Skip to main content

Alom Shaha - five way interview

Alom Shaha was born in Bangladesh but grew up in London. A science teacher, writer and filmmaker, he has spent most of his professional life sharing his passion for science and education with the public. Alom has produced, directed and appeared in a number of TV programmes for broadcasters such as the BBC, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, and the Nuffield Foundation. Alom has represented his community as an elected politician and has volunteered at a range of charitable organisations. He teaches at a comprehensive school in London and writes for a number of online and print publications. His new book is Why Don't Things Fall Up?

Why science?

Honestly, because I had a couple of great teachers at school who made it make sense and come alive for me and, perhaps more importantly, made me believe it was something I could do.

Why this book? 

It’s the book I’ve been wanting and meaning to write ever since I had my first book published over a decade ago. Teaching and 'communicating' science has been the basis of my working life for 25 years or so and being asked to write this book provided an opportunity to do something which I had always found too intimidating to attempt before – summarise and explain the 'big ideas of science' alongside a discussion of key issues from the history and philosophy of science and science teaching which I consider important.   

Why do you think so many people appear to find science a turn-off?

I think it’s partly down to how much 'science capital' people have to begin with, for example whether they grow up with parents who have a positive attitude towards science and who expose them to science from a young age in the same way most parents expose their children to art, music, literature. Teachers also make a huge difference – surveys consistently show that scientists often credit their science teachers for sparking or fuelling their interest in science and leading them to their subsequent careers. Without good teaching, science, like any other subject studied at school, can be dry and boring, especially to young people who may not be exposed to science in any other context. 

What’s next?

I have two young children, aged 5 and 6, and looking after them is really my main priority. I also teach two days a week at a comprehensive school in London. In the little time I have left after meeting those responsibilities, I hope to continue writing. My first work of fiction, How to Find a Rainbow: A Reena and Rekha Story, will be published in February next year. It’s a picture book for young children about two young red panda sisters who go on adventures in the Himalayan jungle in which they live. I’m hoping it will be the first in a series – each story sees the two sisters to discover something about how the natural world works, for example, in How to Find a Rainbow, they work out how rainbows are formed. 

What’s exciting you at the moment?

My youngest daughter has just started reception in primary school and my eldest is in Year 2. Watching them grow and develop is one of the most exciting experiences I’ve ever had. Like pretty much everyone I know, I think AI will change the world in ways we cannot even imagine, so I’m excited and fearful of this in probably equal measures…


 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more