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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
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
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...
Look at this article by Dorothy Sayers.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
I remember my elementary school and middle school days. Its been this way for years, since I started going to school 11 years ago. In 4th grade, I remember the class also had some 5th graders in it. The teacher had both halves working on different assignments, and I could do the math delegated to the fifth grade segment of the class faster then they could after they had been learning it for a while. It was pitiful. In 7th and 8th grade, I still breezed through math. Sadly, the school didn't think I could, though, and placed me in a standard math class. They offered high school credit algebra, and they know I should have taken algebra. Now, I am still good at math (I'm taking algebra II now), and I still belong in a higher level class. I do my work, I know how to do most of the things we are shown, and the damn school doesn't allow you to take classes elsewhere to get up to the appropriate level to take the most advanced math class they offer, AP Calculus AB, so now I have to find the appropriate loophole in Arizona law to bypass the need to take the prerequisite class my senior year. The American education system is a joke. It is so reliant on the assumption that all students are dumb and ignorant idiots that the exceptional students are forced to be at the same level as the ones that really are dumb and ignorant.
Even the teachers believe that the American education system is terrible!
The American education system does have some measures to make sure the brighter students are learning and challenged, but these are open to only a select few who meet the prerequisite requirements. And these prerequisite requirements require the schools to have recognised your ability years beforehand. My AP American History class is incredible, and it is one of the few classes I enjoy, mainly because it is interesting and not dumbed down. If you aren't familiar with the AP program, it provides for university level classes in high school. I don't know how well the classes do in that regard, but AP Am. Hist. is a great class, and everyone in it is intelligent and understands what is going on. Because we are expected to.
And science in middle school is a joke. It was 6 years ago. It was 4 years ago. It still is. Its not science. Its just a filler class. We built mousetrap cars. Why? Not a clue. The teacher never explained the physics, and we were just supposed to build the cars.
Textbooks are terrible for most subjects in school, anyway, so it doesn't matter.
Oh, and we spent three days covering World War II. You have a problem with that?
"FDR, sitting in his car, smoking a cigar, driving over tar, he's gone to far, he's gone to far." If you get this, all I have to say is "Wie heisst du?"
Slashdot is a waste of time. I enjoy wasting time.
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
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
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.
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.
It's not necessarily the teachers. My gf teaches middle-school science at a pretty bad school in SE Dallas. [yes she hates the textbooks]. Anyway, she is not allowed to give a grade lower than a 50. Even though almost half of her students earn less than 50, she has to put 50 on the report card.
In addition to this, the principal [or the administration, I'm not sure] complains about the percentage of her students that are failing [ranging from 50-70%]. It's not that she's a bad teacher. She really tries to make things interesting. Not only that, but on every homework assignment and test, the students are given the opportunity to correct their wrong answers for partial credit. So the students have every possiblility to pass, either by understanding the material OR by simply doing the corrections on their wrong answers [they do this at home with the book]. Yet they all still fail.
She's getting in trouble because she actually expects the students to put forth some effort. Many of the other teachers just pass the kids so they don't get in trouble for having too many kids fail.
Of course, it may also have to do with the fact that she's having to teach the kids how to read and do math, so that they can understand the science. The really sad thing is that she teaches 2 classes for students that have recently come to the US [mostly from Mexico though she doesn't speak Spanish]. The spanish speaking classes end up doing better than her normal classes.
In addition to the books being poorly written, this kind of thing is really killing the US education system.
The moral? There must be CONSEQUENCES for the students actions [or lack thereof]. Otherwise they will continue to do nothing and pass.
As it is, she's considering moving to teaching Kindergarten or first grade. This way, she figures she can get the kids off to a better start than they are getting now. She wants to prove that she can have all her kindergarteners reading by the end of the year. I personally think it's possible as well, and hopefully getting the kids off to a good start will help them deal with the crappy teaching/education they are likely to get for the rest of their public school lives.
Ender
Nothing to see here