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

A Kinesthetic Approach

[Ignorant Aardvark]

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.

Re:A Kinesthetic Approach

[flewp]

Indeed, hands on approaches are the best. However, I think there needs to be some written (ie, textbooks) references. In other words, hands on approaches need to compliment the written matierial. Perhaps do an experiment to get the students' attention, and then teach the why and how. I don't know about most people, but when I see something cool, I want to know the hows and whys.

Although, back in high school I used to have the most fun combing combustion and chemicals to give off smoke.

Re:A Kinesthetic Approach

[PIPBoy3000]

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.

Re:A Kinesthetic Approach

[NOLAChief]

Both yours and her's approach to learning I agree with as the best way for children to learn. Unfortunately the pressure cooker our schools are under to make kids pass high stakes assessment tests (the LEAP here in Louisiana, the CSAP in Colorado, etc. etc.) pretty much requires that teachers stuff as many facts, however disjointed, into kids heads so that they can regurgitate them come test day. Until this nonsense changes, I fear she'll have trouble getting her approach off the ground. I wish her luck though!

Re:A Kinesthetic Approach

[reverseengineer]

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.

Re:A Kinesthetic Approach

[the Atomic Rabbit]

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.

Rewriting?

[Decimal]

They're rewriting history books? Dammit, now I'll have to re-learn all sorts of things, like who won World War II!

Re:Rewriting?

[Skyshadow]

They're rewriting history books? Dammit, now I'll have to re-learn all sorts of things, like who won World War II!

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.

Re:Rewriting?

[Guppy06]

Could be worse. You could be trying to learn European geography during the late 80's and early 90's.

Re:Rewriting?

[Skyshadow]

so what your saying is that history is someones opinion of what past events mean. No Thankyou, I'll be the judge of the meaning of events that happened yesterday.

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.

Some of the titles include ...

[DogIsMyCoprocessor]

• Newton Has Two Mommies
• Are You There, Mr. Feynman? It's Me, Margaret.
• Harry Potter and the Erlenmayer Flask of Doom

Different at the College Level...Why?

[CheshireCatCO]

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?

Re:Different at the College Level...Why?

[Jason1729]

College textbooks are choosen for the class by the professor who has expertise in the area. K-12 books are choosen school or district-wide by committees.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Re:Different at the College Level...Why?

[ArmyOfFun]

In addition to this, it's apparently pretty difficult to make a profit on k-12 textbooks, and the toughest committees for passing/buying a book are in Texas. To avoid differing versions, costly rewrites and so on, most publishers give their books to a few select committees in Texas (and California) for approval and only if they pass there do they go on to the rest of the country.

It's not as local a decision as you may think. Well, unless you live in Texas or California. But you don't have to take my word for it.

Re:Different at the College Level...Why?

[Cyberdyne]

To avoid differing versions, costly rewrites and so on, most publishers give their books to a few select committees in Texas (and California) for approval and only if they pass there do they go on to the rest of the country.

Woo, Texas, where the right-wing trolls control the education system.

Anyone else sick of this damn state too?

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...

Re:Different at the College Level...Why?

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

So why is this so very different from college textbooks

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. :)

Students.

[Daleks]

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.

Re:Students.

[hobbesmaster]

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...

Re:Students.

[myc]

wow. mod up parent, couldn't have said it better myself. There is a serious problem in this country where "being smart" is looked down upon, especially at the junior high-high school level.

Having said that, I think that while a large part of the problem lies with the student's attitudes, an equally large part of the problem also lies with the curriculum. US High school textbooks are, in general woefully inadequate when compared to science textbooks from other developed nations. The SAT exam, particularly the portions pertaining to math and logic, are usually at a junior high level in most Asian countries, for instance (from where I hail from). Its hard for students to take their studies seriously when they are not learning anything serious. JMHO.

Re:Students.

[Quantum Skyline]

Mod parent up. I couldn't have said it better myself.

There is too much emphasis on trying to make science "hip" and "cool" and to a certain extent, "l33t". This seems to work for a bit but ensures a kid's attention span is short.

