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."

Comments

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[Anonymous Coward]

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IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[Anonymous Coward]

SCIENCE TEACHES YOU!

Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[Simon Field]

Science teaches me here in the U.S. as well. ;-)

I think we web geeks have a different approach to changing how science is taught in schools.

The subject of the article is about replacing textbooks that are "collections of facts and vocabulary words" with textbooks that are stories about scientists. By providing material for free on the web, we can supplement the facts and vocabulary words, instead of replacing them.

My book is on the web for free, and I get lots of email from teachers and home-schooling parents who like the idea of teaching science by having kids build radios, laser communicators, Gauss Rifles, magnetic levitation devices, homemade solar cells, and the like. The kids end up toys they can play with. When they get interested in how the toy works, they can read the explanation in my book, but they just might also open the textbook they were given, and learn some of those vocabulary words.

Re:A Kinesthetic Approach

[Caoch93]

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.

This may depend on what one is looking for in a "why" question. My interpretation of the original post stating that science doesn't address "why" questions is that science cannot answer the "why" in a more existential sense. Scientific models certainly explain why two billiard balls have the trajectories they do after they collide, but this can be seen as a "how" question...as in "How do these billiard balls interact when they collide?"

In my (most likely deluded) opinion, a critical shift in science came when scientists stopped trying to ascribe reasons and meanings to the events of the natural world and instead studied their mechanics. The world Aristotle gave the West was based on the need to seek meaning and purpose behind the natural world, and it was well surpassed when scientists left his mode of inquiry for a more dispassionate study of the mechanics things.

So, I think this is mostly an argument where semantics severely get in the way. IMHO, science models action, not meaning, which is what is meant by "how, not why".