Slashdot Mirror
A New Approach to Teaching Science
Gallenod writes "The Washington Post has an article on Joy Hakim, an author trying to re-write junior-high science textbooks to make them more readable. There are some interesting observations on how traditional textbook publishing houses control pretty much everything children read in school and her difficulties in challenging the status quo. However, she's already succeeded with an award-winning history textbook series, so maybe she'll rack up another win here."
Don't bother with textbooks - just teach them hands-on. I had 10X as much fun combining chemicals that gave off smoke than I ever did reading some dumb paragraphs.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
textbooks that are written kind of like A Brief History of Time or other such books. Of course, they'd need to have to be more indepth and whatnot, but if ideas and concepts were introduced in a more entertaining and inviting way, people would be more interested in learning the details. I did not read the article btw, I don't feel like registering.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
post your manuscripts on the web. at least one will become popular.
do more than just science books. That way she could rewrite history!
yuk yuk
--My other sig is a ferrari.
They're rewriting history books? Dammit, now I'll have to re-learn all sorts of things, like who won World War II!
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
New math textbooks, new english textbooks, new history classes.
They spent one whole week covering addition with my 3rd grader. Then they moved on. The new method is just to teach the basic idea. So the kid struggles with addition. Spelling and handwriting are just details. So she cant write legibly.
Of course this is all just a smiley face on the fact that teachers dont want to look bad (by having anyone fail) or, god forbid, work too hard.
I'm sure these new science texts have a bunch of pictures of magic frogs and shit, but none of those annoying facts or theories or equations to memorize.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
The article claims that textbooks at the K-12 level are usually written by committees. This is probably true, based on my limited recollections. So why is this so very different from college textbooks, which are usually written by a small number of authors? (Usually, there are one, two or at most, three.)
There must be some driving force that makes the committee system work better for the K-12 textbooks, but what is it, I wonder?
How about we take a new approach to having students actually give a rat's ass about science or learning in general? The problem isn't textbooks or any 'style' of teaching. It's students who come to school who simply don't care. Why is there the steroetype about smart asian kids? It's because societies like those in South Korea and India place a high value on intelligence and education, ours (America) doesn't.
I was looking at a junior high science book recently. Everything seemed very dumbed down already. It was basically memory - not enough emphasis was placed on understanding concepts. Making them easier to read does not solve the real problem of students not understanding concepts.
Books are written by committees. They have no literary merit, no voice, no style, no charm. They are focused almost exclusively on facts...
Is it just me, or is an almost-exclusive focus on facts a good thing for textbooks of any sort? Would people prefer books based on rampant speculations, unwarranted assumptions, and outright lies?
Oh cruel fate, to be thusly boned! Ask not for whom the bone bones; it bones for thee. -Bender
It seems like every couple of years we get a new set of "reforms." Every time I check out the textbooks they are almost uniformly horrible. The biggest error (other than teaching incorrect notions) is that they push too general an idea rather than trying to give kids the skills and critical thinking. I guess its time for an other round. . .
First of all, I agree that publishing houses suck. I know the context of this article relates to middle school, but textbook publishers are lousy at all levels.
As a college student, I get frustrated with math textbooks that present few examples, a lot of derivations, and problems that don't necessarily follow the examples. It's rather difficult to learn from that. If I'm stuck on a homework problem, I'm pretty much screwed no matter how many times I go back and read it. There's also an attempt to ruin the used book business by publishing minor revisions with different problems every couple of years. As a victim of this, I'm all for anything that opposes the large publishing houses.
It's an interesting way to teach science, and the approach sounds a lot like reading A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking. I learned a lot from that book that I certainly would never have picked up from a classic textbook. It's a good idea.
I'd also like to add a suggestion. In a lot of schools, textbooks are being replaced with CDs containing the text. It's a nice idea, but I think a combination of both is the best idea. Consider a book that has the text, PDF files on a CD, and interactive examples or at least videos to supplement the text. It seems like a good way to learn, especially for the audience these books are intended, that being middle school.
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...is all k-12 text books and supporting materials (worksheets, lesson plans, etc.) produced under an open source licence so we, the taxpayers of this nation, can give these publishing houses the collective finger, and to make this material available to the world freely.
This work could be all be done collectively by the nations teachers themselves, just like this good woman has done. This idea just needs a Corporate Sponsor or two to host the server space and bandwidth.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Having recently graduated from the public school system here in Milwaukee, I have a few choice words for publishers of text books and the blockheads who find them well written. It took me just a few minutes in my general education classes in college to realize that we were taught absolute bullshit, despite labeling such as AP and IB (Advanced Placement and Inter-Bacalaureate[sp?]) on a class. The texts are nothing but devices to spread half truths and partial histories and facts related to a subject. When presented in the psuedo-official manner such as a required text for a class, students have no choice but to believe the things held within. It makes it harder for higher educators to do their jobs, unless they too are nothing but sheep to the text book publishers. I have had enough career-type, dont-take-no-bullshit professors in a variety of classes to know that > 50% of the stuff they feed you in the public school system, by way of these "award winning" books is nothing but bullshit. An Effort to make the books more "readable"? Thats fucked up. They are just accomidating the lowest common denominator, the kids who havent grasped the basic skills of reading and comprehension. This is a bad move, in my opinion. There is too much padding in the grades. I feel like basic skills should be taught early on, at a quicker pace, while children are more disposed to picking up tasks. Then exposure to "higher level education" needs to move down, so instead of beginning calculus as junior or senior in high school, kids should be taught 8th-9th grade tops. I know its frustrating though, for those who are trying not to feed the sheep mill, because there are alot of kids who just want to be kool and just dont give a fuck (that was me, I regret it now... too smart for my own good). Those students need to be put into educational systems adapted for their needs. Some kids arent college material, lets not kid ourselves. Put them in a program where they can get that low level management job at the local K-mart and lets be done with it. There are jobs out there that the dumb people need to occupy, lets not bullshit. Dont gear education towards them, with these re-hasing of books, gear it towards those who will take all the knowledge they can get their hands on, and do something with it...
[/rant]
I'm a little tea pot.
Just start the text books by explaining how science fiction has had many ideas that were later 'invented' by scientists.
Pulp scifi in the 1920's talked about ray guns, which all the established scientists ignored, knowing they were impossible. Now we have lasers.
Rocket ships. Same story.
As anyone who read much of Robert A. Heinlein's work knows, he wrote about a bed made out of a soft bladder filled with water. Now waterbeds are taken for granted.
Those people also read about all the beautiful and sexy women in the 'average' scientist's life. Nowadays we have breast implants, nose jobs, face lifts, liposuction, and every other procedure needed to make that a reality.
Finally, every male character, no matter their age, could please all those women all night. Viola, Viagra.
See how interesting they could make science if they really tried?
now if they are just rewriting the books to where they are easier to read (and not like a tech manual) and more interesting to the kids then that's great, but if they are dumbing it down so the kids don't have to think as hard then that's a horrible thing & the books should not be put out there as the public school systems are teaching to the lowest common denominator as is...and just look how things are now news broadcasts are generally on a 6th grade level and people still complain that it's too far out of reach for the general public...also I've noticed that in the new books for the kids there's a trend to where they are pushing a PC agenda & therefore adding more fluff to the books than facts...I thought kids were in school to learn not to have someone's agenda pushed on them, that's the parents job...
If I remember from my own experiences in public school, the current biggest problem with textbooks is the lack of photographs of beautiful, naked women.
Social Contract? I don't remember signing any Social Contract!
If making the books more readable is not another "code" word for dumbing down the subject then I am for it. I am going through junior high science on my fourth pass now.
No, not what you think I'm helping my third daughter through it, not that #3 needs much help. The books aren't too bad, but the schools spend too much time on none academic subjects, and not on English, Science, History, and Math.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
I'll agree that a simple reading of a science text book is boring. However you shouldn't be reading it like some novel. Your read it to learn about science. So you skim a couple pages, then get the components and mix up an expiriment.
