> Does anyone collect these educational inspirational stories?
That might be really useful. Maybe one barrier to improved education, is people having difficulty visualizing it?
Last summer, I tried to explore teaching atoms in early primary, with a focus on nucleons and nuclei.[1] One big surprise to me in discussions, was a pattern of non-linear response to my saying "teach nucleons to kids".
One physics postdoc, one with a professional focus on introductory physics education, replied basically "Absurd! How could you teach muons to kids!" It turned out that for them, "teach nucleons and nuclei" meant understanding muons. "Teach ... to kids", wasn't enough to change that image. So they tried to imagine teaching muons to kids, and exploded.
Another physics postdoc tried to picture kids chalking quantum math on some graduate seminar blackboard. And was "WTF?" baffled.
A primary-school teacher heard "teach atoms", and tried to picture early-primary students memorizing and regurgitating 4th-grade paragraphs of definitions. Because for them, that's what "teach atoms" meant.
And more. These weren't outliers.
I ended up using an analogy. That it was like proposing to teach kindergarteners about traffic lights. And having highway engineers declaring "Absurd! There's no way kids could understand those standards documents! And they're expensive! And the Chinese ones are in Chinese! You're think you can teach technical Chinese transportation standards documents in kindergarten!?!"
"Red means stop; green means go." "Atoms are sticky little balls that jiggle."
I'd expected that crafting accessible leverageable descriptions would be hard. And that how well one could achieve transferable understanding, at various ages, would be an open question.
But I didn't expect that people would initially be so dramatically unable to picture the possibility of teaching some topics.
People were fine after a "kindergarten traffic lights ... green means go... not network theory" story to set context. But I wonder...
Might there be a badly underappreciated need for stories like OP? To provide "Oh wow... I wouldn't have imagined one could teach that... Now I can picture it..."
That's an idea for helping to disrupt education that I've not seen before.
