On science teaching and science teachers
I expected to love Project Hail Mary (this was an easy prediction. Things I like: space movies, puppets, problem-solving, emotional soundtracks, plots that revolve around solving problems, people who are isolated and at risk of giving up but don't give up). I LOVED Project Hail Mary. This isn’t a newsletter about liking this movie or not, but it might annoy you if you didn’t like the movie – feel free to skip if so! You do you. I quite dislike debating about movies and books, creative stuff either works for you or it doesn’t, and I immediately philosophically and spiritually hurtle myself away from every conversation about “taste.” Here is a reason you shouldn’t try to have this conversation with me: I have watched and enjoyed every single Fast and Furious movie. I own the Fast and Furious board game.
Nevertheless I felt moved to write about how this movie affected me, and why. Project Hail Mary destroyed me in a particularly unique way as the wife of a science teacher after a year of watching attacks and defunding hit the entire field of STEM education in the US, at a scale that I think few people who outside of the field can even see[1]. People love this movie, which I'm sure will be a success, and yet so many of the people around me, living in the place where I live, also hate my wife's work and actively vote and work to destroy things like the program she runs that teaches science. People line up to cheer for Artemis II, and meanwhile, scholars are leaving STEM education.
How is it possible for all this to be true at once?
Even as I struggle with the dissonance, I know how it is possible. It is because many things are true at once: that we want to have medicine, that we do not have the foresight to fund the students who want to create medicine or fund the projects that will reveal the basic science that will lead to medicine, that we value stereotypes of scientists more than actual scientists, that environmentally devastating beliefs rise to the foreground of our minds and are exacerbated by social dynamics that are bigger than all of us, that people are both kind and awful, that people generally want science but also don’t really think science comes from anywhere in particular, that people can flock to both harmful supplements and breakthrough cancer cures, that we feel angry when a person who has a gift for science doesn’t look the way we expect, that Sally Ride could go all the way to space and yet never come out of the closet. The social is enormous. The social is dangerous. The social operates both with and without reason. Social forces of inequity wrench across my life and the lives of the people I love most in the world, like gravitational forces trying to pull apart our spaceships.
I have this delusion that I would be good in space. I have always loved a space movie, and I love space peril. Space peril is different than earth peril because it is inherently existential in a way that the familiar setting of earth lets us avoid noticing. But space is stripped down terror, life against the void. Life inside of the void. Life, realizing it has always been reducible to a miniscule moment of heat and motion.
One of my friends dislikes space peril acutely, and describes a message she got quite early on as a child from watching a scary scene with astronauts: space is death, we shouldn’t go there. I get that reaction even though it makes me want to watch space movies and makes her want to avoid them. Space is death and it’s unbelievably wrong for us to strap our many squishy little cells on top of a rocket just to go there and try not to die.
A lot of people get that message about STEM, too: we shouldn’t go there.
And yet for some reason that peril feeling is exactly why I like it: perhaps because in space, the forces are so objectively scary no one would deny it. Your survival struggle can become so starkly obvious that you are free from the obligation to explain it to a skeptical audience. Maybe the star is dying. Maybe the ship won’t fly. The problems are objective. In space, no one doubts you have a good reason to scream.
Here is another reason I like it – it’s familiar. Because it’s not just about the peril, but about who you become because of the peril. Space is death lurking right outside but also you in your little room with all your gear, you with the tools immediately to hand. Maybe if you think hard enough you can make it. There is something familiar about that for me, and for everyone who worked to get into a field where the field itself is like an alien lifeform, dangerous, powerful, perhaps your enemy, perhaps your friend.
I won’t spoil Project Hail Mary in this newsletter, but I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that it starts with a fundamental question: how did I get here? That gradually unravels into a different central question: who am I?