Sure you con't do every experiment to learn about it, but you need a grounding first. (Anyone care to tell me how to prove H has 1 electron, 1 proton, and no neutrons, without equipement byond what a science classrom could afford) Sure the story of Tesla and Ben Franklin might be more interesting, but their bio will not help you understand electrisity. Doing expiriemtns will. Reading about Ohm's law, and the other basics of the Science will.
Science is about how and why things work, and the process of finding out. Science is not about enertainment, other than the enertainment of a hands on expiriemnt, or hands on solving some difficult math. (it is exciting to solve a complex math problem after spending several full days thinking about it, most people have never experienced it though)
I'm not completely against these books. If they really help teach science great. However the joke about modern teaching where it doesn't matter if the kid says 2+2=2, so long as the kid tried hard the kid gets all the points is a concern. Science is fun, but a new textbook is not the answer. The answer is in teachers who understand science (not teaching, there is a BIG difference, though understanding teaching is important too) and can show the kids how to do it. Somehow, I'm not a teacher because I can't do it.
Ok, this is something I am really sick and tired of hearing... Are you a teacher?
I just spoke w/a group of professors who complained that students aren't willing to learn anymore...
1. School is forced (especially college, which has become a *necessary* extension of High School).
2. Teachers teach passively yet expect students to be active learners. Putting an overhead on the screen or a PPT presentation DOES NOT COUNT as active teaching. It causes people to become uninterested and bored.
Once teachers start teaching actively, students will probably learn actively. Until that time, it is just as much the fault of the educators.
When I look at my dad's old math textbooks, they are usually much dryer and "harder" to read than most of today's textbooks, which are loaded with colorful pictures and silly examples to make them more "child-friendly" instead of being concise and to-the-point.
As a result, it is very hard to find the point from all the fluff-talk, and next to impossible to create a good systematic understanding of the topic. With these books, children don't take science seriously, and the result is much worse.
In the recent 50 years or so, there's a very visible trend where textbooks get prettier, topics get more lightweight, school gets to be more "fun" instead of education, and the result (people's knowledge of science) gets worse and worse.
We need to finally understand that we can't teach more/better by making the books easier and easier.
When men used to be men
and supported by four elephants standing on a giant turtle.
In the artile she is proud of putting emphasis on the history of science more than actual facts. What's the point of going through mistakes and theories proven false. It might make the book interesting in the same manner as any other story, but this is SCIENCE. The primary goal is to communicate current (or valid) concepts and ideas instead of those already obsolete. The history of discoveries is also important but only for those who are interested. Besides teaching many theories instead of one can make some kids confused.
Or I could argue that energy is the ability to heat things. There is a whole network of types of energy that are interconvertible. To pick one, and not another, as the fundamental definition is quite misleading. You could perform complex computations using different types of energy without a single time involving 'work' (ie. the integral of force times distance).
Same goes for many other silly definitions in textbooks.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
damnit already, quit allowing the state government dictate what textbooks to buy each year.
I am sure that many many lawmakers would like to contract out their printing of free open content books instead of paying $10 - $15 each for whatever the book publishers want to sell.
I think D-Day, Omaha Beach, and WW2 deserver more than 3 pages in a US history text book.
Seneca Falls women's rights meeting does not deserve the 15 or so mentions it gets in US history books. I would suggest something a little more significant like how everybody gets their rights by being alive and not from a king or government as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
Verbal scores on standardized tests have been declining steadily for a long time. It is believed that one of the main drivers of this is the fact that text books are to a larger and larger extent simplifying their language in order to be more accessible.
The following can be read in the article.
Textbooks often are collections of facts and vocabulary words -- one, for example, has long lists of such esoteric words as "saprophyte" and "commensalism" -- but hers is a narrative about scientists and their effect on the world
This indicates this new book continues the earlier trend. I think looking up new words and learning sophisticated sentence structures is an important part of school.
Tor
...was Steven Hawking's "A Brief History of Time." There is an illustratd version that helps make the reading even easier. It's been invaluable to me, and along with his newer book "The Universe in a Nutshell" comprises a much more interesting and informative text than anything I ever read in high school.
Look at this article by Dorothy Sayers.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
The biggest problem I see in textbooks right now is just how full of errors they are. After that, they have too many pictures, too much white space and rarely get to the point -- they've got fat that needs to be trimmed.
Check out that link. It's a really good source for what's wrong with textbooks.
I suspect that college-level textbooks don't get written by committee for several reasons, but here's my main guess: They're not being written for a committee, either.
Since an individual professor selects the text for his or her course, the texts don't have to be written to satisfy the varied and mutually contradictory demands of an approval committee. That, and most of my textbooks are on a narrower subject area than "Science."
While the intent of the subject in the article is noble, it's just another example of educators trying to treat the symptoms and not the sickness. Kids aren't learning science (as well as pretty much every other subject) and the readability of science textbooks have almost nothing to do with it. The problem facing schools today is a cultural problem, not a logistical problem. We keep lowering the bar, instilling some idiotic postmodern philosophy of entitlement into kids who will one day grow into the idiotic adults everyone expects them to be, instead of raising the bar and working kids harder. Can't cut the mustard? You should be embarrassed. Instead, parents blame teachers for their own parental failures and everyone is hunky dory, as long as there is someone to blame. Teachers get beat down by this and feel like nothing they do helps so they quit too, robbing other children of the education provided by Uncle Sam.
It's funny. I graduated high school in '97 and have since gotten a BS in comp sci and I look back and realize my favorite teachers are the ones that made me bust ass. I couldn't stand them when I was under their totalitarian rule but I learned whether I liked it or not. Sure, I had plenty of teachers whose classes were a joke. Nothing was expected of me and so I did as little as I could get away with...what else would a teenager do? I despise those teachers now, as I realize that their insistence on being my friend and not working hard was a disservice to me.
There's plenty of blame to go around, whether it be lazy teachers, apathetic parents, cowardly administrators, or rowdy kids, but instead we pour more and more money into facilities, books, technology, or some other taxpayer funded red herring. Kids of the ages mentioned in the article...junior high age...aren't self-motivated. Less than 1% of kids that age have the self-motivation to pursue knowledge so you have to cram it down the little SOBs throats. Eventually, you'll find that the majority of them will then develop a craving for it and your work as a teacher is done.
It's the exact same way with behavior. You don't ask a child to behave, you have to make them behave. If parents would get over their little ego trip of how high and mighty their children are and treat them like the subordinates they are, this wouldn't be a problem. God forbid we hurt poor little Johnny's self esteem though.
From the article: "I try to help students understand that through stories, showing the way ideas and knowledge have changed through the ages."
This is new? Its been done. Someone tell this woman to google "James Burke"... and see if she still thinks her ideas are novel. Cripes... he was doing this stuff back in the 70's, and probably much better too.
"Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed" should be mandatory viewing in every junior science class...
considering that the only people who sit down and read science textbooks are teachers.
If I were king, I would make the introductory science class be taught like an English lit class. They should read books every week from authors like S J Gould, Weinberg's "The First Three Minutes", maybe Feynman later, and explain what they read about. Any of the quantum mechanics "what a fking screwy world this is" genre and some good hard-science fiction. After they learn what the world is made out of and how it works, the interested ones can can put it to numbers.
Physics first, Chemistry second, Biology last. Then Physics again.
Leave equation solving till later and for algebra class until they're grown up enough to understand what the concept of a model is.
In lab class, just make things happen - you figure out why if you're interested.
This book seems to fit neatly in a bigger trend.
Textbooks are becoming more and more readable and accessible, typically somewhat at the expense of sophistication.
This is good news for many of those who struggle in school (with science in this case). It is bad news for many talented kids that need challenges and prefer abstractions over colorful examples.
My solution? Realize that all kids are not made alike, and develop a few different books with different methodologies covering the same material. Test the kids for apptitude as well as prefered learning method and give them the book that suits them best.
Tor
Can't be. I learn more science and technology from anecdotes and references on Slashdot than I ever learned from a textbook. (Well, maybe not so much chemistry as biology and physics.)
What's this Submit thingy do?
This a part of a worrying trend in writing books and movies on complicated subject matters in more accessible way.
... i am sure every high school student will feel good reading about that. I am also sure they will not learn any physics by reading about that.
