About Darwin's Workshop

Step into Darwin’s Workshop and you are stepping into the world of the 19th century naturalist. The skeleton of a huge bird hangs from the ceiling and skulls, bones, chemistry equipment, microscopes, shells, seeds, and a hundred other objects to contemplate and study crowd display cases lining the walls. It was in such an environment that Charles Darwin first organized his theory of evolution, and it is in this environment that Magi Discoe tutors students in science.

After 15 years teaching biological and physical science at the high school honors course level (including three years as science department chair at Berkeley High), Ms. Discoe has chosen to leave the urban school environment, with its budget and curriculum constraints, to return to the “one on one” relationship with both students and nature available only to a rural naturalist. With her laboratory—like Darwin’s—an integral part of her home, and with the world of nature literally at her Green Valley front door, she can help individual students or small groups learn at their own pace in an entirely lab-based environment.

“I’ve always considered myself a professional asker of questions,” says Discoe. “Now I have the chance to help students learn in the most basic sense of the word: not just to memorize facts, but to develop the skills of analysis and critical thinking that will let them discover the concepts behind those facts.”

Darwin’s Workshop offers science tutoring, workshops, and enrichment programs for individuals and small groups, from middle school through junior college level. Contact Magi Discoe at 823-2758 or www.darwinsworkshop.com.

Why Darwin’s Workshop?

On my tenth birthday, I opened a book that was to change my life. The book was about “science”, but what I saw was page after page of brilliant frogs, glowing sponges, powerful alligators, spiders, seeds, diatoms, fish…the creatures were all strange and beautiful, and they filled me with wonder. Also in that same book was a picture of the study of Charles Darwin, the room in which one man, surrounded by the marvelous specimens and notes of his journeys, had worked out the central organizing concept of modern biology—the idea of evolution. The room was the very ideal of the nineteenth century naturalist’s workplace, crowded with bones and feathers, notebooks and magnifying glasses, with a big round table on which to perform experiments and a big leather chair in which to consider them…and I knew that when I grew up I wanted a room just like that.

As I grew older I kept my love of observing living creatures, but also gradually came to appreciate the rigor and skeptical discipline of science, which takes us beyond simple wonder toward deeper understanding. As a skeptical and rebellious teenager I resonated joyfully with the brilliant central idea of good science: scientific method, rather than trying to prove the truth of an idea, tries its best to disprove it. In other words, the skepticism that comes so naturally to teenagers can make them ideal scientists. But as I developed these more sophisticated ways to learn about nature, the simple wonder of that room full of specimens and tools stayed with me. It is that original curiosity that leads us to keep asking questions, and it is my goal in Darwin’s Workshop to keep that curiosity alive while gradually introducing the rigors of scientific thinking.

My classroom is my modest version of Darwin’s study where I can encourage my students to see and handle interesting objects, to begin their study of biology with free exploration, and to build scientific understanding on that base of curiosity. The room, like its namesake, is crowded with specimens and tools, and literally just outside the door are vineyards, pools, and wooded hills, so that we can move our studies out into the natural world.

Philosophy of Education

The word “educate” comes from the Latin “educare”, which means “to lead out from” and does not mean “to put into”. It is my intention to draw from the student’s own curiosity, critical questions and answers relating to the workings of nature. For example: I may give a student a sponge and ask, “If we assume that this animal, like others, needs oxygen to live, how do you think it breathes?” (You may notice that this question makes assumptions that could themselves be questioned—and a student would be encouraged and rewarded for pointing this out.)

Darwin’s Workshop has available the tools to begin exploring this problem—a research grade microscope, dissecting kits, textbooks, a computer—but the real path of learning is the mental exercise of learning to ask useful questions and then testing your ideas. Many students are stunned to learn that some of the most fundamental scientific discoveries were made with much less sophisticated tools, relying only on painstaking observation and reasoned inference.

In the crowded classrooms of today’s California it is difficult for teachers to assess misconceptions and gaps in understanding of individual students. Science is especially unforgiving in the regard, in that one concept builds upon another. Without the clarity of underlying concepts, science becomes a string of isolated facts, impossible to memorize and boring as well. Science becomes fascinating only when it is understood enough to continue to ask more and more fundamental questions. It is the goal of the teacher to encourage the student’s curiosity, while searching for misconceptions and gaps in understanding and leading the student to think critically and develop fundamental understanding of the nature of the world and scientific investigation.