• Question: i find science boring, how can you convince me its good!

    Asked by jade97 to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 26 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Nuala Carson

      Nuala Carson answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Hey jade97,

      If you find science boring then its either not for you or you just haven’t found the bit you like yet. When i was at school i found languages and history boring. No one likes the whole range of subjects! Maybe you are more drawn to the arts and languages than science?

      If you do want to get interested in science i would say watch a David Attenborough show, or a planet earth program. They are cover pretty cool bits about earth science and don’t give you all the boring detail 🙂

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Hey jade97,

      Nuala is spot on. One of the best things about us all is that we are unique and can enjoy whatever we want to enjoy, I was always interested in science, but never really in art (mainly as I can’t draw!), so I went down that route, but we are free to do what we want.

      However, if you want to give science a really good chance, watch Frozen Planet, it was an truely epic TV show shown last year looking at nature at the poles and I loved every minute of it!

    • Photo: Gemma Purser

      Gemma Purser answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      I agree with Nuala, its ok if you dont find science that interesting. We cant all like the same subjects and some of us are better at other things. Like in the British Geological Survey (BGS) there are staff who aren’t scientist but are still essential to help BGS promote it science. We have It specialist who create our website, people that sort out information and databases, people who keep us organised and who look after the buildings we all work in. we all have our own skills that we bring and work as a team.
      David attenborough programmes are pretty cool too!

    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Hi jade,
      It’s not a problem if you find science boring, but I reckon the biggest problem is the difference between what you guys get taught in schools compared to what being a scientist is actually like.

      At school your mainly sat in a classroom having to learn and remember facts, and you might occasionally have to do some simple and probably not very interesting experiments.

      Yet when you take the example of just the 5 scientists in this zone, we’ve got people going to the Arctic and Antarctic to study ice and penguins, people studying the effects of earthquakes all over the world, or going to volcanoes to see when they’ll erupt. Meanwhile you have palaeontologists digging up fossils all over the world (China is currently a big fossil hotspot), while physicists are going to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to smash atoms together at close to the speed of light. Are those things not pretty interesting?

      The problem is that there simply isn’t enough money for schools to spend to show you what science is really like. I don’t think your school could afford to send your whole class to the Antarctic or to a volcano, so unfortunately you’re stuck in a classroom. Real science involves getting out there and observing, measuring and understanding all the processes that happen in the world. I think that’s why I’m A Scientist was set up: so you could see what real scientists actually do, and it’s definitely not just learning facts and equation – we have to get out there and do some very cool things.

      So unless you really hate it, try to stick with it, because as you go on it’ll get more interesting, I promise.

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