It is not just science textbooks, i have noticed the same trend in documentaries and educational movies.
Well needless to say it is really annoying. First of all the proponents of this new trend all have two things in common - they think their audience is stupid, and they thing the audience does not want to know about the subject matter.
So basicly they do not teach about the subject matter at all. They teach some details that are some how connected to the subject matter, they are really easy to understand, but do not help the understanding of the subject matter at all. Usually those details are about people, somehow connected to the subject matter. That is because the writers in their belief that their readers are stupid, think the readers would be much more interested reading about people's lives (that of course are written in a way to be similar to the life of the average reader) than history, or science or whatever the subject matter is.
The quote from that woman's textbook serves the perfect example. It talks about how albert einstein was briliant, yet he hated doing homework
The quote from the older text, teaches actual physics. It is perfect it explains an aspect of the theory of relativity in a way that a student, that is too young to be able to learn it, can at least learn how it fits in the general field of physics, and how it applies in the real world. Thus the student will be able to learn classical physics without worrying that he/she is not learning relativity.
The new and improved physics passage leaves the student with no knowledge of physics whatsoever. Now parents and teachers may be happy that the student has more fun reading this passage and maybe even remembers it better, but they are fooling themselves, the kid is not learning any physics.
Maybe passages like this have a place as background sidenotes. But in no way should they replace actual physics. And it seems to me that in that woman's books they do.
Unfortunately, the new book (and the example passage) sounds like an excellent history book, but a terrible science book. Kids need to get the fundamentals of science somewhere, and while I agree that making science more interesting will help, if the book doesn't delve into details and tries to tell a story, it will be a bad thing.
From the article: Textbooks often are collections of facts and vocabulary words
Yes. If you don't get this in school, where are you going to get it?
Wonder why so many people believe in crystals and angels and aromatherapy? Poor grounding in basic science, and an ignorance of the fundamentals.
The science books ought to be really good.
-- ac at home
Painting with a broad brush, there are two major camps of educators -- those who take an objectivist approach and those who take a constructivist approach. The objectives focus on learning objectives -- where you can say that all learning results in a specific behavior you can test (e.g. using a standardized test) -- while the constructivists believe that you can't standardize the outcomes because groups collectively negotiate and construct their belief systems. So the constructivists encourage learners to look at multiple viewpoints, become investigators, and draw their own conclusions about the underlying reality.
(From the article) [Hakim] wrote an 11-volume series, "A History of US"
Constructivism is popular in teaching the social sciences, where students can be given multiple viewpoints and encouraged to seek out diverse views. It doesn't find much of a home in learning the 3R's, nor in science education -- basic skills education is driven largely these days by the inststance that students pass standardized tests (Textbooks today are hugely accountable to individual state standards defined for that particular course," said Wendy Spiegel, head of communications for Pearson Education) and by the sense that science describes a world in precise, irreducable, and unambiguous terms. Neither of these leave room for the "social construction of meaning" that's so dear to the constructivists.
... America is quantifiably behind the rest of the industrialized world in science education... and we're going to catch up by going slower??
The best part is where the article makes it sound like its a *bad* thing that current textbooks are written by "people with advanced degrees". Are you kidding me? Yeah, it would be terrible if someone who actually knew what the hell they were talking about got to educate your kids.
Do you really want a freaking JOURNALIST teaching your kids about science?
...this urban legend? First, a lot of the questions on the exam were stupid; many of them involved listing rules rather than actually being able to use capital letters etc. in practice. It was probably also a teacher's exam, which would explain some of the strange questions.
Most kids will just make the nerds do their homework, and we dont need anymore dumbed down text.
How about the next big change be to break up the horrible price-fixing by the textbook companies? This is especially bad in college...$150 is a good average price for a textbook that I probably won't even have to read. Then at the end of the semester, the bookstore gives me 30 dollars for it and sells it used for at least $80. This problem is getting a little better with online sites being used more frequently to trade textbooks to other students (or sell them for more than the store will give you, but less than the store would charge for it used). But the problem is still the initial cost of the book. They're NOT worth that much. Some of them are pretty bad. And I rarely even need them for anything other than getting my homework problems. Argh.
</rant>
if(!cool) exit(-1);
One thing that bugged me with my Junior High science text book was that it seemed to take a very unimaginative and finalized tone forgetting that science isn't a static set of rules and is constantly advancing. I still remember when is shortly after the Dolly experiment I ran across a passage in the textbook. That ran along the lines of "Cloning simply isn't possible and is pure science fiction" (not exact quote memory fuzzy). Needless to say I took a lot less stock in the imaginative opinions of that book thereafter:)
I stole this Sig
'ta
It's not so much 'ground truth' as it is someones creative interpretation of the times.
For instance, the french have a different view of Napoleon than the one in my history texts. And I've never seen an american textbook make any mention of the war of 1812.
History should be dry facts, because everything else is biased.
In his autobiograpical book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, physicist Richard Feynman wrote about his service on the State Curriculum Committee, which selected textbooks for California schools. There is an excerpt from the book here.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
An essay by Dorothy L. Sayers I recently read contains a wealth of information pertinent to this topic. You can find the essay at the following URL: http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html
The essay talks about the "dumbing down" of education, as well as the loss of vision by educators. It's central argument is simple: our schools are not teaching our pupils how to learn. Instead, we are teaching specific subjects as if they were entirely unrelated.
It's long, but well worth a read.
As a graduate student pursing a Ph.D. degree and one of a minority who actually enjoys teaching I don't think changing the readability of a textbook is news.
Yes, I do believe that a textbook should be an interesting read to help students retain the material, but it's just as important for the teacher to make the information exciting as well.
Students all learn differently and teachers should be assessing students using different and valid techniques to determine if their 'little ones' are understanding what is being taught. If some are having difficulties, it should be up to a good teacher to find another way to connect with the student. The downfall of all this is the limited time a teacher has to cover a certain amount of material.
The field of teaching science to students is under constant review and revision and there are many questions yet to be answered. Entire journals are dedicated to improve the methods used to educate students in various scientific fields.
Another outstanding textbook was "From Gaia to Selfish Genes", by I think Lynn Margulis. This was a collection of short essays on various biology topics, all highly radical, that was given to a "weed out" biology course for majors in college. THe results of the study I saw were interesting -- the non majors loved it because it was more interesting that the traditional approach, and all the majors hated it because they basically said "Just teach us what you're supposed to teach us so we can get the degree, don't screw with tradition."
Lastly, a great module was done where a teacher doing a unit on evolution began teaching that the dinosaurs were wiped out by space aliens. The program was complete with a staged firing of the teacher who was warned not to teach that. Afterward the class held a mock trial where they decided her fate.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I must say, the textbooks that exist for public schools are terrible. They present arbitrary facts and information to such a disinteresting degree that I even find them nausiating. And I'm the kind of guy who reads a dictionary when I get BORED. I think there is much to be improved upon for textbooks but we need to focus on a more hands on approach. Also, a good textbook wont do squat if the only people that decide to teach are not very talented... Teachers are paid less than babysitters. Who'd want to go into a profession that can't even pay the bills to teach some snotty nosed kids? Parents pay on average 400$ a month for daycare. If we paid teachers this at ONLY 20 students per class and about 180 days in the schoolyear this is about 48k. A starting teacher in my state only makes 30k a year (about). I'm all for the books. Let's get some better experts and write better books. Sounds cool to me.
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Kompressor use logic.
me too! just think, we could be on a destroyer now, making the camel jockeys eat rockets and afterwards fuck their women. :-)
Those arab chicks are HAWT!
Btw, does anyone know a good arab pr0n site?
(No, not goatse or tubgirl)
About your view on how to treat children, but I can at least say I don't agree with the way I see many parents treating children right now.
A lot of parents, and adults in general, treat kids like little monsters, pets, or stupid people.
They may not have the experience or the total understanding, but I don't see why they shouldn't be treated as *people*.
The kids that I've seen treated as people tend to act like them; responsible, mature, knowledgable, and intelligent. The ones who are treated like monsters or rejects or annoyances, they act like them.