Flashback, in the style of Project Hail Mary, to some of the choices that have made us who we are: my wife could have easily become an R1 research faculty member but chose to apply to a tenured teaching track job at UC San Diego. She is unique among many of the scientists that I know in that she can build computers, handle lasers, create bespoke hardware to look inside of brains, and yet alongside all of that she can explain to you why she is doing it and how you could get there too.
She has always loved teaching. When we first met in grad school, she was part of an unusual program where alongside getting her PhD in neuroscience she would get up early in the morning to go to high school classrooms and teach. Time away from research is always a sacrifice when you are grinding away in a very prestigious grad program. She did it anyway. I remember her getting up early, leaving early in the morning to drive inland, a theme that would continue throughout our life. She is always leaving me to go teach other people’s children. I love that about her even when it is hard, and it is hard more often than I would like.
When she got this teaching professor job I couldn't believe it. It felt like so many dreams coming true. It felt like the narrative arc of a good story. Kid who fought her way into science gets to design and lead science teaching programs, winning with all that expertise and achievement they demanded and all the compassion they couldn't beat out of her. She made new courses from scratch that had never existed: coding for biology students, electrophysiology labs that provided the hands-on learning required for future scientific paths. When Ashley wrote her first book, So You Want to Be a Neuroscientist?, we marveled that there were so few updates since the classic Advice for a Young Investigator by Ramon Y Cajal, which was still given as gifts to undergraduates aspiring to study the brain – and which calls women a distraction to science and an impediment to progress. It was clearly time for an update. In our happiness it did not cross my mind that anyone could see this as anything other than a good thing.
I have been writing and thinking a lot lately about role-related identities, which are fundamentally socially constructed but do a good job of tricking us into thinking they’re not. In work, as in other parts of life, we define ourselves in relation. We are all a lot more dynamic than we like to think, capable of holding many beliefs at once, some of them contradictory. I value this, I want that, success looks like this, no it looks like that. People expect someone like me to do this. When people look at me they will expect this. The shifting and dynamic tapestry of our motivations, implicit and explicit beliefs, supposed goals, then contradictory behaviors, and all the interactions between them, is a lot of what makes psychology a very difficult science.
University STEM departments did not always value things like student motivation in the world of STEM nor see the psychological needs of learners as a driver of learning outcomes and innovation. However, the evidence is clear: who we consider ourselves to be, and what future self we consider possible, is what makes more people becoming scientists possible. Imagining yourself a scientist will unlock more science. Gradually, over time, teachers like my wife began to create empirical evidence about scientific identity and show the value of classrooms in which more identities are possible: who gets to see themselves as a scientist, who gets to expect to be treated as a scientist. In neuroscience, my wife’s field, experiments have sparked around greater global accessibility. The rising tide of computational neuroscience has opened the possibility of more open sharing of data that invites more people in. STEM education pathways can be analyzed to identify intervention opportunities that keep more people from falling out of STEM pipelines. Belonging varies tremendously across campuses, and science teachers play a key role in deciding whether you will have a psychologically safe space to learn and do science, or not.
These concepts all sound very obvious when you write them out, but in practice, it remains a battle. I can tell you from direct experience across my many years of working with psychology and human learning that as much as people will agree with statements like “everyone should learn,” they won’t always agree with statements like STEM courses shouldn’t just weed out everyone who didn’t go to a wealthy high school and we probably shouldn’t measure STEM rigor based on how many students we kick out.
However, reform programs for science teaching have spurred great changes as well as highlighted the cultural problems that differentiate some STEM fields from others: for example, biology welcomes women in a way that physics and chemistry don’t. My wife and I talk about the hierarchies of knowledge that split STEM in strange and nuanced ways: tech companies love to hire neuroscientists and fawn over recruiting neuroscientists, but the same person with the same training with a degree that says “biology” will face a harder uphill battle being believed for their technical ability. Your retirement fund could hinge on whether you learned fast enough to call yourself “computational” in your twenties. My wife taught herself to code and then taught herself to teach biology students to code and her classes have a very different composition than other coding classes on campus. Before 2025 it was the kind of thing that universities would boast about and now we worry because this success, her very effectiveness as a teacher, makes her a target.
