I’m super-enthusiastic about K-12 science education, and working with K-12 teachers and students*. When a student wants to talk science with me, I’m over the moon. That doesn’t mean I’m as drunk as a cat on catnip whenever a K-12 student emails me a question.

I don’t get a deluge of email from K-12 students, but they trickle in at a steady rate.  I don’t think of it as a drag on my time. Most of them bother me for other reasons.

Most — actually, probably all — of these students are contacting me because their teacher required them to contact an expert. Usually, the students write to me that they are contacting me as a required part of an assignment. I think it’s indicative of poor teaching on the part of their teachers. I think the students are receiving a poor lesson about how to do academic research.

Nearly all of the questions I get are from middle- or high-school students, which can — and should — be easily answered with a visit to a library, or by a few informed minutes on the internet. Or with a visit to a reference librarian.

Here is what I typically do: I send the student a link to a book in their own local public library, or to a website that provides the information they need (typically, a top-hit wikipedia page). I politely write that if they have any questions about what they’ve read, then they can ask me. I have never, ever, heard back under these circumstances. Not even a thank you.

I don’t ever get contacted by university students to answer these kinds of questions, not even those from my own university! University students are doing higher level work, but are not being sent off by their instructors to consult with experts. But this is something that high school students are being assigned on a regular basis. That does not compute. While university instructors are training their students how to do research, some high school teachers are sending their students off to get the answers from experts without having to crack open a book on their own.

Their teachers are showing their students that a routine part of learning about a new topic is to contact a university professor who is an expert on the topic. This is not the way the world should work. For example, I just started reading some Jane Austen for the first time (as a progression following the amazing Aubrey/Maturin series). I’m getting really fascinated by a bunch of things about Austen, and I have a bunch of questions about Austen and her times. I’d like to know new facts and also want to hear expert opinions. But I’m not emailing professors of history and literature for this kind of thing. There is plenty of writing and scholarship on the topic. When I want to learn about Jane Austen and the England of 200 years ago, there is the internet and there are books.

Likewise, if a student is required to ask me how many kinds of ants there are, or why there are more species in the tropics than in California, there is the internet and there are books. I don’t take these questions as a personal offense. But the educator part of me is worried that there are teachers who are condoning this kind of research.

If a member of the public has a general question about ants or rainforests — or anything biological, I’m enthusiastically all over this. This is important outreach. These things are uncommon enough that it’s no problem at all, and in fact a joy. But when a student asks me a question as a part of a course assignment, and they haven’t done any basic reading before contacting me, well then that’s just shoddy academic practice by either the student, or the teacher, or both of them.

I sometimes get inquires that aren’t even close to my expertise, other than the fact that I’m an ecologist or an entomologist. The most recent one falls into this category:

Professor McGlynn,
My name is [redacted] and I am a senior at [Elite Public High School with stratospheric test scores]. As one of my final assignments as a high school student I am required to write a research paper on a topic of my choice. I chose the topic of de-extinction. I’d like to have the chance to interview you on the ecological and environmental effects of reintroducing an extinct species to an ecosystem. The interview would be no longer than fifteen minutes and would need to be recorded. If you’re interested please let me know dates that would work.
Thanks for your time,
[redacted]

On the face of it, this sounds totally normal and this is definitely an outlier. But I do find this weird, because I’m not an expert on de-extinction whatsoever. I’ve never written or researched this topic at all. Also, the student said that it “would need to be recorded.” He said he had to write a paper. I’m assuming the need to record the interview was a requirement of his teacher. As I’m not an expert on de-extinction, all he would get from me is a set of opinions that I’ve formed as an ecologist, but not nearly as well-thought out as the opinions that have already been shared in print by other ecologists who have thought more about and worked on this question. But I wrote back and thought it’d be fine, so I made a window in my office hours for him. (My department schedules eight undergraduate advising appointments for all tenure-line faculty each week. I thought I could sandwich him in among those.)