So if you think kids should be treated as a subordinate, I guess that's your call for your kids. I think I'm gonna treat my kids like people, from day 1, with needs, demands, desires, and the ability to reason, even if they lack the vocabulary or eloquence that comes with study and experience.
GPL Deconstructed
I think kids need to have the drive to learn, if they don't then what good are book? I like what Chris Rock said about this subject!
Tossed salad man! (by Chris Rock)
HBO:When a new prisoner comes in, how do you initiate him?
INMATE:Well.... The first thing I do is make him toss my salad
HBO:Toss your salad? What's that?
INMATE:Havin your salad tossed means havin' your asshole eatin out with jelly or syrup. I prefer syrup
Chris:I am not making this up
HBO:Wh-wh-why must you go through all that, sir? Why not just oral sex?
INMATE:Well, when a man's sucking your dick, he can pretend it's something else. When he's eating ass he knows it's ass.
We don't need the death penalty. We've got the tossed salad man. If I had the choice between the electric chair and the tossed salad man I'd be like, "where do you plug it in? shouldn't I be wet first?"
Everyone's talking about public education out of control.
"We need tougher rules. We need prayer in school."
We don't need that shit. We just need the tossed salad man. He'd straighten out those kids
TEACHER:Hey, Jimmy. You got a D. You know what you've got to do
JIMMY:NOOOO! NOOOO! I don't wanna toss a salad! I don't wanna toss a salad! I'm gonna read! I'm gonna learn to read!
I apologize in advance for lack of references. This is all from memory here.
The important thing about learning anything isn't rote memorization, but internalization of concepts and then being able to reason from those concepts. Much of science is "common sense", and can be checked out using your intuition - cause preceeds effect, faster things cover set distances in shorter times, etc. But many physical and mathematical concepts are not intuitively obvious.
In the 80s I heard of an educational program that used physical intuition to help teach "poor students" math and science. The educators knew that people learn using different modalities that develop at different ages. The kinesthetic modality develops first - that's what lets a baby put its hand in its mouth, or find its feet. Next comes the visiual modality. This is extremely powerful - you can recognize one face out of thousands in just a blink of an eye. The most abstract modality is symbolic. You can reason about anything symbolically, but it is the slowest mode, and unlike the others has little "hardware acceleration".
(There seems to be cool hardware/software in the brain for doing lots of visual processing. For instance, the time it takes to match a shape with the same shape rotated is proportional to the angle of rotation. And Deaf people who grow up using sign language score much better at visual perception tests, as the visual parts of their brains are more developed from using them for language.)
The program I heard about used an approach of starting with the lowest level modalities and progressing upwards until students had a symbolic grasp of the material.
For instance, the students were taken out into a field with portable sonar range-finders and computers. They were then asked to run in various manners: constant velocity, accelerating, decelerating, running in a circle, etc. Using the gadgetry, they could see a visual plot of their movement, in terms of velocity and acceleration. This let them tie their kinesthetic understanding of simple physics to a visual one. Building on that, they were able to grasp the mathematical concepts of position, velocity, and acceleration.
It seems a lot of education tries to deliver information at the symbolic level. If you give students a way to connect that abstract stuff to things they already understand, they do a lot better at internalizing it.
Piaget showed that people learn at the frontiers of their knowledge. If you tell someone something they've already learned, there isn't any opportunity to learn it again. And if you tell someone something too far removed from what they already know, they can't make a connection to it and won't understand it (try explaining quantum mechanics to someone who doesn't know about atomic theory). But if you tell someone something that they have enough background for, they will be able to make that connection, and voila, learning occurs!
Hakim's approach of telling stories about scientific progress might make the information easier for students to memorize. However it doesn't seem like it will make the concepts easier to internalize. That takes a more radical approach.
in the latter, it was the chapter where feynman was asked to serve on a textbook selection comittee. very enlightening. and scary.
the first book is a rather scathing review of a dozen high school history books, how they are written, reviewed and edited, (read scrawled, mauled and gutted.) it's actually almost painful to read as you realize how much more interesting history class would have been had they just told you ALL of the facts.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
My undergrad (Biology) advisor had this most excellent poster on his wall:
(This is what I remember from it... Not an exact quote. But you'll get the gist...)
--Begin Poster--
If Baseball was taught like Biology:
1. Athletes would read about some of the great players in Baseball history.
2. They would listen to lectures about the fundamental concepts of baseball: batting, fielding, pitching, running.
3. Athletes would become involved in group discussions about the rules of baseball and the strategies involved in playing a game.
4. Athletes would assemble for 2-3 hours a week and have "hands-on" experiences with balls and bats in a closed and highly controlled environment.
5. Athletes would learn and practice the techniques of calculating statistics such as the RBI.
6. Then athletes would "take the field" and attempt to play a competitive game against other teams who had limited experience on a baseball field
---End Poster--Begin Rant--
Science is not a body of knowledge, but a methodology of answering questions. Though "the hard facts" are important to understanding Science (like memorizing the carbon atom has 6 electrons) these are simply facts. More and more today we have immediately available facts. I haven't even seen "The Handbook of Physics and Chemistry" in dead-tree format for over 5 years now! We need to realize that since information is readily available, the concepts and methods are important. Instead of pounding in facts, teach students how to become talented information-finders. That type of skill will be more important in "the real world" than knowing the chemicals involved in the Krebs Cycle.
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
If I were a betting man, I'd say those in the publishing houses have succeded with revisionist history and now is working on dumbing down science.
Of coarse, they've allready succeeded in teaching our children our creator is a mysterious big bang, so now one must wonder if their goal isn't to limit scientific knowledge that could allow rouge students to threaten corporate existance.
1984 anyone?
h tm
Step A.
Rewrite History...
Freedom: A History of US
By
Joy Hakim, Foreword by George W. Bush, Foreword by Laura Bush
Here is an excerpt from
http://www.textbookleague.org/111hakm.htm
from The Textbook Letter, March-April 2000
Examining the treatment of religion in schoolbooks
Textbook-Writers Promote Religious Tales as "History"
http://www.textbookleague.org/111hakm.
http://www.textbookleague.org/111joy.htm
Book 2 of the series is called Making Thirteen Colonies, and it purports to cover American history during the period 1600 through 1740. On pages 9 and 10 of Making Thirteen Colonies, Joy Hakim inflicts upon students a six-paragraph passage in which she retells, and depicts as matters of historical fact, stories that involve Abraham, Moses and other biblical characters:
Thanks for the link to that eye-opening interview on corporatemofo. The interview sums up the whole mess in K-12 texts nicely.
One must beware of pure semantic changes in an attempt to make something "easier" to understand, or you end up with verbal diarrhea. Just because your goal is simplifying and you're changing big words to small ones doesn't guarantee success.
traditional textbook publishing houses control pretty much everything children read in school and her difficulties in challenging the status quo I wonder if she has considered targetting the parents of home-schooled children?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
It sounds more as if Hakim is writing textbooks on the history of science, not science itself. That's nice and all, but that's not really what I expect a science class to teach. As a supplement to a science class it sounds very valuable, but I don't think I'd want this to be the only text a class was using. Jr. High School students are (or should be) advanced enough to begin to approach scientific topics systematically, and to apply some mathematics along the way. Factoids (or narratives) are (again, or should be) for younger students. If today's Jr. High students are still at that stage, then something is seriously wrong with American science education. But I think we've all guessed that by now. Hakim's historical approach doesn't sound as if it will address the basic problem.
And the brethren went away edified.
Lord of the Benzene Rings,
Burning Chromium, and of course,
Jurassic Park (Teacher's Edition).
Think, write, think, edit, think...then post.
But while you're doing this, make sure what you say is accurate. The above quote is not accurate. Energy is not created; matter is not destroyed. One is changed into the other. If students have previous knowledge of the subject, this statement would confuse them. I understand what she means, but I wouldn't expect a middle school student to. I think this is a great idea, but I hope she has some people who are in the respective fields edit it.
Just fscking great. I can see it now
"Mofo is hangin at the skate park. If he has a velocity of 18 ms^-1 at the bottom of the gnarly 2.5m high ramp, can he pull of the cabalero into a backside air with 360?"
