Defying the process-themed label; /
Support in the times far from stable: /
A semblance is seen /
Of a structured routine. /
We turn the next card on the table.
As I reach a slightly calmer week with Spring Break, I’ve been thinking again about the excellent essay from The Hedgehog Review that I referenced a few months ago. It’s worth requoting the eloquent conclusion that stood out to me in August and has been coming to mind throughout this 2025-26 academic year:
“Part of a teacher’s job– certainly in the humanities, but even in professional fields like business– is to help students break out of their prisons, at least for an hour, so they can see and enhance the beauty of their own minds. It is to help them learn, together, to defend how they want to live, precisely because they, too, unlike a machine, will one day die. I will sacrifice some length of my days to add depth to another person’s experience of the rest of theirs. Many did this for me. The work is slow. Its results often go unseen for years. But it is no gimmick.”
Jonathan Malesic, in “ChatGPT Is a Gimmick,” in The Hedgehog Review
Throughout the year, I’ve been reflecting on the parallel structure of a science class meeting, knowing that our default course is not a discussion-based seminar but a content-driven lecture or lab. In other words, thinking of this “zeroth,” inherent ability of a humanities course to engage students in genuine and meaningful discussion, is there a comparably fundamental goal in a content-heavy science class?
Modeling how to approach calculations; working through derivations; trouble-shooting an experiment– these are narrower skill sets that defy the intentionally larger discussions that Malesic references. While I enjoy the sense of zooming out to talk about the role of science within society or the historical context of a discovery, it’s more common in my experience that such broader discussions happen in office hours, via research mentoring, or even with random questions in the hallway.
That said, the specific approaches and techniques we teach in a science curriculum are likewise intended to be foundational, so the question has been on my mind for a while. I finally landed on a parallel that took its initial shape via a limerick, and I’ll expand it more generally here.
“Defying the process-themed label…“
One answer that had come to mind as the broader goal for a lecture-based science course was learning the scientific method (the “process-themed label”). However, as I thought about it more, it seemed that that’s aspirational… but not at all universal. For instance, what I’m typically doing in a chemistry lecture course is introducing calculations and content that students will contextualize in parallel labs, which themselves are established over years to effectively fit into appropriately timed modules and be reasonably user-friendly. It’s via independent research, rather than introductory courses, that most students would truly engage with the scientific method for the first time.
“Support in the times far from stable: /
A semblance is seen /
Of a structured routine…”
What I eventually landed on as a more suitable parallel was, interestingly, inspired by a quote that I encountered around the same time as I had read Malesic’s original essay, last fall.
When astronaut Jim Lovell passed away in August 2025, his obituary in The Washington Post had quoted writer Jeffrey Kluger, who had collaborated with Lovell on the book Lost Moon, about the Apollo 13 mission that Lovell commanded. Kruger remembered talking with Lovell about the ordeal: “He said, ‘My feeling was that it was like playing a game of solitaire. As long as you have one more card to turn over on the way home, you’re alive.’ He told me that his whole goal was to just keep turning cards over until he got them home.”
This in turn had strongly reminded me of two moments in fiction.
In the end of the movie The Martian, based on the wonderful book by Andy Weir, protagonist Mark Watney discusses his ordeal of being stranded on Mars and collaborating with scientists on Earth and on a spacecraft in between, to ultimately return home. Some of Mark’s final lines in the movie (directed by Ridley Scott, with screenwriting by Drew Goddard) echo some of the same points that Lovell made: “At some point, everything’s going to go south on you, and you’re going to say, ‘This is it. This is how I end.’ Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.”
More broadly (although still, intriguingly, referencing an outer-space-themed setting), I think yet again of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, as Meg fights to defy the villain IT’s influence and escape the planet Camazotz. In an early battle, she reclaims her own sense of self first by remembering a portion of the periodic table of the elements, then by working through increasingly complex math problems: “For a moment she was able to concentrate. Rack your brains yourself, Meg. Don’t let IT rack them.”
All of these immensely challenging circumstances involve taking one concrete step, which will reveal the next one to take, then taking that next one. In them, I hear echoes of the problem-solving-focused routine that I and (I imagine) many other professors in STEM regularly practice in teaching. The goal is, in part, that each student will build up a toolbox of concepts and techniques, across the curriculum, to take into their post-graduation path. The “semblance of structure” can itself be constructive, helping to break real-world challenges down to component, underlying principles that can be addressed, each in turn.
Jim Lovell’s eloquent discussion of solitaire stood out particularly to me for two reasons: first, of course, his was the example based in reality; second, I have also seen solitaire referenced in other STEM settings as a model for scientific problem-solving. His quote ultimately was my inspiration for the poem’s final line.
“We turn the next card on the table.”
The specific moments cited above are well known precisely because they portray far, FAR greater magnitudes of difficulty than anyone will practically encounter (again, two of the three are fictional!). That said, I certainly have many memories of going into the research lab– and now, into the teaching classroom, or simply through my daily experiences– under “normally” challenging circumstances.
In those cases, I understand the sense of letting routine and expertise take over in working through one step of a calibration or calculation, then the next, consistently aiming to simply take it one step at a time, and to “turn the next card on the table.” It can be immensely reassuring, and I hope that my students will likewise benefit through their own lifetimes. The broader goal of considering a difficult situation, aiming to translate it into a logical set of problem-solving steps, is one that resonates for my science teaching.
And since I’m now past any semblance of my typical word limit, I’ll close here, although I imagine I will keep returning to this outstanding and thought-provoking essay in the years ahead.
Chemphasis 