However, in the movies, we unconsciously feel out the transition of STEM teaching from conventional sage-on-a-stage methods to these newer more inclusive models: we love active teaching, we want to see a Good Teacher who honors their students’ curiosity and cares about their lives. STEM teaching is not solved. In real life on campuses, it is still a daily battle for everyone I know who teaches: advocating for enough TAs to run intensive hands-on lab courses, pushing for enough time to do the grading of project-based learning, engaging in the endless psychological labor that we can so easily simply erase in a movie.
These methods work better for all students and they work better for more at-risk students and yet talking about the latter has been erased across university websites and campuses and conferences and scholastic venues. If you care to try to help students who have been failed and you achieve impossible success against impossible odds it is now a liability. Nevertheless, they keep working. My wife works three times as hard and five times as long as most of the research faculty I know, in order to teach courses that provide active learning, project-based learning, and the collaborative group work that sets students up for real skill-building in their professional lives.
In Project Hail Mary, much plot centers on the protagonist’s ability to use lab equipment to get information to understand novel parts of the universe. To solve things. Some teacher taught him to think and observe, and now he is the teacher (unbalanced centrifuges notwithstanding). But even more in the movie hinges on the psychological choice to collaborate, to trust an intellectual partner with a piece of your problem. This too reflects the reality of STEM, beyond the stereotype.
There is a famous method in teaching called the jigsaw method, a cooperative classroom technique where individual students are given uniquely necessary pieces, are tasked with becoming experts in their pieces of the problem, then asked to teach their groups the part they have learned. I kept thinking about it during that movie. Much has been made in education research about the benefits of the jigsaw method for learning outcomes, but the research has drifted from its original entanglement with those gravitational social forces. The jigsaw method started with a goal to increase social outcomes, attempting to reduce racial conflict and prejudice in classrooms in the 1970s. Inequitable structures try to persuade us that we are not all in it together, that the classroom has nothing to do with the world. But new futures are drafted in classrooms every day.
Perhaps the identity question of the movie is less who am I and more who could we be if we can teach each other?
I have seen who my wife can be when she can teach. As I write this, this morning she left at 7am to teach lab classes with more contact hours with students than any other single course on campus. She has filled her office with plants, and a couch for students to sit on, and nerd art of those squishy impossible cells, the same cells we shot up into space. On the whiteboard there is a thank you note from students who sat in her office last quarter for a study session because she left her office open for them to use. She runs a program called STARTneuro which was funded by the NIH ENDURE program, part of a beautiful community of programs across many campuses that open labs and open science for people who otherwise would not have access to it. It is this kind of program that is on the chopping block, this kind of community that is being railed against.
My wife and I both made it into these careers by the skin of our teeth. When I got accepted to a prestigious PhD program on a coast far away from the dismal Texas bedroom I was living in, I remember my hands shaking so much that I couldn’t pick up the phone to call my parents and tell them. The choice in my mind was very clear: either I would go back to being a waitress, or I would get in. Doing this work, and succeeding at it, is the collaborative triumph of our lives. It’s our continuing science experiment. The statistics of our lives are difficult for me to believe. We both should’ve been anything other than this and I cannot forget that. I do not want it to get harder for little girls to think about cells and space.
Another flashback: as graduate students we budgeted for groceries and I took on extra teaching and TAships to survive, and all the while we thought and talked about how it was so hard, how meaningful it would be to make it less hard for other people. In this hard world it is easy to forget how far support can go, tiny nudges to the spaceship changing its trajectory. When people like my wife win grants for science teaching they think about things like whether students have a quiet room to study in because they remember having to learn all of those things about being on a college campus that you don't get taught if you grew up the way we grew up. She is a better teacher because of what she knows and not despite it.