I’ve tentatively scheduled you for next wednesday.  If you could send me a copy of the questions in advance, that would be appreciated.  I have you down tentatively for 1:30 pm on 04 March. You might want to be aware that this isn’t my field, though I am an ecologist, so if you’re looking or an expert on this you’re not exactly barking up the right tree.

cheers

dr mcglynn

I understand that scheduling him in the middle of a weekday might interfere with school hours, but outside school hours don’t work well for my schedule, either. Also, the way he wrote this email suggested to me that he didn’t really care about my expertise per se. He just need to talk to some ecologist, and it was okay that I wasn’t an expert. If that’s the case, why would he need to interview me at all? I am making the assumption is that his teacher required it. That’s not a reason for me. So, I punted:

My schedule is pretty tight and I don’t see what you would have to benefit from interviewing me in particular on this topic. If you’re looking for opinions from experts about deextinction, there is absolutely no shortage of them in on blogs and other media.

good luck,

…

Terry McGlynn

scholar   lab   blog

I have to admit, if this student were attending any one of the many struggling public schools in our area, I’d work a lot harder to squeeze this student in. That would be an opportunity to help and inspire someone. In this case, the way I read between the lines, the only thing that this particular student would gain is the ability to meet his teacher’s requirement for an interview. If he wanted answers to those questions, then I pointed out to him that an interview with some professor who is an ecologist wouldn’t be necessary. I’d rather take the same amount of time and effort to swing by a high school biology classroom in a high-need school on the way to or from work some day, to talk about science.

This phenomenon is tied to social class. The majority of students in public school in the US are living in poverty, and only 10% of all students in the US attend private schools. However, the majority of the students who have contacted me are attending expensive private schools. Those that aren’t at private schools are in public schools with well-endowed districts that regularly send students to prestigious 4-year universities.

These students are being trained by their teachers that they are entitled to have access to expert information without having to do any research on their own. You don’t have to read a book if you can just contact the expert who wrote the book. The teachers that are training the next generation of wealthy elites are training them how to take academic shortcuts. What teachers think that creating this kind of assignment is a good idea? What, exactly, are they thinking? I imagine the teachers are attempting to teach the students good research skills. I imagine the teachers are picturing a high-level activity in which students contact experts with a non-trivial question after having done some research. But I honestly don’t know. It’s just so bizarre to me.

These students, in the upper social class, are learning a wholly inappropriate lesson – that publicly-funded professors are there to answer their basic questions about science in lieu of going to the trouble of opening up a goddamn book. I’m really curious how often this happens to people depending on what kind of university they work at. Are professors at prestigious universities hit up more often because they have higher visibility, or are they less likely to be approached because their position is more intimidating and students don’t feel that they should waste their time? I honestly have no idea.

If you’re a student who is reading this post after getting this kind of crappy assignment, then I don’t have a recommendation for you. You have my condolences that you have a teacher who gave you this crappy assignment. I suppose you could anonymously email them a link to this post, though that’s unlikely to change anybody’s mind.

If you want to ask me a question that genuinely requires my expertise? Bring it! I’d love it! If you are a student doing an assignment for a class, and are about to ask me a question that can easily be answered by visiting your local public library or on the internet, then please spare both of us the trouble and learn to find information independently.

Carl Zimmer, as an amazing science-writer-guy, reported getting hit by these requests all of the time, often by those who were assigned some of his writing as part of a school assignment. He seems to get students who aren’t assigned to contact him by the teacher, but those who just don’t want to do and think about the assigned reading. He ended up making a page specifically for teachers and students to deal with this type of issue. It has lots of helpful information, and includes the following line: “Please note that Zimmer cannot respond individually to emails from students asking for help on class assignments.”

Do you get these kinds of emails? Do you give the students the fish they’re looking for or do you help teach them how to fish?

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*Just to let you know that I’m not anti-kid, and not a slouch when it comes to K-12 engagement. On a personal level, I’m probably two sigma above mean with respect to volunteer time for public schools. Professionally, I’ve been an involved Co-PI on a handful of major projects training current and future K-12 science teachers, including an urban teacher residency program, Noyce Scholars, Master Teacher Fellows, and the California Math Science Teacher Initiative. And one of the hats that my university placed on my head is to be the science faculty member who advises pre-service teachers. I’m just sayin’, I’m both an advocate and a hard worker for quality public education for children. And I don’t think that spoon-feeding them otherwise easily-accessed answers in the process of researching a topic is in the best interest of their education.