Want kids to do better in school? Turn off the TV. Do homework as a family. Don't buy another console (I know a few people who have a few consoles.) Teachers need to care too. And lets face it, most role models for kids (Britney Spears, almost any rapper) suck as role models. All they really portray is that you can make money dropping out of school or almost never going. To put it simply, kill the distractions. Explain in no uncertain terms that you need to care in school in order to do something in life.

Best influence on my life is my father. He taught me to do math at a grade 1 level when I was in junior kindergarten, and moved up. He encouraged me to do math beyond his comprehension and offered to help, even if he didn't know what an integral is.

That's what Western (not just American) families need - a return to the fundamentals instead of a focus on becoming the next American Idol.

Re:Students.

[machine of god]

Why is there the steroetype about smart asian kids?

I always thought it was because only the smartest got to come here.

Re:Students.

[mlknowle]

Bullshit.

All or most of the asian kids around you are smart and dedicated? Wow! But do you think that that is a representative sample of Asians, or some Asians who are particularly smart and dedicated happen to have left their country to study abroad? Groups self select; you don't seem like a very bright person, but at the highest levels everyone is smart. The reason the smartest people around you are Asians is because American's who are smarter than you have had more opportunity to go elsewhere.

If you look at world-wide test scores, you'll see that America ranks well down the list; why? Because America educates (and therefore tests) a much larger range of the bell curve than many other countries do. For this reason, our 'average' score is indeed lower, but if you did total score divided by the entire (not just test taking) population, you would see different results.

Re:Students.

[arvindn]

I'm from India. I've got a couple of observations.

You're right about the problem not being with textbooks. The textbooks here are as dull if not duller than anywhere else. But smart is sexy over here. There's a lot of motivation for students to learn. And there's the economic incentive, too. Very hard to get a job that pays enough.

That's not the whole picture, though. There are government schools and private schools. What I said above goes for the private schools. In the government schools kids go there because they have to.

Then why the stereotype about smart Asian kids? Simple. The smarter kids get a job/fellowship in the U.S and migrate there, which is the only section you see.

Re:Students.

[Rinikusu]

Umm.. no?

I mean, I'm 1st generation native born Asian-American. My mother is Korean, my father is Native American, but that's besides the point. The point is that every other half/whole korean kid I know with a Korean mother is in fear of our lives about our grades in school. If I came home with anything below a B, I would get beaten within an inch of my life. My mom cared about my grades, it reflected upon her. Through the threat of beatings, I then cared about my grades. Granted, I got straight A's until the 10th grade, but the idea is still there: Get beat, get good grades..

Um, no wait that's not it...

When parents give a shit about their kids and what they learn in school, then the kids tend to do better, especially if the parents take an active role in their education. You don't necessarily have to beat them up (Hey, I fucking turned out great, and I'll beat the shit out of anyone that says otherwise), but knowing how to provide incentives and make education, well, worth learning, makes a ton of difference.

Science books

[zzxc]

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.

Re:Science books

[JoeBuck]

She wasn't talking about making them easier to read. By making it a narrative, the student sees the process of science, the adventure of figuring out what was formerly unknown, and is more likely to get an understanding of how things fit together than if she is just asked to memorize a series of facts.

A complaint about textbooks...

[rabiteman]

...from the article:

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?

Re:A complaint about textbooks...

[Jonathan]

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)

Re:A complaint about textbooks...

[JoeBuck]

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.

Hope it works

[WatertonMan]

I hope she does a good job. I can't speak having never seen her texts. The one big problem most science and math textbooks have is that they tend to teach subtly wrong things. The so called "New Math" movement from when I was a kid was a great example. The analogies and examples were often misleading and arose out of a misunderstanding of set theory or how scientists actually utilize mathematics.

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. . .

A nice idea.. but..

[windows]

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.

What I want to see...

[GeneralEmergency]

.
...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.

Write them as science fiction

[charon_on_acheron]

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?

It supposed to be FACTs, not a story!

[bluGill]

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.

Re:It supposed to be FACTs, not a story!

