Teaching is a high calling, but it can be difficult to get through to your audience. My wife is a scientist studying fresh water and rivers, my brothers are an architect and a bioinformaticist, my sisters-in-law are medical doctors, and I have a Google employee for a brother-in-law. I have more doctors and scientists among my step-siblings. That is to say, I am a fierce proponent of math and science education - it has benefitted the people close to me, and I love to see it embraced and honored through a vehicle so close to some of my own passions: art and comics.
Pardon my expansiveness, but I love what Sam Hiti and Joseph Midthun are doing with World Book here. It is important work in the guise of silly drawings and fun stories. Bravo, sirs!
BUILDING BLOCKS of SCIENCE (by Joseph Midthun) via Bob Flynn
Richard Dawkins on his children’s book The Magic of Reality
Magic takes many forms. Supernatural magic is what our ancestors used in order to explain the world before they developed the scientific method. The ancient Egyptians explained the night by suggesting the goddess Nut swallowed the sun. The Vikings believed a rainbow was the gods’ bridge to earth. The Japanese used to explain earthquakes by conjuring a gigantic catfish that carried the world on its back—earthquakes occurred each time it flipped its tail. These are magical, extraordinary tales. But there is another kind of magic, and it lies in the exhilaration of discovering the real answers to these questions. It is the magic of reality—science.
