Demystifying the Science Fair

I was prepared to dislike The Class. Andy Bramante, high school science teacher extraordinaire in Greenwich, CT, accepts four dozen students a year into his research class. They enter a dozen different science fairs and academic competitions, bringing home tens of thousands in prize money. They win admission to America’s most elite colleges. Along the way, they also go to prom.

It’s not that I don’t like Greenwich, despite its reputation for snooty rich people. It’s not that I dislike elite universities; holding degrees from two of the top institutions in the United States, that would just be hypocrisy on my part. It’s not that I begrudge the students and the school the prize money.

It’s that I hate the competification of everything. At some point in the twentieth century, schools took a cue from sports. If the opportunity to compete made student athletes do their best, why not turn all academic subjects into competitions as well? My high school years coincided with that transition. As a teenager I participated in Its Academic, a Washington DC area high school quiz show. I took the National Latin Exam for four years and played in endless certamina sponsored by the ridiculously active Virginia Junior Classical League. Despite being disinclined toward STEM, I even remember getting the results of a national math exam in which I somehow placed in the top two in the school and fell just a few points shy of advancing to the next level. And at my graduation I received all sorts of academic achievement awards I didn’t even know I was in the running for. But most of my school life had nothing to do with winning anything. I enjoyed learning, and I learned. The competitions were just add-ons and not the focus of my energies.

Except for science fair. Every year of my high school career, the various honors and AP science classes that I enrolled in required a science fair project. This was easily the single most stressful assignment I was ever handed in my entire academic career (that’s saying something, since I went to a college that required everyone to write a senior thesis, spent four years writing my PhD dissertation, and am now in my twentieth year as a professor). It was obvious to me as a teenager that I was personally incapable of conceptualizing “original” scientific research. I didn’t know enough basic science to poke holes in the curriculum. Some of what I was learning (I see now) was pretty much what Galileo, Newton, and da Vinci figured out centuries ago and some came from the intellectual revolution of the early twentieth century led by brilliant Europeans whose apotheosis was Einstein. Nor did my school have the kind of equipment that would allow me to do much more than separate chemicals with a centrifuge. At the dawn of an era of collaborative scientific discovery leading to published research papers whose author credits run to a dozen pages, I had nothing to add. Instead of getting joy from noodling around the chemistry lab, I lay awake night after night full of anxiety about how this massive and clearly inadequate project was going to tank my grade for the year. I had no desire to share my “findings” in a science fair, yet I was required to air my project in front of strangers.

Things seem to have gotten even worse since the 1980s, and I have seen firsthand the damage that the reorientation of academic pursuits around competition can do. My children waited through the first years of their elementary education for access to our district’s gifted program. But when it was finally offered to them starting in fourth grade, it turned out that the entire program was structured around competitions. Competitions for reading, competitions for history, competitions for science, for math, for history, even for citizenship. There was literally nothing in the program that valued learning for its intrinsic satisfactions, nothing that cultivated curiosity for its own rewards. They both dropped out of the program, one disastrously and one quietly.

So, when I picked up The Class, I was primed with suspicion. A whole course geared around pushing kids into multiple science fairs, the bane of teenage Amanda’s existence? No, thanks.

But The Class is charming. The students are quirky and good-natured, anxious but basically well adjusted; the teacher dedicated to their well-being, with just a hint of professional frustration. A few of the parents are, in the way of twenty-first century helicopter parents, nightmares, but a good story needs antagonists as well as protagonists. I ended up rooting for the kids, checking the appendix at the back to see how they fared in the various competitions they enter across the academic year and poring over their decisions about where to go to college.

Interestingly, Tesoriero portrays only two of the students—both boys—as really gifted. Everyone in the school recognizes William as the smartest kid around. Characteristically of gifted kids, he has developed procrastination as a psychologically protective strategy—if he waits until the last minute to do the work, then the fault for not winning lies in the avoidance, not in his underlying capacities. Ethan, for his part, is on an entirely different plane. High school only interferes with his education. A few months into his senior year, his parents rent him an apartment in New Haven, where he is working twelve hours a day in a Yale professor’s laboratory; later in the year, they finance his relocation elsewhere in the country to pursue the capitalization of his project. Somehow he doesn’t actually need to show up to school in order to graduate. The rest of the research class, however, seem like bright and charming young people. The come across as high achievers, but not necessarily brilliant like William and Ethan.

The abundance of good looking and well-rounded young scientists in the science research class seems to be Tesoriero’s point. The kids in Greenwich aren’t fundamentally different from students anywhere else in the United States. So why are they cleaning up the science fair prize circuit? It’s because their teacher spends the whole year cultivating them. Most high school students simply are not offered this kind of opportunity to explore a single research project in depth across a whole academic year. They don’t have labs full of high-end scientific equipment and a teacher with a network of contacts to connect them to machines that he doesn’t have immediate access to. Tesoriero’s message seems to be that if children across the country had these resources and the support of a dedicated teacher, then they too could achieve like Andy’s students.

Fascinatingly, Tesoriero has very little to say about the students’ knowledge of science. With my own Groundhog Day of incompetent and futile science fair experiences in the back of my mind, I was mystified how it was that Greenwich’s students could write research proposals for admission to the class. Didn’t they have to know stuff about science before they could push the cutting edge? In a revelatory passage, Tesoriero explains, “as Andy has learned from years of teaching research, kids who are masters at traditional science class don’t automatically make for great researchers. The call and response of information-test, information-test has little to do with the ingenuity, creativity, and perseverance required for independent research” (383).

As the scales fell from my eyes, I realized that the students’ projects all fell into the realm of applied science and engineering rather than basic science. They wanted to make a quick and inexpensive test for a disease, teach a computer to read data to answer an empirical question, to make a new kind of bandage. One kid spends a large amount of time in the lab trying to open up a battery case so he can reuse it in his project. Another puzzles over getting the right conditions for the experiment. They aren’t trying to understand the nature of the universe; they are trying to solve problems. If someone had told me three decades ago that this was the nature of scientific research, the shape of my life might have been different. I certainly would have been a less anxious student and might have figured out manageable science fair projects. A teacher like Andy Bramante not only provides the space for kids to do research projects, he also helps to nudge them into the realm of the possible and doable, building in the students the confidence that they are capable of seeing problems and figuring out how to solve them through trial and error as much as through the vaunted scientific method. I wish I had known that myself as a young person.

Do I want to do science now? Still no. I’ll happily stick to my archives. But if my kid decides she wants to take the research class at her high school and can imagine a project for herself, I will stifle my own reflexive anxiety, hope she has a sympathetic mentor, and roll up my sleeves for the ride. I might even encourage her to share out her knowledge in a public setting—though I still won’t encourage her to believe that winning is more important than learning.

Heather Won Tesoriero, The Class: A Life-Changing Teacher, His World-Changing Kids, and the Most Inventive Classroom in America (New York: Ballantine Books, 2018).