[KnowledgeFreak]

I get what your saying, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I know that I have learned, and retained for many years, factoids that were surrounded by context and additional meaning. These are facts that i definitly wouldn't remember otherwise considering that i never use them. I still remember that summation equation because of the story that my high school math teacher told us, about how a the guy (i forget his name) figured it out because, as he was acting up in grade school, the teacher told him to add all the numbers from 1 to 100 (keep him busy). He came back in 5 minutes with the answer because he had figured out that
100 + 99 + 98 + 97...
1 + 2 + 3....
all the additions vertically are 101. multiply that by 100 and divide by 2 and you have the answer.
We know A LOT more today about cognitive psychology and what is physically going on in our brains when we learn. We know that by giving facts (propositions) context they are able to be better recalled and remain in our memories for longer periods. We CAN apply this to scientific learning. Ironically enough, to ignore that is to ignore what we are learning through science.

-Pete

Re:It supposed to be FACTs, not a story!

[mrpuffypants]

...understand electrisity. Doing expiriemtns will...
...other than the enertainment of a hands on expiriemnt...
Somehow, I'm not a teacher because I can't do it.

But anyway, I know some good spelling books you can get if you want to become a teacher ;)

Re:It supposed to be FACTs, not a story!

[sstory]

It's really not supposed to be FACTS. Science education is not primarily concerned with transmitting facts. Science is both a structure and a method. The great structures in science are the theories. Gravity. Atoms. Thermo. Maxwell's eqns. Relativity. etc. Facts are merely pieces of data used to test theory. The method, the process of beginning with a blank slate, collecting evidence, forming theory, testing extensions of the theory against evidence, is the embodiment of rationalism itself. It's the unique tool for generating knowledge. That, is what science education is about.

NO!

[garcia]

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.

Re:NO!

[zaffir]

I agree with you 100%.

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. /rant

Re:NO!

[Daleks]

Ok, this is something I am really sick and tired of hearing... Are you a teacher?

Nope. I was a TA in college though.

I just spoke w/a group of professors who complained that students aren't willing to learn anymore...

There is always going to be some degree of animosity between students and teachers. There will always be some students who say soandso is a horrible teacher, and there will always be some teachers who say their students are spoiled brats. Teachers share some of the blame, but if you've recently seen the behavior of classrooms firsthand, you'd be appalled.

1. School is forced (especially college, which has become a *necessary* extension of High School).

What does this have to do with anything? Should children be allowed to sit at home all day and play video games because they think Math is hard? Also, you can go to a trade school after high school and get a job that way. If you don't like the job you get, well, then you should've gone to college.

You can try to say that schools don't teach you anything that you'll use in the 'real' world, but that simply isn't true. Now more than ever high schools offer applied programs. Auto repair, programming, and hell probably even carpentry if you ask your wood shop teacher nicely. Last June I was offered a position to teach at a vocational school that had a program for high school students to learn programming as it applied to game development. This wasn't for a rich and privaleged school either.

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.

Even if a teacher does his or her job poorly, this doesn't mean a student is completely absolved from having to understand the coursework. If a teacher gives a poor lecture about WW2, does that mean the student gets to blame the teacher for his or her lack of understanding? No. While a teacher does play a central role in a course, it is still the responsibility of the student to make every effort to learn. With a proper respect for knowledge a student will understand the material is more important than judging the teacher or even the grade they receive. This isn't to say that grades are irrelevant, but that a personal understanding of the value of knowledge is more important than having a high GPA. I'm not advocating throwing grades out the window. I'm advocating the driving force in the learning process for a student should be knowledge, not letters on a report card or classroom dynamics.

With that said, I agree that a bad teacher will obviously have a negative effect on the learning process. Teachers should be held accountable for their actions. I've had my share of bad teachers, but I realized that the classes were about me, not them. I understood that it was my future at stake, not theirs.

It causes people to become uninterested and bored.

This is something I hear all the time, and sorry, I just don't buy it. If a student is unmotivated to take an active role in their own future, then it is their own fault. A teacher shouldn't be required to turn Physics into song and dance to get the student's attention. School is hard and not always fun. More is at stake for the student than for the teacher. School for a teacher is their profession. School for a student is their entire future.

