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."
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.
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.
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. . .
To a large degree, I think there's a lot of truth here. When I was doing my student teaching, they called me Mr. Explosion (due to an unfortunate science demonstration). I suspect they remembered far more about the strange demonstrations than what was read in the textbook.
Keep in mind that different kids learn in different ways. Textbooks should just be one of the several methods in which information is passed along. Open discussion, reading, projects, and even the ubitiquous video all have their places.
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.
You obviously didn't glance at the article or anything, 'cause if you had you'd probably understand that the idea is to overhaul these books which were essentially designed Way Back When (and subsequently only updated) to reflect a more modern understanding of how to effectively impart information to children -- we know that they don't learn like adults do, so it's backwards to use instruments which assume that they do.
For example: It's hard to dispute that kids or a certain age absorb more from a narrative than from being presented with a list of facts to absorb. So, what possible objection could you have to using a narrative to impart these lessons? When your kid was learning the alphabet, didn't you teach her the song version? Or did you insist that the A-B-C song is a lightweight new-agey tool for stupid children and force her to recite it without singing? No ROY G BIV or other memory aids for her, no sir....
Anyhow, if there's a better way to impart information, I'm all for it. If you're not, well, you're an idiot. And read the fucking article next time.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Is it just me, or is an almost-exclusive focus on facts a good thing for textbooks of any sort?
The point is an anecdote or two livens things up. Would any one remember who discovered of the structure of benzine or how if they hadn't heard about Kekulé's weird dream of a snake eating its own tail? (And yes, I know most cynical chemists think that Kekulé was just BS-ing about the dream -- that's not the point)
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
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.
Politics. At the college level, individual professors decide what books to assign; in many cases if there isn't a decent text, the professor has a strong incentive (the tenure system, royalties, reputation, etc) to write his/her own. For K-12, teachers have no such power; committees make the decisions, and it's far worse if the book offends someone than if it is merely boring. So, as a result, K-12 texts are almost always boring.
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.
Disclaimer: IAAH (I am a Historian).
There isn't a "right" way to view history; it's simplistic to think that there is. History is always necessarily the interpretation of data through our modern worldview and understanding, and as such it's appropriate to constantly reevaluate what we know of history.
Of course, there are dates and places and people in history, but the "hard facts" aren't generally important. 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.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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
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.
Facts aren't the whole story of science; you find this out if you work with grad students at a good research university. At some point in graduate school, the student is expected to make a transition between being an excellent test-taker to being able to produce something new, and many alleged-brilliant students don't successfully make the transition (though they usually successfully get out with master's degrees, and no, this is not a slam against people whose highest degree is MS). They're great at doing algebraic manipulation to get the homework right, and they have excellent memories, but they don't really grasp how things fit together. They are the ones who always try to get the TAs to give them enough hints to turn the word problem into an equation, so that they can get the answer without understanding the concept. They always got ahead by spitting back the answers the prof wanted, and have trouble shifting to finding out things that the prof does not know, or evaluating what is likely to be true when the question is unsettled.
It's more important for students to understand the scientific method and critical thinking than to just memorize a lot of apparently unrelated facts.
The science books ought to be really good.
-- ac at home
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.
Except...
If you've read James Burke's columns in Scientific American you realize that he is an insightful *television* writer. That's his medium. In contrast his written columns are an incoherent jumble of odd organization, asides, and unresolved thoughts. You really need to read them three or four times to figure out what he's trying to get across.
Understand, I love his television programs, but he's a perfect example of how interesting, readable prose is an art in itself. Her skills are not about just waking up in the morning and saying "Hey, how about taking an historical approach," but also being able to organize it, edit it, and write it in such a way that it slots into kids' brains and stays there.
--------
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
No, your idea needs content. The server space and bandwidth are trivial. Are you lining up to write a few chapters for free, or is this one of those things where you're volunteering other people's time?
And while we're at it, haven't you ever noticed that the aesthetic quality of a product is inversely related to the number of people with creative control? K-12 textbooks read like DMV manuals precisely because there are too many people involved; "open-sourcing" their creation would only exacerbate the problem. I challenge you to name a single book written by >3 people that doesn't suck, or to name a book written by >1 person that is a genuine classic.
