The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures in Scientific Curiosity

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And being interested can be powerful even in difficult tutoring situations, when a writer is under stress or even at a crisis point. The other day, for example, I met with a writer who was quite unhappy with both her course and her assignment and was telling herself (and me) that there was no way she could write this paper. Though she had not started drafting, she was quite knowledgeable about the topic of the course and had been doing a lot of reading. I kept asking her questions, and—despite her conviction that she could not write the paper—the writer began explaining her ideas about the role of apocalyptic rhetoric in the fall of Constantinople. (Really interesting.) As I continued asking questions, she interspersed her explanations with negative pronouncements about how she couldn’t write the paper less and less often. She started writing things down. She came up with an outline. My interest in her ideas and her situation as a writer had helped break down the negative messages she was telling herself by tapping into a powerful resource—her own interest in the topic. Curiosity across the curriculum The book is about science and curiosity, but it's incredibly rambling. Ideas aren't pursued before he spins off. He just gets beneath the surface on a topic, then wham, he's off quoting somebody and heading in a different direction. Robin mentions the "tangential nature of my jabbering" when on-stage, and I imagine it works well with a live audience. On paper , it feels unfleshed out. Mike: Thank you so much for your thoughts and questions—I appreciate the opportunity to think through this with you and clarify what I wrote. I’m glad to hear you think some of the values I articulated here are in the same territory as Bill Cronon’s definition of a liberal education. In November, I helped lead a writing retreat that was co-hosted by the UW-Madison Writing Center and the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) graduate student group. It took place at the UW Arboretum; the twenty-five graduate students in attendance were from a variety of disciplines, but knew each other through CHE. We started by going around the room so everyone could say what project they were working on. After our four-hour writing session, someone said that, though he knew in general terms about the research projects of other CHE grads, it was great to hear specifically and concretely what everyone else was working on that day. Coots! From the glorious appeal of the stars above to why scientific curiosity can encourage much needed intellectual humility, this optimistic and profound book will leave you filled with a thirst for intellectual adventure. About Robin Ince

Being interested can help writing center tutors and leaders in their work with faculty across the disciplines as well as in one-on-one conferences with students. To collaborate with faculty and show them how to integrate peer tutoring and process-based writing pedagogy into their courses, we have to be curious about both the forms that writing takes in their disciplines and their concerns about student writing. In recent years researchers have begun to build a science of interest, investigating what interest is, how interest develops, what makes things interesting, and how we can cultivate interest in ourselves and others. They are finding that interest can help us think more clearly, understand more deeply, and remember more accurately. Interest has the power to transform struggling performers, and to lift high achievers to a new plane.I’ve learned a lot by being interested in writers and their projects—not least how I can cultivate my capacity to be interested, and why I should. In the last two or three years, I’ve become an avid birder. I’m not the “big year” sort—I don’t even keep a life list—but I very much enjoy watching and identifying birds. And being interested in birds has made me more attentive. Coots on Lake Mendota in Madison.

But it’s so important to keep a curiosity when it comes to science. It is everywhere whether we like it or not. In our lives, in what we do, in what we are. It can be an amazing thing when that spark for science is relighted and something I’m very grateful to the Infinite Monkey Cage podcasts for, which Robin Ince also hosts (would recommend!). I think maybe the last three chapters of this book don't use "right wing" as shorthand for "ignorant" at some point. Most of the other chapters do. The same can be said for the pejorative use of "nationalist" , or the interchangeable way in which "religious" and "fundamentalist" are applied. To be fair, a number of these uses are to be found in quotes, but from a structuralist point of view, we can learn a lot by the quotes that were not selected. And as for your second question about using curiosity to engage undergrads who might not be interested in the essay they are writing, I feel like it often happens that my questions give unenthusiastic writers (or even resistant ones, as I describe in the post) permission to grab hold of what they’re saying in a paper. But I’d love to hear more from you, or from others, about this—have there been times where your curiosity motivated a student? Or situations in which expressions of interest did not work to motivate a student? That’s why I think cultivating open-ended curiosity is so important—because I can only ask questions like that when I allow myself to remember that anything can be interesting.Robin Ince, as most readers will know, is a comedian who began with little knowledge of science but developed an interest and has now presented over 100 episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cage with Prof. Brian Cox on Radio 4. In The Importance Of Being Interested, he reflects on his and others’ responses to discoveries in science, using the very considerable knowledge he has gained combined with the humility of a non-expert, to try to understand what some of these ideas mean to people. These people include a wide range of scientists, astronauts and the like who have deep knowledge of the subjects, and also ordinary non-scientists. It’s a fascinating, thoughtful and entertaining read.