> Consider this question - look outside at a tree. Where did all the carbon in the tree come from? You may have heard that carbon fixation in plants use a process called "photosynthesis" that involves iron ions. Where did the iron come from? If only we taught by using storytelling techniques and posing questions to students, perhaps we might have more engagement with science than we have today.

I think that level of storytelling is already routine in science education. It just lands differently with different people, especially at different ages. That's why those "things they didn't teach you in school" books are mostly full of things they really did teach you in school, because many people people who are hostile to a subject as teenagers are fascinated by it later. A kid I went to high school with sent an email to a bunch of us about 7-8 years after graduation because he was learning some information about American history that shocked and fascinated him, and he was really worked up about us not being taught it in school. He thought it had intentionally been withheld from us so we would have a rosy picture of our history and our government, but it was all standard bits of American history we were taught in history class. He remembered being bored in class, so he assumed this information wasn't shared with us, but it was, it just wasn't interesting to him at that point in his life.

> Consider this question - look outside at a tree. Where did all the carbon in the tree come from?

I assume that you are referencing the famous 1983 interview with Feynman, in which he playfully says that "trees come out of the air!" For anyone who hasn't heard the interview, it's definitely worth a listen: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/09/25/161753383/t...

Er, hate to nitpick but photosynthesis uses magnesium, no? In the chlorophyll, at least, although other parts have haems with iron in :)

(Also as with anything in biology, there is no doubt some weird organism that has like a cadmium or similar in its chlorophyll, I don't know)

You're absolutely right! I don't know what I was thinking here - I blame my supervisor :) One of the other things that my old research group did was crosslinking of hemoglobin which has iron as its central atom vs. magnesium in chlorophyll. I find it pretty amazing the structural similarity between the heme structure for metal ions in these two very different use cases.

> If only we taught by using storytelling techniques and posing questions to students

The sciences are a richly interwoven tapestry of stories, so the question arises, might it be taught like that?

I suggest the bottleneck is that crafting such stories is very very expensive, and very poorly incentivized.

To see this, try taking an existing story, and sampling the neighborhood. In some way broaden or retarget it. Take the "tree carbon source" story. Perhaps make it rough quantitative, say flow vs time of day, as in a "plants consume O2 too - rainforests are only net producers for a couple of hours around noon" story. Or vs lifetime. Or use ocean primary producers, and sketching dissolved gas flows - how recently was consumed CO2 part of the atmosphere? Or sketch a global daily-or-seasonal "inhale/exhale" graphic. Or deep-time context - when did such fixation begin historically, and how has it changed since? Or flow residence times for different biomes? Or a correct telling of "treed sunlight released as campfire redshifted light and heat". Or ...

My experience has been, that if you ask simple, obvious, important-for-integrated-understanding accessible-down-to-K questions, you're pervasively dropped in primary literature searches. If you're lucky, the secondary research literature will catch you. Tertiary literature, like professional "everything about X" too-big-for-a-doorstop tomes are sometimes of helpful, but online are generally unavailable or copyright violations. Sometimes phython/mathematica/R/etc scientific code is regrettably required. Education and outreach content is generally useless - because of scope and focus limitations, when not incoherent and incorrect. And there's much effort, even by the American Chemical Society, to kill off sci-hub. Which will make this all even less plausible.

So I suggest the absence of accessible powerful integrated stories (aka science education that doesn't suck), is a failure of the science research community, not the "science" education community. Because only they have the expertise to create them. Or at least, a failure of research funding to incentivize it. And thus a collective failure to appreciate the magnitude of awesome being left on the table. Assuming sufficient awesome might overcome indifference.

Which is less than clear. "The Sun is yellow" is very popular story. From preK to the most used intro astronomy college textbooks. It's pervasive among even first-tier astronomy graduate students. Also to be found on astronomy education research's lists of most common misconceptions in astronomy education. We've known Sun color for at least a century, had detailed limb tint numbers for decades, and now years of intensive work on stellar atmospheres for occultation, and "science" education content has managed to remain uncoupled from all of it. Getting it right would permit weaving with stories of blackbodies and planetary energy flow and color vision and more. Perhaps someday someone will pay someone enough to care, or finally become sufficiently embarrassed to change. But if anyone expects that will happen this decade rather than next, or the one after, I'd really appreciate to hearing why.

On a more upbeat note, it's been noted that almost all (US) professors in the sciences have been through a small number of institutions. So maybe imagine someone with too much money funding a dozen awesome scientific storytelling programs, and waiting a decade or three?

Or maybe creating good science stories might be promoted as a hobby, for people who were in the sciences but left and so have time on their hands? Sidestepping the massive resource allocation challenge by making it unpaid work.