I totally agree. I was lucky enough to have science teachers in junior high and high school who emphasized hands-on learning. Textbooks can be a valuable resource, but they can't be used as a crutch. In most of my classes, textbooks were used to assign homework and practice problems, but the teaching was done by the teacher.
Of course, I think my teachers' decisions to not make much use of textbooks stemmed in part from the texts sucking pretty hard. Given their current state as a mishmash of facts written by committee, I'd say teaching science from only a middle-school science text would be like teaching English using only a dictionary. The facts are all present and accounted for, but the presentation is a bit dry. Personally, I think Joy Hakim's overhaul sounds like an excellent idea- there are some fascinating stories in science, and I think that they could greatly enrich the material.
A careful balance has to be struck, however, between these "stories" and academic rigor. On the one hand, I would argue that learning about how learning how Newton and Leibniz hated each other, for example, is not as important as learning about their independent discovery of the calculus. Any changes made to middle school science must keep in mind that some of the students passing through middle school will become our nation's next generation of scientists. I don't want to see kids get three years of touchy-feely science "stories" with no real science and then go on to get overrun in high school and college when they take hardcore "real" science courses. On the other hand, I had the honor of meeting distinguished physicist and Nobel laureate Leon Lederman acoupke weeks ago- he gave a talk about his efforts to reform science education at the high school level, actually- and he said something that made a lot of sense. He pointed out that the scientific way of thinking would certainly be a good thing for all citizens to have- it promotes a very healthy sense of skepticism. Thus, any attempt to modify science education must walk a fine line, catering to both future scientists and every other student. While I am a proponent of rigor in science education, I think it would be a damn shame to turn off otherwise bright, eager students from the joys of science on account of a boring textbook. We have to encourage the few, but in a modern world surrounded by science, we can't afford to alienate the many.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
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.
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
I don't like the suppression of prostitution references, but I'll still take that over Kansas's objection to the teaching of evolution any day! Prostitution, after all, is hardly a key element of history, while evolution and natural selection are pretty fundamental to biology...
Nah, I've come across those things from time to time. My mom, a retired public school teacher, loves to forward them to me. But look carefully: The things that those tests test are facts and memorization -- the of the skills that are needed today and tomorrow. Never compete against a machine at the task for which it was designed -- computers store information better than humans. Computers also do arithmetic better than humans. Being able to convert 12.3 bushels into pecks simply isn't a life skill anymore.
One of the real issues is, we don't know what skills are relevant, we don't know how to teach said skills, and we don't know how to evaluate the outcomes. As a current physics teacher, I can assure you it's something I'm thinking about all the time, and I feel I am making only incremental progress.
Those "1890 finals" point more about how our society's conceptions of knowledge have remained limited, than about how the schools are failing.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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.
Don't delude yourself. A lot of college textbooks are crap, too. The main difference seems to be that there is an actual market in college books -- bad ones can sink quickly and good ones get established. Is it because only a few people write them? No. It's because use of a given text generally depends only on one person -- the prof teaching the course. If a books sucks (and the prof cares), then it drops from the required list. If enough profs agree it sucks -- even if they never talk to one another -- the book vanishes because no one buys it.
On the other hand, at lower levels, books are bought once every n years, with n usually 5 or more. So a bad textbook sticks around. Teachers get used to using it, aligning their plans with it, pacing by it, etc. So when time comes to change, they're often antsy about it. And of course, the decision is not made by the teacher at all (esp. in public school) but by yet a different committee for the whole state.
Hmmmm. Individual profs choosing --> individual authors --> better books. Committee of educators choosings --> committe of writers --> bad books. Maybe it's just a case of a species protecting its own.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Hmmm. Comprehension is enough? Then aren't we dumbing down slashdot to the lowest common denominator, those who haven't grasped the basic skills of writing and grammar?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I challenge you to name a single book written by >3 people that doesn't suck, or to name a book written by >1 person that is a genuine classic.