:wq
based on your journal entry, and the fact that you essentially just blathered some scientific sounding crap, i am calling you a TROLL
The quote is not from the woman's book, but from a conventional science textbook.
Which means the above is currently being taught to middle school students. Sigh.
Sometimes you need to tell a small lie in order to explain a bigger truth. If you try to explain E=MC2 properly, a student won't understand it other than in the terms you described it. In other words, memorization. Memorization isn't understanding.
Granted the analogy is NOT accurate, but it can be used as a stepping stone towards a real understanding. If you say that matter is transformed into energy, a student with no idea of how this works would be more confused. After all, we don't think of wood as being transformed into heat and energy when burned (again, not a proper analogy, but we're talking about stepping stones here).
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
Nobody wins a war. Some people just lose more than others.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
At my high school, we use Paul G. Hewitt's physics books. Firstly, I should explain that my school subscribes to the view of "physics first," so all students are required to take a semester of physics freshman year (9th grade). The books provide a great overview of basic physics, have festive little drawings, and have writing full of personality. By the end of the class, many students (including me) love the book, compared to other textbooks, which are promptly forgotten. These books are a good standard for a more basic course's textbook.
Well, this line of thinking is caused (at least in part) by the public schools. At least in the US, anyway. Much of what they do is brainwashing by propaganda. So you get people saying things like:
Quite sad. The way children are taught these days, they are not taught to think for themselves. Also, they are taught to not think for themselves. Nearly everyone fresh out of high school/college has to be told what to do and is afraid to take any initiative. This line of thinking may work in a bureaucracy, but it doesn't fly very well in many real world working environments. This is one of the reasons you hear so many stories of immigrants sucessfully starting their own business, but not as many about citizens who were born and raised here.
Please, PLEASE, for the love of $DIETY, put this stuff on CD! First of all, it seems to me that learning is accomplished better with moving graphical aids.. and also, I being a junior in highschool have a bag weighing over 27kg! Give me a fucking laptop with some preloaded software! All of the campuses of our school have wireless hubs EVERYWHERE -- there's no reason to avoid the obvious technological advantage! (But then again why would the board of trustees want to CHANGE anything? ...don't mind me. I've got a lot of beefs with my school.
[insert witty comment here]
I really felt the context of the subject was
missing in my School and Collage studies in Mathematics.
I was pretty un aware of which bit we were being taught were new ie. this centuary and which bits clasical mathematics. It took until my MSc before
I had an inkling of what the boundaries of the current understanding was.
Having a whole chapter of the book on Einstein
seems great. The one physisist people have heard of and he does not get a single mention up to Degree level.
I'm all for this sort of book, hope it manages
to grab attention without dumbing down. And hope
it does follow the pop-science sales formula
num_sales = 1/num_formulas
by eliminating the actual sums (etc) for waffle.
A very fine line.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
One minor point: one of your reply posts mentions your military analogy and "not gulags." Boot camp, from what I've heard from those who know, is anything but a gulag. It's purpose is not to warehouse "undesireables," but to breed proficiency, self-respect and pride in normal, healthy young adults who are learning to do something important. Prob'ly just a keystroke error :)
Think, write, think, edit, think...then post.
taco, can i have one more please?
I agree that we don't all learn in similar ways. For example, I usually want an overview and a couple of cool examples; I'll find lots more on my own. Just don't waste my time belaboring all of the main points; they're obvious.
And your approach is brilliant, especially if teachers have the ability (= talent + permission from administrators) to run their classrooms in the same way: presenting materials in more than one way, to suit different learning styles. Good Post - Thanks!
Think, write, think, edit, think...then post.
The operator of the League site, Bill Bennetta, posted on the Skeptic list today on this subject. He said he was interviewed for the Washington Post piece, and gave the journo various straightforward examples of Hakim's deception in her previous books. This got edited down to "Even amid all the acclaim, one textbook group accused Hakim of writing in errors."
Actually, the League didn't "accuse" her of anything; they darn well proved it, so far as I can see. But who's ever going to be able to check for themselves, while the League is anonymised as "one textbook group"?
Well, here are the references the Post doesn't want you to see. Check 'em out here, here and here (a search reveals a few more, too).
Basically, Hakim gets stuff wrong, and just loves calling her own religious beliefs "history". Other people's don't get the same treatment.
Maybe she'll be just great at inspiring kids with the majesty and humanity of the scientific endeavour, tra la. Her past work doesn't bode well, though.
Think, write, think, edit, think...then post.
I have been intrigued for quite a while by the Sudbury Valley model. Sudbury schools are free, democratic schools which allow students the freedom to pursue their own interests, and to learn by doing.
Suggested reading:
Sudbury schools are definitely radically different than traditional U.S. public and private schools, and probably aren't for everyone. All I know is that school was absolutely the most miserable experience in my life, and that I undoubtedly would have thrived in a Sudbury-like environment.
For completeness, that guy was Karl Frederich Gauss. He also found a way to construct a regular 17-gon with straight-edge and compass (actually, an infinite class, but I forget the rule). He also did physics, mostly in magnetism.
Hey, I fucking turned out great, and I'll beat the shit out of anyone that says otherwise...
;-)
I see it didn't have any long term effects at all
Kidding! KIDDING! OW! OW!
Freedom: "I won't!"
In the side bar discussion of special relativity the following statement may be found:
"He (Einstein) explained that energy can sometimes be created -- by destroying matter!"
That is completely wrong. Matter is energy. It is never a service to the student to teach them INCORRECT information in the name of "simplificity".
Being in public schools, I found that my curiosity were never satisfied. All my friends that I hung out with thought along the same lines as me. I never realized it then, but I had learned to teach myself things by searching out alternative information sources. For me, the library, and like minded friends are the best school you can have. Its just a pitty that school hours took time away from my learning.
[begin rant] When I was a kid, many teachers were very smart women who couldn't get other jobs. Such women now have better opportunities. Public school classes are taught by less-qualified teachers, teachers who want textbooks and methods aimed at entertaining the lowest common denominator, teachers who value their motivated students only for their docility.
Kids who are ready to learn about planetary motion are required to spend a week building papier-mache models of planets. Why? Partly because the teacher feels much more comfortable with papier-mache than with Kepler. But mostly because the teacher demands a "mixed grouping" where good students are used as makeweight to keep discipline problems quiet.
I would be willing to let teachers "dumb down" our public schools as much as they want if only they would let motivated students, formerly known as good students, study their subjects in a separate boring-but-informative track. But that's not going to happen anytime soon.[end rant. At least for now]
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
That is almost the exact opposite of what the primary goal is. The goal is to teach students how scientitists think -- partly to produce new scientists and partly to give non-scientists the skills needed, as members of a technological democracy, to evaluate the claims of scientists. To do that, you need at least some idea of what was believed before and -- much more importantly -- why the view changed, and how it might change again.
The "current (or valid) concepts and ideas" are themselves possibly on their way to being "obsolete". Science is always undergoing worldview revolutions, as we advance our understanding and our instruments. It's a wonderful, vibrant, human endeavour. And it teaches us to be humble in our assertions. That's what the citizens of the 21st century will need to know.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Just knowing *what* happened doesn't really buy you anything -- it's just trivia. The *why* is what really counts, what really leads us to some understanding of history, and that's rightly always open to interpretation.
IANAH, but when you are in elementary school, the "what" and the basic vocabulary are the two most important things to learn in history.
If you don't know the basic facts, it's impossible to challenge the explanations of "why". And if you don't understand the vocabulary and methods of history, you cannot critically evaluate primary and secondary sources.
You are correct that there is no right way to view history. (Of course, this does not mean that there are no wrong ways to view history!) But if students are to talk intelligently about the benefits and limitations of differing interpretations, a certain familiarity with primary sources is really quite essential.
