“No pressure,” my beep

Schools opened in early January this year but messages of support are only flooding in now on radio and print, and we seem to be only concentrating on grade 12 pupils, at what seems to be the eleventh hour. What does this say to us and what effect does it have on the pupils themselves?

I was a matric student in grade 12 and for the most of us, there is nothing more difficult. We used to be told that grade 11 was the toughest grade and this resulted in the grade being called matric 1 and grade 12 downgraded to matric 2.0. One does not understand the 'truth' behind the statement until one is overcome by the fear of receiving one's report card on D-day only to wait six hours and remain the last class in the whole school to get their results and fail..

Yup, I failed grade 11 with a mathematics mark of a staggering 18% but instead of being sent back to matric 1, I got parole in the form of "condoned" (the grey area between "pass" and "fail" and the epitome of the standard of education in South Africa). Anyway, I got away with murder and "snuck into" matric 2 on the basis that I was disadvantaged by the teachers strike of 2007 that lasted six weeks.

I seriously sucked at math and no amount of last minute catch-up programme would have likely saved my ass. Over the years, I have noticed how the focus of matric 2 has intensified and wondered if this is a good thing. First of all, I found that the standard of grade 12 has "changed", and not for the good, I think.

While I was terrible at math, I was not so bad at science and I usually enjoyed going retro on the science books I read. I noticed during one visit at the local library that the biology (life sciences) textbook prescribed for grade 12 had the about the same content as an older (by give-or-take 5 years?) prescribed for grade 10!

If you go look at the books for other subjects you will also notice this trend. It seems that in an effort to increase the "pass rate" in grade 12, the government has not only turned "30%" to a pass but they have made things "easier" for matrics. That sounds like a conspiracy theory, I know, but if I am somehow "neutralised" in the near future, please lookout for chalk marks and leather-jacket residue at the scene of the crime, #justSaying.

What I have noticed in my township are the highschools’ obsessive attempts at getting 100% pass-rates. My problem is that extra classes are now being conducted all of a sudden where pupils are made to attend "extra classes" on top of the two extra hours added to the school day. These extra classes suddenly spur just a few weeks before the final exams.

Are highschool principals suddenly shocked by the advent of The Final Exams, jolting them into rapid action to "catch-up"? Why are we having Saturday classes only now as opposed to the eight months of school? Did we not know the exams were coming?

Being a part-time tutor for highschools students, I am very familiar with the frustration of grade 12 students scrambling for revisions and a plethora of "extra classes" they are being forced to attend. In my own experience, many teachers are lazy to keep up with the (now reduced) science and math syllabi and these extra classes seem to be eleventh hour efforts at covering for this.

The pupils are the victims, right? No, some are just as lazy (I've been a super lazy scholar myself, so I know). I have noticed how some pupils have questions that should have been answered by teachers, questions that leave me asking "what have they been teaching you the whole year?" and "what have you been doing in class while the teacher was teaching you?".

It looks all -doom-and-gloom right now and I am yapping about a problem I have not put forward a solution to try fix. Right now, I do not know, perhaps the reader may have a few pointers. Right now, I really hate seeing my sister having to make arrangements to find accommodation by her school because they decided the grade 12 learners need to have extra classes from 4pm to 7pm just two weeks before the beginning of the final exams.

Yes, but no one was around during the big bang!

No-one was around during the big bang, no-one has ever seen a star’s lifecycle from birth to clataclysmic death, and we can’t put these things in the lab to test them, so where do scientists get the audacity to claim that these things happened and are happening?

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column in the Zululand Fever where I put the discipline of science within the confines of testability. I said that when one makes a claim on how nature works, then we can test it and prove it wrong or right and I claimed that anything outside this “testability” perimeter is therefore “unscientific” and “supernatural”.

A friend of mine then asked me about the Big Bang theory and how it is accepted as the origin of the universe, being an event that occurred only once, if it indeed did occur. He said, “We can’t conduct an experiment in the lab where we see the big bang again.” He also listed other things rendered “unscientific” by my testability assertion, such as multiverses and black holes (those massive stars that are so hefty that not even light can escape their gravity).

xkcd

Well, the universe acts in mysterious ways but we can find generalisations from observing how it works, like noticing how objects fall the same way every time you drop them. Scientists then formulate mathematical explanations that need to satisfy these generalisations and once they are up to par, we test them on nature. And if they pass these tests, we call them "laws of nature".

Now, each of these remains "true" until a more efficient explanation comes along. In other words, we use Ockham's razor, i.e. we cut the rubbish.

Edwin Hubble in 1929 observed that galaxies seem to be moving away from each other, as if the space between them were expanding. This changed the static view of the universe accepted at the time. Around the same time, Georges Lemaitre theorised that if the universe is expanding then it means if you extrapolate backwards it must have existed in one point in space, thus the big bang theory was born (though it was not called that at the time).

It became popular among the scientific fraternity because it was the simplest explanation for the origins of an expanding universe amidst other explanations that were much less elegant.

But we still needed to ‘prove’ the theory by finding evidence for it in nature. Obviously we couldn't use the same physical phenomenon that gave birth to it to prove it so we turned to mathematics and the mathematical results resulted testable (observable) physical phenomena.

One of these was the cosmic microwave background (CMB) which heralded indirect evidence for the big bang as it was found completely independently in 1964. At the moment there are scientists looking to disprove the big bang theory by finding phenomenon not predicted by or against the theory and until that happens, we accept it as the origin of the universe, and all major theories go through this baptism of fire all the time.

“But we can't test it in the lab,” he said. Well, astrophysicists almost never get to touch or experiment on their specimens, but they can construct good enough theories to explain phenomena from little more than star shine and use those to predict other phenomena which

when found to be true are then accepted as true until Ockham comes in.

What of multiverses and black holes? Well, the idea of multi-verses theorises that there are other universes existing outside of ours and this crazy idea came from the observation that some subatomic particles (which operate on a completely different set of laws called Quantum Theory) can exist in two places at once and even disappear here and appear somewhere else.

At the moment, the idea of multiple universes in existence are the best explanation for this and other funny behaviour and it has given birth the mathematical model of the universe called String Theory (or M-theory) which is yet to be proven but is our best bet that can be tested as we get better sophisticated scientific instrumentation.

As for black holes, they were predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of General Relativity and later found in nature through the powerful gravity they exert on other stars, the x-ray radiation emitted when they devour hapless stars and plumes of gas in space.

Sometimes you just have to observe and deduce and test those deductions by observing somewhere else in nature.