Reimagining Science Education in Brookline

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Luka, age 12, strode through the Knight Moves Café in Brookline, into the back parlor where he settled down across from the piano. If he had looked around, he would have seen a book about the Earth, a globe, a geode, a microscope, a stack of magnets, and a model of the human body–all deliberately and intentionally arranged to pull in young students and encourage observation.

This boy and his three middle school peers needed no provocation, however. They jumped right into a discussion about quantum mechanics, even before the teacher arrived.

Luka, and the nearly 70 other Cogitania students from area towns, attend some of the best public and independent schools in the state. But these students still have questions that aren’t being answered and passions that aren’t being fueled in school, parents say.

That’s why Joanna Cutts started a business she calls Cogitania, the land of thinkers. By collaborating with local scientists, she develops small classes customized to student interest and ability. Now in its third year, what started at her dining room table in Allston is currently a thriving community in Coolidge Corner.

“The concept was to create a space in which not only my sons and the friends of my sons but also other kids could come because they are curious, they are intelligent, they are ready to grasp bigger concepts that usually are open only for college students, and they are capable of doing much more than their school program offers,” said Cutts.

On this particular day, the teacher was Justin Brown, an atomic physicist from Draper Laboratory in Cambridge with a Ph.D. from Princeton.

Direct access to highly trained scientists like Brown is what made Luka start coming, and it’s what keeps him coming back. Luka’s parents are both microbiologists. Right now, he’s more interested in astronomy and physics, and his parents don’t always seem like the best people for him to turn to with questions about the complicated math. So his parents pay between $30 and $50 per class to supplement what he gets in school.

Brown first told the group about his own training and pointed out that he took many years to accumulate what he knows. Then, he asked what they already knew so far. That’s when the floodgates opened. Because these kids had already read quite a bit.

Still, there was more to learn. So, they talked about wave interference and diffraction. They looked at the wave properties of light and were reminded to protect their retinas by always keeping a laser at waist level. They talked about a scale so small it is one hundred times smaller than the width of a human hair.

They discussed what physicists know, what they are interested in figuring out, what they can predict, what they ask themselves, and what patterns they can observe. They looked at real data and tried to make sense of it using algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus. They took the complex and tried to make it simple.

“This is something that I’ve grappled with for a time and the thing that I’ve finally settled on is that these are the rules of how the world works,” Brown

said. “The way we came up with the scientific theory of quantum mechanics is by observing the world and doing experiments over and over again and asking ourselves about it.”

Oliver, a sixth grader, perched on his chair, hand on his chin like a Rodin sculpture. Alex, admittedly the newest to this topic, scribbled furiously in his notebook. Caleb, the eldest of the group, who was Schrödinger’s cat for Halloween, sometimes answered his friends’ questions and sometimes posed his own.

At one point, all four boys rose in unison, like the waves they were studying, and physically engulfed their teacher who had been pointing a laser beam through a small piece of glass at the wall. They continued on standing like this for some time, enthusiastically talking, pointing, and learning. The excitement in the room was palpable.

“In school, the curriculum is made to practice and repeat so you really get your finger down on it,” said Luka. “But if you do that the first time they teach it, then the other three times, you are just waiting for class to be over. Here, it’s way more scientific than anything you can get in school and more theoretical. I’m challenged by the math and that makes me want to solve it.”

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