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
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.
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?
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
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
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
Then perhaps our the teachers/text books should try to use parts of our society in their lesson plans/text.
For instance, in physics class you could start off talking about how wrong most everything out of hollywood is...
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you're either in college or a college grad...
There are some disciplines where you have to walk before you crawl -- for example, aren't Newton's Laws just a dumbed-down version of Einstein? Yet we teach them because they work pretty well and they're far more approachible for beginners.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Look at this article by Dorothy Sayers.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
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.
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?
There are some disciplines where you have to walk before you crawl -- for example, aren't Newton's Laws just a dumbed-down version of Einstein?
No. Newton's laws are True Laws for the world in which Newton could observe. Einstein was able to observe a more complex world, and such reached more complex laws to fill in Newton's gaps.
Yet we teach them because they work pretty well and they're far more approachible for beginners.
Plus everyone and their brother is going to encounter Newton's laws. Very, very few people will actually encounter Einstein's--and those that do very likely will simply shrug and ignore it.
Sorry, I know I'm off-topic--but Einstein didn't "disprove" Newton; rather, found gaps in Newton's application to extreme situations and sucessfully derived new rules for these extreme situations--like the precise movement of bodies with a mass several times that of Earth and a distance with a very noticable light-delay.
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
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
Don't get me wrong. It is important to be able to teach some semblance to science to those not naturally inclined towards the sciences. Yet there is a fundamentally different way of thinking in the sciences from most of the humanities - especially history!
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!
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...)
I agree with you 100%.
/rant
First, we have to get up damn early - at least in highschool - to go to a place we don't even like (see reasons below). Google for info on teen's sleep patterns, and you'll see that waking at 6:00 or 6:30 AM is a BAD THING for people my age. The fix? Change when we start. Why hasn't my school done this? "It would mess up the sports schedules." Yay, athletics over education. Not that team sports are bad - i think they're great for students - but come on, what's really more important? Hell, let the athletes out of school early if you want.
When we get to school, we get to look forward to 6 or 7 periods of different subjects. 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. Switching from CompSci to Humanities to Government is pretty rough. Admittedly, block scheduling aims to fix this, but then we can get stuck with a teacher who just drones on for the whole 2 hours instead of the usual one. The fix? Block scheduling with teachers that can actually TEACH.
And finally, I would enjoy school 100 times more if I didn't have 2-3 hours of homework every night. 20-30 minutes of homework from one teacher doesn't seem like that much, but when I have 6 or 7 teachers all assigning that much, it takes alot of time. Teach the fucking class, don't make me copy answers out of my book.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
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.
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.
Go read Brave New World. It's an excellent book (yup, supported by that same educational system). Maybe, after reading it, you'll understand why your post was flamebait. (I would mod it down, but you don't learn anything from that - you'd just dismiss me as "a blockhead who didn't understand my point").
First, as someone else mentioned before you reamed them, learn to spell correctly and use proper grammar. Maybe it's the educational system's fault for not teaching you well enough, maybe it's your own fault for never bothering to learn; and frankly, I don't care which it is. Good grammar makes writing easier to read and understand, and tells me that what you have to say is important enough for you to spend the time on to making it readable, rather than the rantings of some illiterate adolescent upset at the world.
Second, get off your high horse. You seem quite cavalier about abandoning "the dumb people" in favor of giving presumably "better" people - people like you, perhaps? - a better education. Everyone who's not as capable as you gets shuffled off into a "K-mart management school educational system". The modern educational system does not do that. It bends over backwards to give everyone a chance. "Some kids aren't college material, let's not kid ourselves": then perhaps you should be the one to tell every one of those kids that he or she is not smart enough to go to college (but you apparently are). By your logic, Einstein wasn't smart enough to go to college either. You seem to have given a lot of thought to how to educate the top 5% of students; now I challenge you to spend more than a half-second thinking about the other 95%. Many of the best people I know are in that 95%, and I will not have you dismiss them as useless to the world.
Third. You are dismissing the entire educational system based on your personal experiences. Your AP textbooks were bull? I found mine exceptionally well written. What half-truths and partial histories do you feel were there? Have you ever looked at any textbooks beyond the handful you used? And what sort of un-learning do you see college professors having to do? So far, all I've seen are college lessons filling in a lot of details that would simply overwhelm me had I not spent most of my education learning how to deal with that influx of information.
And finally, you want to push calculus back to eigth grade? Are you insane? Perhaps you think you could have handled it then; I doubt you actually could have. Calculus requires trig, a strong foundation in algebra, and analytical skills usually taught in geometry. Start compressing all this down into middle school and even elementary school, and you've just given a way to burn out 99.9% of the students in this country. Congratulations, you've just killed scientific achievement.
The college professors you admire so much aren't teaching you new material that you've never seen before. Instead, they're forcing you to think about it. The better teachers I've had used the textbook only to fill in background so they didn't have to cover everything in class; the worse teachers rehashed the book for an hour each day. Read that again: the better teachers have done as much teaching as the worse teachers, and STILL have every hour of class time to use for whatever purpose they need. How dare you presume that there are no good teachers before college? It's insulting to some of the best teachers I've ever known.
Perhaps you never had a good teacher until college. Maybe your school couldn't afford to bring in the teachers you needed; maybe those teachers were too busy teaching everyone else who tried to learn and left out those who rejected their help. Fine. But whatever you do, don't insist on throwing away an educational system that many others, myself included, have found productive and useful, simply because it didn't work for you.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
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
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.
When I was in college freshman year, my chem 101 teacher actually wrote the textbook..and it was some POS book, it was the nationwide standard for that course..a fact he never failed to mention at least once a week...I half-expected him to pull his wang out and wave it around like a sword whenever he mentioned it.
I actually had a graduate controls class where we had no official textbook- just the arrogant "professor's lecture notes." About three weeks into the class, I happened to stumble upon the "professor's lecture notes" --in text book form--but by another author. You don't often get to feel the satisfaction that I felt sitting in his lectures, highlighting "his" lecture in someone elses book. Strangely, he never mentioned that book as a reference... Fun, but can't say I wanted to wave my wang around like a sword. Maybe balance it like an inverted pendulum, or....er. OK then.I agree with your points, but I would add that no two people learn at the same pace. I object to having every classroom across the nation teaching the same subject material at the same rate. I propose having "subject matter proficiency tests" rather than lesson plans. A student could learn any range of subjects at any pace. You've passed 7th grade when you've passed certain proficiency tests, whether you pass them at age 8 or age 18.
Even college classes suffer from this same basic problem. The "slow" students are bewildered by the pace of the class, while the "fast" students are bored by it. In my opinion, all of these students are capable of learning the material. I suggest allowing them to learn at their natural pace. "Fast" learners would spend less calendar time in school and therefore pay less total tuition. "Slow" learners would require more calendar time (and tuition) but perhaps pass their proficiency test with the same high score as the fast learner.
My 6th grade math class was organized this way. It was wonderful. But no other class and no other grade level had such an education program. *sigh*
Why doesn't education work this way fulltime?