2 Why Geology?

“Why are you taking geology?” I often ask my students, though I already know the answer.

“I need a lab science requirement,” they usually reply. Often they’ve heard that geology is the easiest way to meet that requirement. “Rocks for Jocks,” they snicker. But when I submitted this week’s midterm grades, a third of the class was failing. Huh. It’s not that I take pride in the failure rate, but neither do I like having my course dismissed as fluff. (And most of them will manage to pull their grades up once they get serious about doing well.) In fact, geology is like most things in life —you get out of it what you put into it. So my challenge is to help students see beyond requirements toward the benefits of putting effort into understanding geology. If I can’t answer the “Why?” question myself, why should I expect them to be able to? And if they can’t understand why, I doubt many of them will be motivated beyond getting whatever grade they see as a minimum to meet their needs.

Students have a lot of things vying for their time—jobs, sports, courses in their major, and their social life. It only makes sense for them to apportion their time accordingly. One would hope that they could see the relative value of their activities, but I see little evidence. The takehome pay for a $10/hour job, 20 hours/week, is $2800 over the semester. My 4-credit course currently costs $3400. Yet, they will make the job a higher priority, even if it means dropping the course. How does that make sense? Or they’ll put in 20 hours a week at a sport that they actually have to pay to compete in and will never earn a cent from, yet will often miss class for. Huh.

Look, I was a student once, too. I put a lot of time into choir and the school newspaper and girls. But the only time I ever dropped a course was the semester my dad died, and only then after I missed another week from flu later in the semester. It was Russian IV, not something I needed, even as a free elective. And next fall, my daughter will be captain of the crosscountry team at her college. She also runs track, works in the admissions office, and is active on campus. I told her I’d be disappointed if she graduated with a 4.0. She promptly made one of two A- grades. My point was that if she graduated with a perfect gradepoint, she should have gone to a tougher college and/or done more things outside the classroom—outside her comfort zone. So I’m not opposed to the time my students devote to things other than geology. They just shouldn’t go about it blindly. Deluding ourselves is way too easy. And costly.

First, admit those conflicts: There are significant financial reasons to do well enough in this class, and there are significant aspects of your life pulling you away from the time needed to do well. In order to get yourself motivated and persist for the duration of the course, you need to find the best goal that is desirable and attain-able. The reality is that it is easier to be pulled towards something you find appealing than to push yourself to do something you think you ought to. So try this: Think of three reasons why you want to learn about geology.

Notes:

Geology has a strong historical component, plus the science of geology has its own history. Understanding both how the Earth has changed through time and how our thinking about it has changed are key parts of this course. Key terms related to both include these:

Catastrophism: Before we understood the ancient age of Earth and the processes that shape it, we tried to explain the things that happened, particularly those that scared us, with superstition, what geologists rcall catastrophism. Even recently, an Iranian cleric blamed promiscuous women for causing earthquakes, and an American minister blamed Hurricane Katrina on a gay festival. Blaming others for bad things we don’t understand is still too common.

Uniformitarianism: As our understanding of physical processes increased, we began to understand how those processes, given enough time, shape we what see today—the present is key to the past. That’s uniformitarianism.

Relative and absolute time are the two ways geologists speak of time. Relative time is simple determining if something is older or younger. For example, if each day when I come home, I get the mail and toss it in a box, the oldest mail is at the bottom of the box. But if I pick up a letter and look at its postmark, I can read a specific postmark and determine that is it 17 days olds. That’s absolute dating. We’ll discuss this in lab soon.

Plate tectonics is the theory that states that the surface of the Earth consists of large slabs of brittle rock that come together, pull apart, and slide by each other. In the second section of the course, we will study in detail how these interactions take place.