obsessive with facts and detail. In industry, the more senior in rank that people were, the more readily they seemed to forget – perhaps strategically. When trying to push a company or department forward, being shackled by your memories of the past can be a handicap; so while fantastic memory skills offer a great advantage in the heavily regurgitated environment of school testing and exam curricula, I’m not sure how helpful they are in life – unless one becomes a detective, a barrister, or an analytical scientist.
Two of my children have dyslexia, with an information processing impairment, while still oozing plenty of natural curiosity and intelligence. I also teach a few dyslexics and while they are now much better supported in school, the increasingly one-dimensional nature of schooling must be immensely frustrating for them. Conversely, I teach some children with fantastic memories and no processing impairment. They sail through prescriptive curricula and achieve high grades and percentages. But present these latter children with a creative task, a multi-faceted problem to solve or an open question and they often don’t know where to start, or they give up quite easily as they have become far too acquainted with instant success early in their school careers.
A great memory is a definite advantage at school. It has the potential to make you feel successful. But one needs something more than a good memory to lead a successful, happy and fulfilled life: imagination. As Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French mathematician and philosopher once surmised, “imagination decides everything.” His was a rather scathing analysis of imagination, of how our minds are corrupted by our imaginations in place of pure reason. By the time of Einstein, over 250 years later, imagination was described thus, ““At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the [solar] eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact I would have been astonished had it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.” [From A. Einstein, Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms, p. 97 (1931).]” Taken in isolation, Einstein’s famous quote (in bold) has quite a different meaning to the full context regarding the importance of imagination in scientific research.
Yet, there is still a juxtaposition regarding Einstein’s famous quote. Imagination is not possible without knowledge. With no base data stored within the billions of connections within our minds, we cannot imagine. It would be impossible to imagine a tranquil scene with trees, waterfalls and multi-coloured birds flying in the perfect blue sky if you did not know, or had never encountered a tree, or a bird, or a river, or water. Prior observations and descriptions are required to make sense of everything around us, in order to imagine a scene, or a character, or a story, or make a scientific discovery, or a technological innovation. But Einstein is right in that piecing discrete pockets of knowledge together requires a leap of imagination; and that the pure sanctity of knowledge is not enough if we want to invent, improve or understand things in more detail.
School and universities trade in knowledge, often requiring the memorization of facts and concepts. Yet, life requires understanding. Understanding and application have knowledge as their foundation but they are built on experience. It is in fact possible to argue that true knowledge cannot be acquired without experience, and that knowledge without experience – some form of direct or indirect grappling, unpicking and re-assembling of knowledge – is merely information. The world, the internet, books, encyclopedias and our minds are full of information, but information with no true knowledge or understanding of it, is – in itself – useless. Below, I attempt to create some abstract and approximated word equations connecting information, knowledge, experience and understanding.
Engagement = Active and enthusiastic involvement with a task
Memory = Information
Time = Age in years or Total Working Hours (relating to
specific task, subject or topic)
Experience = Time x Engagement
Knowledge = Information x Experience
= Information x Time x Engagement
Understanding = Knowledge x Experience
= Information x Experience2
Innovation = Understanding x Imagination
So, we are all exposed to information. We can experience that information in a myriad of different ways, which will then gradually turn into stored knowledge. Further experience and knowledge leads to understanding. That is enough for most of us, and perhaps further than many of our fellow humans attain in an information rich, but understanding-lite world. An open mind; some patient, inspirational people and lots of varied experience lead us through knowledge to understanding; but for some scientists, engineers, technologists, mathematicians and philosophers understanding is not enough – we want to discover new theories, invent new materials, machines, products and processes; or improve our collective experience of life on this planet. To do this our understanding needs to combine with imagination; for discovery, invention or innovation to occur.
But where does imagination come from? How can we learn it? Is it genetic? Nurtured through early childhood experience? Or does our environment play an important part in it? Is knowledge always a pre-requisite for imagination? Is the imagination required for scientists to make new discoveries or inventions the same wide-eyed imagination that a young child has, when trying to piece together multiple new experiences and information for the first time? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. And I don’t know why I have such a vivid imagination. I don’t know why I am – seemingly naturally – curious about many more things than a lot of my fellow human beings. But I do know that my curiosity, my instinct to find out and explore and want to properly understand things is what made me a fairly decent scientist. And I think this aspect of my mind and character – my imagination – was, and is, far more important as an attribute of a scientist than the ability to learn academically and remember information; to acquire knowledge. Which is where modern schools, universities and department for education secretaries have drifted so far off the mark. In this pseudoscientific diversion into my attempt to define imagination, it is easy to pinpoint the roots of the knowledge I have officially and technically required to become a scientist; but the roots of imagination, or creativity, are harder to define. My suspicion is that time and freedom were fairly key to this.
