Emergent Properties

OK, I’ve been putting off uploading pictures from Easter Week, but I will soon, I promise. I left you hanging with the kitten video, I know. Allow me to share a random rumination to help start off your week.

As a teacher I am always on the lookout for analogies and illustrations to help teach some of the more abstract concepts in science and English.  For those who are scientifically minded, sometimes an abstract definition is enough, but I teach kids that use all different parts of their brains, so my challenge is to try to connect with all the different ways of thinking.  I think I stumbled upon one today while listening to Pandora.

Emergent properties is a concept seen in biology where two of three things working together exhibit properties that the individual parts themselves do not have.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  Tissues are groups of cells working together, but you can’t put a bunch of cells in a petri dish and magically get tissues.  The tissue, as a group of cells do *more* than just a group of cells.  In the same way, a pair of scissors is more than two blades and a screw holding them together.  There is something about the arrangement of those pieces that make a pair of scissor more than just its parts.  Try taking them apart and cutting paper.

Now, some of you get it, and some of you are going, huh?  So, I’ve only done part of my job.  Let me try a different way:

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.  Listen to any CSN&Y song and then listen to the same song done by just one of the artists.  “Judy Blue Eyes” by Stephen Sills and then follow it up with the group version.  Which do you like better?  I listen to Neil Young and I think, “meh, that’s OK” (sorry Hank), but listen to Crosby, Stills and Nash as opposed to CSN&Y and you can definitely hear a difference.

I love being able to find something ‘outside the box’ and communicate something to my students where they get it.

Now if I can just find a way to teach them who Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are…