The Bible. The Kalevala.
and a habit of believing "arcane, obtuse language" == "truth"
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Agree completely about the necessity of interpreting data. The challenge is to remember that our worldview is not necessarily congruent with that of the original makers of history. There is, of course, no such thing as an unbiased text, but it would be nice, in a more perfect world, to have that bias declared on the frontispiece. I'm thinking the same should be applied to the broadcast media. Then all we have to do (all?! hah!) is teach our kids critical thinking: how to identify bias and form conclusions accordingly. Somewhat OT: Randy Cassingham is launching a crusade against Paternalistic Condescention, on the This Is True website.
The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. -- William Gibson
Depends on what you mean by "very good." In all science, we can describe the way something works, we can predict the way something works, we can even give it a nifty name ("gravity" "electricity"), but we still know squat about "Why?" Nifty names only answer "How?"
I'm tempted to say that "Why?" is by definition outside the realm of science.
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.
This is science we're talking about. We can answer the "How?" but have no clue on the "Why?" part.
People sometimes make this claim, but it's really a silly wanky thing to say. You're using a definition of "clue" that's so restrictive it's practically meaningless.
Science is perfectly capable of answering "why" questions. Granted, the answers that it provides are necessarily incomplete, pointing to deeper questions, but an incomplete answer is still an answer. There are NO complete answers to ANY question, inside or outside the realm of science.
Pretty much anybody can judge the meaning of events that happened yesterday, seeing as most of us were around back then to witness it first hand. It's a mistake, however, to instantly group political propaganda with valid interpretation of historical events.
Let me give you a "what": Homesteaders in the midwest during the last part of the 19th century would surprisingly often take time off from working on their own farms to go work on their neighbors' farms. There was no money or barter involved, they'd do it even when there was obviously work to be done on their own farms, and in most cases the time spent wasn't even kept track of in any way. Why not work on their own farms where they'd benefit from their labor?
It's not spelled out for you in their journals or explained in the county records, so you've got to work out the "why" for yourself. To do that, you need to do what the historian does: try to put yourself in their place, understand their reality and their reasoning. Our thinking is that it served two purposes: (1) an informal form of work sharing, an understanding that many jobs can be completed in fewer man-hours with many people than with a few, but even more importantly (2) this custom provided much-needed socialization, which is especially important when you consider how rampant cabin fever was during the isolation of the winter ("Wisconsin Death Trip" is overdone and somewhat cliche, but none the less an informative collection of the sort of insanity that prevailed when this system broke down).
That's an example from just over a century ago here in America, within three or four generations for most of us; now try interpreting events from 1000 years ago and half a world away. Take my word, it ain't easy -- if we thought like you, I'm sure we'd just assume our ancestors were just stupid or nuts.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
It's a good thing to have confidence in math. I hope you are planning for college.
If I had to condense all of my high school/college advice into one point for future engineering/math/science students, it would be this: Focus on the derivation of the proposed solution.
Memorizing a bunch of formulae is a total waste of time and energy. Instead of spending hours memorizing, go through the process of deriving the problem mathematically, and then go through the complete derivation of the possible solutions. When grappling with some scientific/mathematic question, knowing the "why" behind a presented solution is just as important as knowing the "how."
The value of slogging through the derivations once or twice (like on homework) is that you will become familiar with the "tips and tricks" that WILL be used in your professional career--essentially, the philosophy and methodology of coming up with mathematical models and solutions. There is unmeasurable value in being able to recognize what approximations or assumptions can be be imposed on a mathematical model, and how they will affect the model (including its solution).
A comment on grade/high school being too easy: It is. I would love to see a much more rigorous college prep program. However, I know people who didn't even try college because they had trouble in high school. While I think increasing the intensity of education (esp. math/science) would benefit the "good students," keeping the intensity level within the ability of the maximun number of students increases the odds of even mediocre students at least attempting to try college. In the big picture, THAT is what's important.
Consider this: if you are going to college-particularly to study math/engineering- the second you matriculate, all of your previous educational records are essentially worthless. The college prep focus of getting you INTERESTED in engineering/math/whatever by letting you build balsa wood bridges, mousetrap cars, et cetera-- worked. In college, you will learn how to analyze mousetrap cars: energy analysis, kinematics, material selections, optimization for speed or distance or weight. You'll learn it all! And the bulk of what is important (the philosophy) it will be based on mathematics beyond even the most advanced high school math.
Bottom line is, if can get into college, you can make it as challenging and rewarding as you want it to be.
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.
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.