Fascinating Education
Welcome to Fascinating Education, an audiovisual
approach to learning science. Science, by its very
nature, is a highly visual subject, and as reported by
the National Assessment of Education Progress,
students’ reading skills have deteriorated in the past
dozen years. This shouldn’t be too surprising given
the way the internet and the iphone have changed the
way we gather information.
What audiovisual instruction offers, and textbooks do
not, is the ability for students to see and listen to such
visually-rich subjects as chemistry, biology, and even
physics. Seeing and hearing are, after all, how the
brain was designed in the first place, before reading
was ever imagined. Moreover, audiovisual instruction
allows the brain to store what’s being taught in both
its auditory and visual centers, making for easier
retrieval.
Instead of requiring students to memorize
mathematical formulas, I show students how graphs
also solve mathematic problems. A typical example is
a graph that measures velocity along the Y axis and
time along the X axis. When given the object’s velocity
at 1 point in time and a faster velocity at a second
point in time, the slope of the graph line measures the
object’s rate of acceleration, the area under the graph
line measures the distance traveled during the period
of acceleration, and the base angle of the graph line
measures the object’s direction of travel.
In short, I want students to see that science explains
so much about everyday things, has practical uses,
and is not just facts to be memorized or just for the
“smart kids” in the class.