Whole school assemblies resume next week in the Price Hall following Year 11 and 13 mock exams. In a continued effort to tell the story of everyday life at BGS, and for the second time this year, a switch was flicked on a smart phone and I recorded the last assembly hoping it might capture something of interest, although, admittedly, I am never at my best on a Monday morning! After a round up and celebration of recent activities and achievements, attention turned to the theme of the week, namely: ‘Questions’.
“At BGS, we encourage questions to be asked and students to be inquisitive. We foster a disposition of active engagement in the world – curiosity, not passivity or dull acceptance of what we see, what we hear and what we read.
Happily, this is precisely what most of you, our students, do. Asking and finding answers to questions is the stuff of learning, the stuff of interacting and of living in the world. And, if you think what I’m saying is just routine teacher talk, a predictable encouragement to be more active and busier, well you would only be partially right. To ask a question is a uniquely human trait – a profound act that helps to define our species, that enriches our experience; but which, be warned, can also take you on a dangerous path.
More of that later.
First, a quick look at the most frequently asked questions of 2019, or at least those typed into the Google search engine. So, what was the most common question asked of Google? Was it, for example, ‘is there a God?’ or ‘why are we here?’
No. It was neither of those. It was, in fact…‘when are the NBA playoffs?’ This was the number one question with, on average, more than five million Google searches per month. The NBA is the National Basketball Association of North America, so the popularity of this question tells us that most Google traffic resides within the US and that basketball is a national passion in that country.
The number two question asked of Google was ‘what is my IP address?’ swiftly followed by ‘where’s my refund?’- another US-based question reflecting tax refunds and a population hoping, like most ordinary folk perhaps, for a quick buck.
Money and basketball. We don’t seem to be asking particularly deep questions do we? At least, not of Google. But then, in comes the fourth most frequently asked question, ‘what is love?’ It’s closely followed by ‘when are the early signs of pregnancy?’ – so perhaps there’s a bit of a link here? Love and pregnancy following in rapid succession. Anyway, moving on…
If we look at different types of questions, starting with ‘what?’ type questions, one of the most frequent enquiries was ‘what do men want?’ Good luck with that one, particularly when, I suspect, the answer is ‘we don’t really know’.
In terms of ‘why?’, we find the most frequently asked questions to be ‘why is the sky blue?’ and my personal favourite in seventh place, ‘why is my poo green?’ (!) and in the number one slot, ‘why were cornflakes invented?’ (!!).
Other popular questions are: ‘where do babies come from?’, ‘does the dog lie?’, ‘how do you make slime?’, ‘does size matter?’, ‘is Europe a country?’ (remember that most questions asked of Google originate in the US), and finally, ‘is water wet?’
Questions are great things. Answers equally so and often surprising. But what about my reference earlier to dangerous paths? The truth is, some questions, when asked, have the power to change the world and how we view our place within it.
Scotsman James Hutton was born in 1726 and died in 1797. He studied classics at Edinburgh University and afterwards in Paris, later reading medicine in the Netherlands. He had interests in mathematics, chemistry, agriculture, meteorology and the natural world. If there was ever an advert for keeping your interests and studies broad, it was the intellectuals and thinkers of the 1600s to early 1800s.
James Hutton looked around and asked questions. His questions about landscape and the rocks below our feet have changed the way we view our planet and the cosmos.
James Hutton noticed puzzling rock formations now called unconformities. Put briefly, James observed near vertical and steeply inclined layers of rock, seemingly chopped off at their upper edge with younger beds of near horizontal rocks layered on top. James knew that these rock formations, comprising the inclined lower and horizontal upper strata, had formed, initially at least, in neat near horizontal layers in shallow ocean environments, but here they were, complex patterns existing as land and with a tale to tell.
The story is ultimately one of formation on the beds of seas and oceans, followed millennia later by slow bending, tilting (folding) and uplift to form continents, then slow erosion of that land, a smoothing down of these folded rocks to create a flattish upper surface. Untold eons later, these weather-beaten and denuded continents were submerged once more below the waves and eventually new horizontal rocks came to be dumped on top. Later, (much later) they were uplifted again to form a modern landmass, only to be subject to further, imperceptibly slow, processes of erosion to expose the whole lot at the surface today.
This all takes time, deep time, and his ideas brought James Hutton into conflict with the religious authorities of the time and members of the then, scientific community who were also largely non-plussed.
James Hutton, like many revolutionary thinkers, was a controversial figure of his day, but he is now regarded by many as the ‘Father of Modern Geology’. And what was James’ question when looking at these now famous geological sections at places like Siccar Point in Scotland? More or less, he simply asked: ‘what’s going on here?’ And science, but more fundamentally our perception and understanding of deep time and our place in the big scheme of things, changed forever.
And so, I encourage you all to keep asking questions.”
“At BGS, we encourage questions to be asked and students to be inquisitive. We foster a disposition of active engagement in the world – curiosity, not passivity or dull acceptance of what we see, what we hear and what we read.”
Be Social!