To make this more concrete:
when I read selections from Jo-Ann Shelton's excellent book As the Romans Did for a history class, it was extremely beneficial to have previously read through the Satyricon, the Golden Ass, the Twelve Tables, various of Plutarch's Lives, and Michael Grant's History of Rome. These works provided a basic framework for understanding the living conditions and concerns of the Romans. The material collected in Shelton's book is extremely interesting, but if you read it having no idea whatever about the place in Roman society of slavery, religion, the military, the law, the patria potestas, and so on, then it would be much harder to put the pieces together to form coherent and consistent explanations of Roman society.
but before i cracked open my math110/105 Multivariable Calculus book here at the University of Regina i thought that it might be healthy to crack open a junior highschool math textbook to brush up skills that never really had a chance to fade away to begin with. that's right, i went right from highschool, taking at least one math course every semester since BIRTH[my parent's have been throwing numbers at me in one form or another, [now to think about it, if you include music, before birth woo jsbach/pinkfloyd/eltonjohn!] pretty much since i was created.]... and part of my major is mathematics [ComputerScience/Mathematics]. fair enough... also - i'm not exactly stupid here. sure i may not be the top of my class... the classic underacheiver, but it's not my intelligence, at least i think, which is the cause. so i take and i pull open this textbook of simple, simple math...
...
i first notice it's from awhile back. mabye the 70s, mabye the early 80s...old stuff. it starts out defining very specific terms, such as 'membership' and a 'set' [after a breif writeup of who, cantor right?], and then proceeds to what an axiom is, the axioms of transitvity, symmetry, etc...
before i actually read the text, i got ALL The questions wrong. every single one. i knew NONE of this. i suspected it's existance, but i had never been taught any of this stuff. i remember in elementary school being told not to do any more math because 'i was getting ahead of the class' and the teacher wanted me to stay with the class. given it was a french elementary school, who knows mabye that was relevant. anyway, while i do know[or at least believe i know, or know that i believe that i know...?] that i can count to 1000 or so in both french and english,
WHY is it that i can't do these really simple bits of math, that i'm sure have been doable since the times of Daedalus...yet if i can't do it i'd be willing to bet good money that no one who's graduated my highschool within the past 5 or so years has. that's what, 6000 people? i guess i'm not talking for very many, but this is really significant. this means that many people have no idea what a number is. that many people have no idea why specific relations hold, and proofs weren't taken until grade 12 --- in a class most people didn't take, which means people CANT recreate mathematics if they had to for whatever reason. of course one could argue that if we weren't so restricted by the axioms we have that we'd still come up with a bunch of mathematics, albeit completely different from a set of newfangled axioms, and it may solve the same, or roughly more problems than our current one, but i'm still kinda skeptical of this whole process being productive - after all if this current system of mathematics is a bad thing wouldn't it be better to raise a person up in it so that they could find out in university that "there are no absolutes", "god is not a number", or whatever you want to negate? or mabye i'm completely and utterly wrong? but the whole matter scared the hell out of me, and this was before i got into descartes and his doubting the simplest of logical reasonings. but yes. in case you hadn't been paying attention, what i'm saying is the fundemental parts of math are no longer taught in either elementary or highschool [local saskatchewan, Canada]. of course, mabye if the highschool i went to didn't have this strange mentality of 'get overinvolved in every social club and athletic group and community group you can get invovled in so that not only do you not have time enough to have a social life so you can fuck and get into trouble, but you'll be so overtired, overworked, and burnt out by the end of the 4 years you'll be either hopelessly insane or wanting to commit suicide just to get some rest... but that's all just speculation, of course...
or mabye i just suck at math? that's always an option i suppose....or mabye there's another factor? mabye it's all my fault?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
DISCLAIMER: I'm A Junior High School Student ;)
;)
(A Fourteen Year Old Reading Slashdot? Yes.
COMPARE SCHOOLS TO YOUR LOCAL PRISON:
OVERCROWDED
SADISTIC WARDENS AND ADMINISTRATION
CONFINED TO ONE AREA AND ONE ROUTINE
BLAND LUNCH
It's no matter why my peers and I are so dumb, were in fscking prison!
The price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings.
graduate university
get a good job
profit[make lots of money]!
----------
eternal happiness
errrrrr
i was having a conversation with someone today on this exact topic. he was proposing a more "active" teacher-students relationship because of the low attention span of kids these days. [i don't know if he'll ever get naywhere with his idea but i'm glad to see that someone takes people with no attention span and utilizes this in some way! i mean, if teachers would stop trying to drug away attention deficit/hyperactivty and start to utilize the hurricane winds within, imagine what kind of things we could produce??]...
in the meanwhile, i came to this university to become "englightened" and "educated", not to get a job...i thought i'd be happier if i lived my entire life poor but while knowing [ kind of like Socrates, even though i hadn't really studied him yet... ]... then i got into Socrates and i felt i was in the total right place, even though i really didn't like being poor. then i got into Descartes, and then i wasn't really sure about anything, except that i didn't like being poor. then i got into Neitzsche.
tis all in vain? i'm not sure. but i can tell you that the original reason i came to university ammounted to the quest for god. yes, i'm an atheist. [or i suppose, i was an atheist?]. presupposing symmetry. presupposing the law of noncontradiction. presupposing an englightenment to acheive. presupposing that englightenment has anything to do with truth. presupposing that englightenment is something you sacrifice your entire life and suffering and everything else to acheive. presupposing that englightenment has nothing to do with love, which has nothing to do with sex[did i say that right?], presupposing that what i was looking for was going to feel good. this last one broke me. that the truth was supposed to feel good..."that there would be someone tending the light at the end of the tunnel..." that truth is there is no god...the truth is a cold, emotionless truth, something that if i have anything to say with my experience so far, i'm not sure if i ever want to open my eyes again. to anything. of course i have to, to keep feeding myself...because i really don't like being poor. i dont want to be rich, mind you, and i've passed over many many chances to gain physical wealth so far, in so that i DO NOT WANT TO SUPPORT 'THE SYSTEM'[i prefer another system]...so that i'm still pretty poor.
but food is not enough. despite the rational side of me knowing full well what a horrible thing love is...
...i am after all male. the system welcomes me back with open arms...the contradiction! what the hell was the otpic again? oh yea, university becoming a necessary follow up for highschool. so ok, why in your opinion[open question], should we go to university?...if of course, it's a bad thing to follow everyones' highschool with...? i think i've lost track, mabye someone could help me out here?
thinking again...and of course, i can't find love without being a descent accomplished human being...and this can't be done without university, oh wait yes it can, but it can be done with university as well...but this sounds to me sick, going to university to find a love that will inevidably throw me into the pits of dispair and from this hopeless uncertianty into bitter loathing and hating everything...
oh wait...
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
In high school we were doing some experiment in groups, spinning a cork on the end of string, with the string going through a tube and a weight on the bottom, to demonstrate centipetal force. I forget exactly what the exercise was, but it wasn't terribly interesting and everyone was just screwing around. I got bored and started checking out what was in the cabinets along the wall.
.txt file I'd downloaded somewhere. Anyway I formed the wired and hooked them to the transformer and fired the thing up. It was great. In about 30 seconds half the class was crowded around this thing and asking me how it worked.
When the teacher wasn't looking, I pulled out a high voltage transformer and a few bits of heavy wire. I hadn't done this before, but I'd read about it in a
For the rest of the class, we ditched the centripetal force thing, and she had me at the white board explaining how a Jacob's Ladder works. I'll never forget it...
I'd love to be a science teacher some day. Sadly, teaching hardly pays a living wage in California, so instead I sit at a desk writing code.
I'm a high school sophomore and at my school (public) we have a similar problem with dumbing down. However it is carried out in a different manner. Instead of having bullshit prerequisits that make it impossible to get into classes, they let almost everyone into the advanced class. Someone with a D in regular 10th grade chemistry who can't grasp the concept behind a mole or titration, even after weeks of review on the subject, should not be in an AP Chem class the next year. However, the school lets them in and the teacher feels obligated to teach to the bottom, or atleast near bottom.
This is especially problematic when it's an AP class with a set curriculum for the AP exam. My chemistry teacher actually said to me, "I don't teach the stuff on the AP Chem exam because most of the class wouldn't be able to keep up." That's no way to run a class at all.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
That is the reason why the health book used at my highschool does not contain the word condom at all. They didn't want to get banned from conservative communities, so the went for the lowest denominator. Which is a bad idea in a 85% minority, poor school with high rates of teen pregnancy/STDs.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
It lets the kids individually do an experiment, find any unexplained observations, make a hypothesis, and then go about proving or disproving their hypothesis. All the while documenting everything of course. The kids have a blast because they're actually trying to figure something out and see if their ideas are right. In a single classroom with the same "experiment" there could be 10 or more different hypothesis and even more ways to test them.