Many of our friends are STEM teachers. When we try to schedule a game time we schedule it around their grading, their late nights, their thankless early mornings. Their stories are more mundane than a movie but no less full of peril: they keep students in school, reconcile the irreconcilable conflicts between groups in labs, listen to problems that no one else is listening to, advocate against gatekeeping and spend their spring breaks talking and working with other teachers about how to make teaching better. It has always been a job that's costly. I see the cost in more frightening, sharp-edged ways now. Every line on their websites and every grant that had “diverse” or “inclusive” anywhere in its text has become a weight, a latent threat, a weapon against them. Every science teacher who decided to care is being punished for caring after being told that the biggest problem with science is people not caring enough. This dissonance is perfectly encapsulated in the fact that the author of the book that Project Hail Mary was adapted from can be lauded for writing stories about science and have a platform denied to most scientists and use it to disparage anyone having a concern for social topics, can run to go say he’s a fan of an “anti-woke” platform rather than the actual work of scientists teaching science [2]. This is apparently not political, while the actual work of actual scientists teaching science is.
Another flashback: my wife and her program co-directors got their NIH grant the day after we eloped. This beautiful program to raise the floor for learners staying in science, with direct pay to students and hands-on training and mentorship and a long-term cohort model and all of the well-tested pieces that STEM education researchers had had to spend so many years doing so much research to prove the value of, finally funded to a level where it could be implemented. The students in these programs that I have met have clearer goals than most tenured professors I’ve known: I want to help my community, I want to become a doctor, I want to study cancer, I want to study cells so we can understand why they break.
We toasted her grant, we celebrated, we were staying at a small oceanfront hotel and I remember taking pictures together on the beach, our faces glowing with the realization of multiple dreams. When we started dating we couldn’t get married and now we could; when we were students we couldn’t afford groceries and now we were clawing funding out of the cracks in the universe and putting it in the pockets of students. But society’s belief in the value of that work had an expiration date, and we crashed into it. The asteroid has hit, the future has changed. Programs like this will not exist, and people like my wife must find other ways to work. She will teach fewer of your children.
This fall my wife organized a meeting of ENDURE students, bringing the community together to celebrate them and the teaching of science. And to mourn together, which they can’t take from us. There is great loss, and great risk, and great grief. But there is a clarity to this moment, too. Programs and grants are cancelled, but there is still community, and there are still the scientists and science teachers who care. The thing it all teaches us is that they have never accepted people like us succeeding at this, not really, no matter how beautifully we render planets and stars on movie screens. I love science fiction, but it is possible to have science fiction exist happily alongside pseudoscience and bullshit. It is not possible for actual science to exist alongside pseudoscience and bullshit. Nevertheless, they can pry our actual science from our cold, dead hands. Science teachers wake up every morning to do hard things, and have done so for years, and will continue to do so.
STEM education research as a field has been devastated by cancelled grants, cultural attack and upended funding structures. In early 2025 work on any aspect of DEI in STEM was labeled illegal which, even as this was a preposterous claim that does not stand up, has a devastating chilling effect on all people doing that work.
https://grant-witness.us/
https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-three-fourths-nsf-funding-cuts-education/
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/trump-administration-slashes-stem-education-research-grants/2025/09 ↩︎“Cat how do you like this movie then.” I don’t know, because I have the fast and furious boardgame and the world is incredibly annoying and I just can’t help what makes me feel like that little girl again, the one who loved astronomy and space movies. For whatever it’s worth I completely understand not feeling this way, but I always aggressively separate movies from books and their authors. To me movies are made by entirely different creative teams who can either crash and burn with, or transcend, the original source material. So I can like movies and dislike authors. I do think it’s really funny that Weir has apologized specifically to the producer of Star Trek and that this is the power relationship he perceives as worthy of his attention; it is in such actions that people who disclaim politics show you their audience and enact their politics. https://gizmodo.com/andy-weir-star-trek-backlash-apology-2000739821 ↩︎
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