Kicking and other accidents in the classroom - random or by design?

     “I accidentally  kicked  him,” my student said.

     "You were both standing there and your foot, without your knowing it, accidentally kicked him."

      This is a typical exchange between me and my second grade students. Hopefully this “by accident” plea is not something I use when it comes to teaching and learning in my classroom - that my students are not learning “by accident,” but rather, they are learning by design, or purposefully.

     Or are they? Thankfully, there is a way to find out through a t-test using paired samples.    It sounds complicated but it's really quite easy. Dr. James Carroll of the University of Portland taught me how to do it with EZanalyze,  a free add-on to the Excel spreadsheet program. I type in my two sets of scores from a pre test (test given before instruction) and post test (test given after instruction). With a few clicks, (please contact me if you would like to learn how to use EZanalyze for this test) EZanlyze spits out a probability score called the p value.  Researchers  have determined that .05 is the threshold number upon which we can conclude randomness. This means any p value that is higher than .05 should make me conclude that based on the their scores, learning being measured by the test  happened accidentally, or by chance, randomly. My instruction did not make a significant difference. A p value that is less than .05 means that my instruction made the impact I had intended it to make. Learning was not accidental, chance or by random. (Even when a p value is high, this analysis provides a teacher valuable information on his or her teaching, and the adjustments needed to make teaching and learning more purposeful.)

     Like a net that drew bigger, more fascinating creatures, my encounter with randomness in my classroom brought me to a study of, well, randomness. The Oxford English Dictionary defines random as “having no definite aim or purpose.” Many things happen in life by accident. But is life itself, our very own existence, random? Is our existence without purpose or meaning?

     If I received a message consisting of three random prime numbers, I would say the message has no meaning. Or maybe I did not get all the numbers needed to conclude meaning. But if the message is a complex sequence of prime numbers repeating itself, then I would say it must have meaning though I do not know what it is yet because I do not have the code that unlocks its meaning. That is exactly what happened to the fictional scientists in the movie “Contact”, in which SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence) concluded that because of its complexity and structure, the signal from the star Vega was not an accident, random or meaningless, but came from intelligent life in outer space. 

     If I flip a coin, there are two possible outcomes  or information I can receive – heads or tails. The possibility of getting either head or tails is one half. But if I roll a die, there are six possible outcomes or information. The possibility of getting any of the six sides is reduced to one sixth. In 1940, Claude Shannon of Bell Laboratories created a mathematical theory of information: the bigger the amount of information transmitted – six sides versus two – the smaller the certainty of any of the information being transmitted. Imagine, if you will, a die with 1000 sides. There will be one of a one thousandth chance of any of the sides appearing. Based on Shannon’s theory the more complex the information, the less likely it is to appear by chance. The information stored in our DNA and proteins are so complex that many scientists – even atheists – conclude the improbability of them appearing by chance.

     Scientists like Francis Crick,  James Watson, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, etc., do not hold to a deity as the origin of intelligent life on earth. Many other causes –chance variation, natural selection, chemical reaction, even aliens from outer space, are credited for intelligent design. Crick calls the origin of the genetic code as “frozen accident”.

    But proponents of intelligent design like Cambridge educated philosopher of science Stephen Meyer disagrees: “During the last forty years, every naturalistic model proposed has failed to explain the origin of specified genetic information required to build a living cell…”agent causation” now stands as the only cause known to be capable of generating large amounts of information…” In other words, if we are the result of chemical reactions, who created the chemicals? If aliens created us, who created the aliens? If we came from primordial soup, who created the primordial soup? Who, or what, was the first cause? Who, or what, caused the accident?      

  

    The Old Testament character Job questioned God about his suffering. God answered him from the whirlwind and gave him a lesson on creation. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding…Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? Canst thou draw a leviathan with a hook….” God did not directly answer Job's questions, but said he was the first cause of all things, and there was nothing random or accidental about what was happening to Job. 

    I agree with this line of reasoning and want to talk more about it. But for now you'll have to excuse me; there is a crisis in my classroomA student’s sandwich was eaten by a classmate. Accidentally.