Once teachers start teaching actively, students will probably learn actively. Until that time, it is just as much the fault of the educators.

We obviously disagree on the distribution of 'blame' students and teachers share in the current educational system. Granted there are many, many bad teachers out there, but the students need to understand how to look beyond that. School is about learning new ideas, not a pissing contest with a teacher that supposedly has it out for you.

Re:Lets dumb down the schools some more!

[Skyshadow]

No offense, but if your kid can't write or read very well by the third grade, isn't that mostly your fault?

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.

More readable? Why?

[targo]

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.

Open source/content text books

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Open source/content text books

[unicron]

I'm gonna say that the Seneca Falls women's right meeting getting 15 pages is a little exaggerated. If your mother is their secretary..then I probably have it figured out.

WW2 definately deserve more than 3 pages, but not 3+ pages per battle. Get a book on the history of WW2 if you want that.

As for highschool kids, you guys got it easy. Wait until college when the guy teaching you wrote the book. 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.

"Lost tools of learning"

[Bingo Foo]

Look at this article by Dorothy Sayers.

... for committees.

[Squeamish Ossifrage]

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."

not the problem

[NixterAg]

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.

Continuation of long trend

[f97tosc]

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 is really worrying

[Edmund Blackadder]

This a part of a worrying trend in writing books and movies on complicated subject matters in more accessible way.

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 ... 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.

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.

Re:Lets dumb down the schools some more!

[Dunkalis]

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?"

Feynman on Textbook Selection

[Michael_Burton]

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.

Re:James Burke

[Fritz Benwalla]

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.

--------

SSTS

[dmorin]

In college I was heavily involved in a program known as "Science through Society Technology Studies." Basically the premise was that you could teach science better by putting it into social context that kids could understand. Examples of curricula developed while I was there included:

• Acid rain, where kids looked at what acid rain was as well as what sort of industrial polution could cause it (complete with field work of testing the rain that fell in their own neighborhood)
• Dead Fish, where statistics were taught by doing a computer simulation that involved determining the amount of dead fish in the local lake due to pollution. Kids of course love this one due to the gross factor.
• One about having a nuclear reactor in your backyard, but I can't really remember the context.

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.

Modalities of Learning

[soundofthemoon]

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.

on the subject of textbook writing

[circusboy]

no one should be allowed to even think about writing a textbook without reading

• lies my teacher told me
• surely you're joking mr. feynman

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.

Learning Baseball like Learning Science...

[Aetrix]

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.

Bad science.

[Kupek]

From "The Science Story":

You might have heard of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Einstein's theory included a small change to the law of conservation of energy. He explained that energy can sometimes be created -- by destroying matter!

Having a new approach to teaching science is great. I actually think that emphasizing how things were discovered and who discovered them would make science more engaging to a middle school student. I know that I'm certainly interested in it - I've read a few books in my free time on the topics.

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.

Paul G. Hewitt's Books

[McCrapDeluxe]

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.

This is the same Joy Hakim...

[Daniel Rutter]

...who's had a starring role a few times on The Textbook League's site. The Textbook League's basic purpose is to point out the large number of textbooks that say things that aren't, you know, true.

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.

Sudbury model of education

[phutureboy]

IMHO, textbooks have their place but are relied upon much too heavily, as are chalkboards, assigned seating, standardized testing, age segregation and fixed curriculum.

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:

• http://www.sudburynetwork.org/
• http://www.sudval.org/
  
• http://www.chicagosudburyschool.org/
  

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.

Re: beatings

[No Such Agency]

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!

Re:my 2 bits.

[kscguru]

Since you seem to have such an exceptionally clear understanding of the educational system, I'd like to make a suggestion.

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.

shameless plug

[saben78]

My boss is a 30+ year chemistry professor and over the years has come up with something called HBL. Hypothesis Based Learning.

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.

Re:Lets dumb down the schools some more!

[jd_esguerra]

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.

SciFi becoming SciFact

[Scorchio]

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.

Re:Lets dumb down the schools some more!

[ender-]

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