If I had a dollar for everyone who has told me over the years that they were never any good at science in school, I would be sipping mojitos on the porch of my beach front villa instead of writing this blog.

Recently, I had coffee with a colleague of mine who always inspires me to look at things from a new perspective. He got me thinking about how learning science is really not much different to learning a new language. It presents many of the same challenges.

In some ways, not understanding the language of science is similar to moving to a new country where you don’t speak the language. In your home country, you know how to shop for food, order meals in a restaurant, drive a car, pay bills, and generally go about your daily lives. But once in the new country, all of these tasks become more difficult because you are unfamiliar with the new conventions, don’t know where to find the things you need, and all of this is made harder because you can’t even ask others for help.

The reality is that most of you all ready know a lot about science. Every day you do things like use soap, cook your food, start your car…you even metabolize your food. You may not call it science, but you use the things that scientists study in your everyday lives. The challenges that many of you have had with formal science training is that learning any language takes some real hard work. Perhaps, this new science language wasn’t presented in a way that really captured your attention, so why would you bother working that hard to learn more. Unlike the newcomer experience, your survival did not depend on you learning the new language and new conventions (Dana’s observation).

The thing is that even if you have no intention of becoming a scientist, it can be really useful to have at least a tourist’s level of understanding. Gaining a better understanding of how things work, makes it easier to clean that stubborn stain using common household products rather than buying expensive water or some nasty commercial brew.

When you think of it, science is no different than any other field (new countries) who has also adopted its own set of terms and approaches. I have had some personal experience with a language issue, as I have worked with a number of sales and marketing teams over the years. The first major sales meeting that I attended, I sat through session after session that I am pretty sure were presented in “Vulcan”. I was relieved when they started showing graphs and pie charts. Even though I didn’t speak the language, I had traveller’s level of understanding of what the numbers meant. Plus, I was pretty sure the overall objective was to sell more product and make more money. Over the years, I actually picked up a few of those sales and marketing words which made it much easier for me to travel in their country.

I am confident that all of you are capable of becoming science tourists. Then you will appreciate why we are so obsessed with showing you some of the awesome science that you do every day but never actually see. Stay tuned for your next language lesson, you might be amazed by how much you already know.

Until then, “Dif-tor heh smusma”.

–Judith Lockwood

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