The best part of this is that the lab is not scripted. The kids go into this class and actually have to think for themselves. They can't just follow some instructions and get an A. Also they're learning science the way scientists do real work.
We're currently part of a huge Department of Education grant in its 3rd year. If you're interested please go to http://waves.okstate.edu and look around.
Also if any Department of Education brass are reading this. Please don't cut our funding! This stuff actually works. The kids are actually enjoying class.
In the recent 50 years or so, there's a very visible trend where textbooks get prettier, topics get more lightweight, school gets to be more "fun" instead of education, and the result (people's knowledge of science) gets worse and worse.
There is a new measure of scholastic success around; it's looking at the students after they have jobs, and seeing how successful they are. Everything the school does is geared towards producing the most successful person tens of years down the road.
Many people were very successful in "hard" environments where the text was boring and so was the lecture. However, many people were NOT! Education is not about getting to an elite few - it's for EVERYONE, and thus it is important for it to appeal to everyone. Also, because students spend so much time in school, moral and social issues are addressed as well; it's about growing holistically.
I am a music education undergrad in Ohio and I am so impressed with the direction of the education here; think internships starting in the early grades, long term interdisciplinary student designed projects, and lots of interaction with peers, teachers, and parents!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Who would've thought that human memory class would come in handy for a slashdot discussion. I'll say that your information is correct, since I'm assuming you are saying the same thing I'm about to.
Any information is better recalled when we attach meaning to it (I'm assuming you meant this when you referred to context). If you want to remember things, a one of the best ways to do that is to construct a story around what it is you want to remember. Visual imagery works very well, something like making a movie in your head ( I sill remember five words of a word list, in order, after a single exposure because we were using this strategy). Location mnemonics is also supposed to work well (take a place you know very well, like your kitchen, and, in your head, place the information you want to remember in various places around your kitchen. Then, when you imagine visually scanning your kitchen from, say, left to right, you can remember the information easily based on its location).
It also tends to be better to distribute your practice over time rather than cram, at least for long-term recall.
I should have been able to give a lot more information on this, but I didn't sleep much last night and my memory is not working optimally.
I hope all of those commas I'm so fond of using haven't confused anyone actually reading this comment too much.
"I swear I won't break you if you let me take you where the willows never weep" -- Switchblade Symphony
this looks absolutely amazing -
/.ers offer first hand accounts?
can any
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Let them teach us to fund them. Just ensure they don't kill themselves.
A blog I run for the wealth
You're using the definition of children in a circular manner.
My postulate was that when a child was treated as a non child they would act like a non child, and when treated like a child they thusly acted like one.
You saying "But the are CHILDREN" doesn't refute my logic, just reinforce it.
They aren't responsible, mature, or knowledgable because they don't have the training, something we both agree on; what we disagree is how to instill this into them. You believe in discipline and a structured military-like process.
I believe in reciprocity and templating; that they act the way they are expected to act (because people are normally and generally social creatures, and children are really just small people), and that they act in ways that reward them and avoid acting in ways that punish them.
In the extreme I will concede that a military training fulfills all of the above, but I don't yet believe that the military method is necessary; it is definitely sufficient, but I am not yet convinced it is necessary.
GPL Deconstructed
Years ago and on a planet far and away science was 'this is that' and 'thats the biz sweetheart'. No need for huge federally funded study.
I think an awful lot of it comes down to social promotion.
Schools are doomed by social promotion. How can you have effective schools if it is essentially impossible to get left back, or to fail a grade?
Next year, you are guaranteed to have students who can't do the work getting promoted to the next grade. Teachers may not grade on a curve, but won't completely abandon those students who can't get the material. Repeat this cycle a few times with a consequent lowering of standards each time around, and it's a miracle that our schools work at all.
Once they're lost, they're lost for good. For example, reading ability is a big part of their ability to work around those bad teachers and crappy texts. If they don't learn to read, they'll hit a hard ceiling, just as they'll hit a hard ceiling later on if they don't learn mathematics. When you have illiterate kids graduating from high school, then obviously schools are failing.
If we don't quantify what we're trying to achieve we've got no chance of measuring success. Social promotion is the equivalent of renaming failure to success.
As far as respect goes, I didn't respect some of my teachers, in some cases with good reason. One of them was finally fired for throwing a stool at a student, (he taught 4th grade, so we're talking about an adult launching a stool at a nine year old.) This didn't surprise me, and he wasn't my worst teacher.
We'll always need better teachers, better textbooks, and wish our culture put more value on education. We will always need to pursue these things. I was lucky: Even if I didn't respect my teachers, I sure as hell wanted to learn from all of them, even the floating turds, who will always be there.
What we must do is try to make education about education, and put the mechanics in place for the system to succeed at its chosen task. Perhaps we should introduce the novel idea of academic promotion in school, as a sort of social experiment.
Nah, I'm sure it's much too risky.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
...as well as inventing several weapons that are deeply badass.
I was raised largely this way by my parents, and I don't think they could have done it better. When I asked questions they couldn't answer, my mother took me to the library to find the answer and learned with me. I never had a curfew but I rarely stayed out too late. My parents never punished or rewarded me for my grades, but I usually got good ones. They told me they were proud of me if I did well, and helped me learn if I asked for help and that was it.
I once had a substitute teacher who saw things a little differently. She was teaching an algebraic principle in my 8th grade math class, when I noticed another way to solve the same problem. I tried to tell the sub about it, but she told me to shut up. But my fellow students understood what I was saying and starting asking me about it. The reaction I got from the sub was punishment for disrupting the class (I guess she saw me as a sort of ring-leader against her).
Children *love* to learn -- more so than adults. Attempting to quench even a portion of that thirst, is one way of respecting them as people. It means taking their questions seriously. It also means pointing them to other questions which you think should interest them, and making an effort to explain why it should interest them. Once that's done, getting the kids to do the work that is also a necessary part of learning won't be difficult, because they will see the rewards involved in doing so.
This is not the same as cramming things down their throats -- with that approach your children may, if you're lucky, reach your level of competence. But if you feed and magnify a child's natural desire to learn, he will continue to seek knowledge well after you can no longer provide it yourself.
While modern books have been modified to fit a superficial concept of "readable" and "children-friendly", they are no more understandable than they used to be, so what's the point?
Schoolbooks now are full of pretty pictures, silly (and unfunny) jokes and puns, and all sorts of "didactic help" that provide no new approach, no new understanding, nothing to dry collection of facts but distractions.
It reminds me of Word's infamous Paperclip: it rarely helps, often annoys, and doesn't make the underlying cluttered product any better. At least Word users have the excuse that, if following the wizards' instructions somehow solves their problem, they don't need to understand anything. This should not be true of education, where the primary goal is to get the "user" to understand a process.
This teacher's approach to "readability" seems to be different. It's not a matter of included comics, social activities, etc. It's a difference of approach: and the narrative approach IS powerful in building core understandings of concepts.
I don't think the approach for "reference" books should be abandoned. But it shouldn't be the main, let alone the only one, approach used to teach the basics of science... or anything in particular.
The thing that the "reference book" approach lacks is perspective. Perspective is necessary to engage in discourse (history, science, etc) with a sense of direction. Perspective can be grasped implicitely from a collection of facts, but it requires effort, time and a lot of discrimination on the facts. The problem is we have a lot of facts, and they're moving quickly. Education should help build the basic perspective just as it provides the basic facts.
At least in my experience, getting an historic perspective of science was a major part of understanding it. It's the best way to grasp the following:
- Why theory/idea/experiment X is important now (what was discovered because of X, what depends on X).
- Why theory/idea/experiment Y was considered revolutionary (how did Y change our worldview).
- How did we come to think of X/Y/Z, what did we reject in the process, and why... from this, how science progresses and by what criteria does it replace its theories with new ones.
- What difference can Z, as obscure, abstract and purely theoretical as it may seem, have on real life.