I have touched upon the freedom and exploration I experienced at Buckland House School from the age of 8 – 11, amongst all the traditional academic rote learning (which seemed to suit my memory and brain function quite well). But, I think it was my time outside school, at and around home, where I experienced complete freedom, and where my imagination, creativity, and characteristics were embedded into my mind. School was undoubtedly an important tool in preparing me for adult life, but I think my broader childhood experience and environment may have been the greater root cause of my accidental journey into science.
At home my imagination had time to run wild. I was not over-entertained like the middle class children of the 21st century (mine included): there was no Saturday morning football, or dance, or Sunday morning rugby, or cricket, or hockey; no foreign holidays; no trips to theme parks, zoos, bowling alleys or indoor play centres; no Centre Parcs and no Disney; no local museums or National Trust garden visits to enrich and embed my articulate and cultured bourgeoisie; not even trips to the local park; only rare cinema visits. On the best of the summer sunny days we went to the beach and sometimes we played garden games but most of the time, I entered my own private imaginary world. There were seven acres and several disused, old farm buildings dating back to the seventeenth century to explore and stimulate my mind. I built camps in the barns; contraptions from old prams and wheelbarrows, set up obstacle courses and did stunts on a series of dilapidated second hand bikes. I carved my name into trees, or doodled in the shade. I named one of the barns, “the chocolate factory” inspired by Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka, named that way because of the old silted up water trough adjacent to it – the source of endless potions and mud pies. But most of the time I pretended to be a farmer, with my younger sister cooped up indoors as my (imaginary) long-suffering farmer’s wife.
Farming was all around me. Not much else happens in rural North Devon. Initially my fascination with all the agricultural activity going on was due to a boyish obsession with wheels and machinery. There is something innate in most boys (and some girls) about machines that make noise, or wheels that go around, or vehicles that seem to do extraordinary things. Next door to our house was a working farm. From about the age of six, I would wander over to see what was going on, stirred by the rattle of an old Massey-Ferguson 135 engine. I would watch tractors in action, talk to Brian the farmer, or David his son, about what they were up to. When I was a bit older, I would cycle off down country lanes and sit at the foot of buzzing hedgerows watching haymaking, silage making or harvesting. The scent of fresh hay, or combine dust, or damp summer evening cow infused air always takes me back to the endless summer evenings of my youth. I was free to observe, explore, dream and understand the environment and livelihoods of the people around me.
I would talk to my Dad about farming, and I longed for him to still have his farm. While he was clearly passionate about the land and farming, he was no longer doing it and I couldn’t get quite so excited about his small scale horticultural activities as I could about cows, milking parlours and lots of live tractor action! From the age of three to thirteen, I wanted to be a farmer. To be honest, I still want to be one today, but I acknowledge that it is an unrealistic romanticism for the freedom and fresh country air of my childhood; but there is something about farming which really resonates with me. I think it is a connection with nature, and a simpler way of life than the materialism of our post-industrialised and computerised world.
I learnt a lot in those long school holidays, summer evenings and at weekends and it embedded a lifelong interest in how our food is produced, and how the rural economy is a very different beast to industry and the financial markets. Farming is not a job, it is a way of life and in many ways it has a lot in common with teaching – a thought I will explore further towards the end of the book. So all the farming, food production and nature going on around me whetted my appetite for some applications of science from an early age; and the time to explore with the absence of a strict routine nurtured my imagination. As I stated earlier, when I wasn’t seeking out farm or countryside activity, I was playing at home – inventing games and role plays with my sister – or alone – that seemed to consume days and probably whole months of my childhood.
Was this imagination, and curiosity for the working countryside environment around me innate or was it something I learnt or developed because of the circumstances I grew up in? I have read books by psychologists firmly in the nurture camp and books by geneticists more strongly in the nature camp, and the science behind who we are and what we become, while advancing at an exponential rate, remains unclear. Clearly we have a genetic code that shapes our bodies and their function, the hardware of our senses and enables both our primal and social instincts. But what of the nebulous software of our minds – how much of a template for curiosity, or imagination, or creativity, or intelligence is there? Or how much are those traits developed by the information programmed into our minds – via our senses – during our formative years? And what of motivation and drive, is that innate or something that is triggered by the environment around us?
It all comes down to cause and effect. Am I a curious, observant and imaginative person because of the freedom I had at home – and at Buckland House – as a child; or am I simply wired that way because of the approximately 25,000 genes I have inherited from my parents, therefore hardwired to be naturally curious about people and my surroundings anyway?
Of course, aged 12, I spent no time whatsoever considering any of this; instead I was seduced by the rattle of a tractor engine; drifting happily amongst disused barns, in my own imaginary world; winding up my irritating younger sister, or attempting to perfect my photographic technique at school. The idea that I would grow up, become a scientist and then decide to teach children was not on the table. No way near it.
CREducATE 