Had a chance to spend some time brainstorming with my colleagues about things we can do during the year to reinforce each other and help students see connections across our different subjects. I talked about the tools that I’m going to emphasize in trying to help students work through their readings. One of those tools is cause and effect relationships, and the science teacher said that she might wind up giving the students a different definition than the one that I would use. We went back and forth a few times before I clicked in to what she meant.
In history, we talk about one thing causing another, but we are almost never giving an exhaustive description of the causes. Human events are so complex that there’s never a single cause, and getting a comprehensive explanation for one event can take up a healthy portion of a graduate seminar. When you have one week to spend on the entire Renaissance, you’re not going down to that level of detail. So you focus on the big causes, but you don’t always have a chance to focus on the little details that make a situation unique. You might say “The citizens rebelled because the government raised taxes very high,” but you’re not asserting that every time a government raises taxes the citizens are going to rebel. It’s more of a general guide than an absolute rule.
Science tends to be looking more for the absolute rule. Exceptions are the sort of thing that can falsify a hypothesis. So when my science teacher colleague talks about causes and effects, she’s using a stronger standard. You don’t just say “Heating water to 100 degrees Celsius causes it to boil,” because there are times when you can heat it that high and it doesn’t. You have to introduce the concept of air pressure in order to more fully understand the cause and effect relationship at work.
Once we had talked through this, we realized that rather than seem to contradict each other, we could support each other’s definition by explaining the different level of detail and specificity that each class was looking for. That helps the students build a level of adaptability into their thinking, and I think that’s useful on top of the other skills we’re trying to build. And we would not have had that insight if we had not had that time to trade ideas. One of the best things about being a teacher is getting to talk to other teachers every day.