- How completely different theories X and Y and Z can and have been linked together by people trying to understand them better.
Knowing the narrative behind quantum theory will not help me understand its equations (and least, it hasn't helped me enough). But it helps me understand that science is willing to throw away its core framework if it doesn't meet experimental results, that our modern understanding of the world depends on quantum theory (even if we use Newton's as an approximation, mostly), that science is about meeting empirical data even if the theory seems absurd.
Knowing the narrative behind mathematics, computation and linguistics may or may not help me to understand the discipline better directly. But it will help me to understand how something as patently abstract and "ivory tower" as Number Theory has had dramatic effects on Real Life (TM), as well as on the thoery itself.
Knowing both narratives will not help me understand, directly, how you can try to explain physics as information theory and vice versa. But it will let me know that you can, who has been involved, and where to get more information; and more generally, that metaphors are considered so valuable in science that once a new one has been found in a theory, it's worthwhile to see what it can say if used in other theories.
Knowing that X is important is the first step to knowing X. It prompts us to ask the right questions, to look for the right references, to "get it" much more quickly, and to relate it to Y.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Most of us have one or more lasers lying around the house, only they're today's replacement for the gramophone needle, and not for atomizing our enemies at a press of a trigger.
Extrapolating from this, I predict that in another hundred years, warp drive engines will enable us to build new, faster and more efficient washing machines.
I once thought that it would be cool
to teach a course based on this book in high school.
With the right teacher, not only geeks would sign up...
Considered harmful.
Simple example: textbooks often include a paragraph or so about the Lincoln/Douglas debates. They'll mention Douglas's speaking style, and some specifically mention his being well-dressed. Very few of the textbooks Loewen looked at mentioned Douglas's moral justification of slavery, though, which is what the debates were basically about.
Basically Loewen's point is that publishers are under pressure not to offend so as to sell their books to the most school systems -- the result being that primary sources are reduced to little "sound bite" sidebars and captions instead of being made central to the narrative of the books. What kids get is watered-down, vague history in which America is vaguely progressing over time due to principles and Old Glory. The idea that individuals had to struggle to make that happen gets softened so much that it's hardly there. People like the suffragettes become marginal to their own stories, almost.
I imagine science textbooks have a similar challenge: they're trying to be marketable to the broadest group of people while not cheesing off the creationists and their friends. If this series somehow overcame the tendency for History textbooks to use "South Friendly" terms like "War Between the States" in the place of "Civil War," maybe it can take on the creationists too.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Speaking of rewriting, let me pause to urge you to read the late Page Smith's revisitation of American history in eight volumes. You don't know America until you have read this series:b ooks.html
http://members.aol.com/jamietampa/Smith/
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
It can be very, very hard to be extremely involved in something - a problem, reading, etc. - and have the bell ring, signaling that you get to go to another class.
School was never designed to teach you anything, it was designed to turn you into a willing slave. The concept of the school bell was instituted initially by Pavlov, the same guy who experimented with dogs. Most of his experiments were done with humans. Being a Russian, it was quite easy for him to do this. Ultimately, it was found that when humans are exposed to startling bells frequently over long periods of time, they begin to stop craving any measure of autonomy. It really is futile. You get used to the idea that a bell is going to ring every 40 minutes, so why bother getting involved with anything complex.
School was never designed to teach anything of value, it was designed to teach free men that it is pointless for them to think for themselves. The teacher is preparing you for the boss who will also demand unquestioning acquiesence. The bell is preparing you for the factory, getting you used to working at an efficient pace without question. It lasts for 16 years because it really does take that long to truly break the will of a free man.
Anyway, just a little insight into that bell. The Sociology folks drooled over Pavlov's research in the early 20th century. They just could not wait to impliment it in schools.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I see 'em ridin' down the highway on Harley-Davidsons all the time! Oh, you weren't talking about the Hell's Angels. Sorry.
We use the history books in our homeschool as well, and find them very effective. I am interested to see what the science books will look like and hope that they are similarly useful.
In the mean time, I can't speak with the same authority assumed by many of these postings on a book which has yet to be published!
(Just dealing with the primes questions for now.)
Why?
Euclid's proof by contradiction: Assume that there are finitely many prime numbers. Take their product, which must also be a finite number. Add or subtract one. This number cannot have any factors in common with the original product; it must therefore be prime. But then the original product cannot have contained all prime numbers. Contradiction, QED.
What is the degree of the infinity?
Why would it be anything other than a countable infinity? Any (infinite) subset of the natural numbers can't possibly have the cardinality of the continuum.
How does the density scale as the number increases? Why does it scale in this way?
Separate questions, having at best a peripheral relevance to the original question of the primes' infinitude.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
When I was in sixth grade (1961), my class listened to weekly radio broadcasts of science history -- mostly the history of single inventions such as the incandesent light or the sewing machine. I found them dull as dirt; I was interested in how things worked and the nifty things that could be created, not how things already long in existence came to be. I suspect this is a personal difference. If you're already interested in science, many (not all) people find the history interferes with learning the science. If you're not interested in science, science history provides context, structure, and motivation to make science comprehensible and interesting.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Before you say there's no hope, talk to an administrator at your school; you may be able to take placement tests or something to get out of your current situation. States are required to provide educational support for all their students through high school (public anyway; private is a different matter).
Here's a link to the Arizona Dept. of Ed.. If you're really that good in math, you may want to be tested for "giftedness." (Note: being "gifted" has to do with smarts and the way you think; you may have lots of brainpower but not be gifted.) While I don't like that term (another matter entirely), public schools must provide "gifted" education, so this may be the loophole you're looking for (see page 18 of this pdf). (Caution: my school district counted the AP classes as gifted education.) Here's a link to the "gifted student" section.
In high school, I lived near the Twin Cities (Minnesota), and was pretty good at math. UMTYMP was a good experience for me. Once you test in (you need to know a little bit of algebra and be between 4th and 8th grades to start), you start with Algebra I & II the first year. The second year is Geometry and Trig, and then you do calculus until you're through high school. There may be something like this where you live.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
Bless her for even trying.
sic
You're ignoring another important aspect of 19th century life - the almost ubiquitous practice of Christianity. The idea of Christian charity and brotherhood was taught and believed by almost every pioneer. Those who wouldn't put forth substantial effort for the benefit of their 'brethren' faced tremendous social pressure and chastisement.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
From the sudval schools's "Free Texts" page: Is Sudbury Valley School "Anti-Intellectual?" "from Reflections on the Sudbury School Concept By Daniel Greenberg" !
One of the arguments for textbooks and structured education is not that it constrains students, but that it constrains teachers. So even the most science-phobic and clueless of them have to at least try to learn and teach, rather than declaring their ignorance a philosophy. The standardized "science" taught is often/usually horrible -- but there are worse approaches.
The other thing to remember in ALL textbooks is that 3 of the states that endorse textbooks statewide: Texas, California and Florida, are the most populous. That means that their endorsements account for a huge percentage of textbook orders. All three include VERY active conservative (and some liberal/PCorrect) groups who hassle publishers and often take all the zest out of texts to satisfy political agendas. It's pretty sad.
It also exacerbates a culture gap between those educated by "marketplace of ideas" sorts of schools and those with watered-down "safe" texts and curriculum.
OH and don't forget high-stakes testing - taking even more critical thinking skills out of the system w/objective, multiple-choice tests.
Parents.
Parents are a huge impact on how a child will function in academia. The parents don't necessarily have to be knowledgeable on the source, which would help, but just keep at them if they're doing their work, reading the extra chapters, extending further on their studies, encouraging kids to explore their curiousity on the subject matter.
If it becomes a daily pattern, it sets a nice base for the kids. Trick is, it can't be seen as a punishment on both ends. And for the parents, patience, time, and knowing where to go for help.
if anyone is keen, the link (probably slow if you are not in SA) is
OpenText
unfortunately, we haven't got anonymous cvs access... but if anyone wants to read what we have, just send one of us a mail! try
fommil AT yahoo DOT ie
and we are looking for writers :-D
Univeristy Physics, Maths or Chemistry is necessary if you want to help out however.