Giving away at the age of 89

An 89-year-old retiree volunteers once a week at a school in Washington area to teach math to 6-graders. Eva Jacobs has been a statistician for almost 40 years, a "wonderful career" as she puts it. The idea behind this undertaking is to show that science is real and might be useful as well. For most of the kids it is also the first opportunity to meet a scientist alive and to convince themselves that scientists are not only those long-bearded geeky creatures working on another disastrous weapon that would imminently blow the whole world up.

What strikes me the most is that such projects reveal a cruel truth about our society. Scientists constantly fight with an overwhelming conviction that science is useless, at least a large part of it. Sad as it might be, it is a prevalent stance of most of the students when faced with never-ending facts, formulas, definitions. A universal question expressed by most of the kids is "will I really ever need it?". Obviously good teachers will not miss an opportunity of spending some extra time on telling them about practical uses of even advanced concepts such as general relativity, energy quantization or group theory.

It's ironic that the society so much dependent on technology as ours isolates people from difficulties of inventing those very advancements. Life has to be easy and enjoyable, almost an opposite of a scientific career paved with studying, conducting experiments, putting effort in understanding the problem. Science is a domain of nerds and by definition incomprehensible. All the efforts to change that boil down to desperate attempts to prove that science CAN be fun. But amusing ourselves to death in a Myth-Busters fashion during physics lessons is not the way to go. Eventually someone has to say it loud and clear, education is a painful process with lots of sweat on the way.

The shopping attitude exhibited by many of the parents doesn't help either. A widely controversial initiative taken recently by some of the public schools in Poland seems like the way to go. At the beginning of this school year parents were asked to sign a commitment (link in Polish). In this written form, schools oblige them to provide proper environment for studying at home, to participate in school's life and, what obviously have drawn attention of a number of tabloids, to make sure that kids are clean, decently dressed and groomed... After a short laugh it doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. Especially given that most parents, so busy with assuring their jobs, have assumed their duties to merely checking their progeny's results online.