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
They're rewriting history books? Dammit, now I'll have to re-learn all sorts of things, like who won World War II!
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
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?
How about we take a new approach to having students actually give a rat's ass about science or learning in general? The problem isn't textbooks or any 'style' of teaching. It's students who come to school who simply don't care. Why is there the steroetype about smart asian kids? It's because societies like those in South Korea and India place a high value on intelligence and education, ours (America) doesn't.
I was looking at a junior high science book recently. Everything seemed very dumbed down already. It was basically memory - not enough emphasis was placed on understanding concepts. Making them easier to read does not solve the real problem of students not understanding concepts.
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
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?
You obviously didn't glance at the article or anything, 'cause if you had you'd probably understand that the idea is to overhaul these books which were essentially designed Way Back When (and subsequently only updated) to reflect a more modern understanding of how to effectively impart information to children -- we know that they don't learn like adults do, so it's backwards to use instruments which assume that they do.
For example: It's hard to dispute that kids or a certain age absorb more from a narrative than from being presented with a list of facts to absorb. So, what possible objection could you have to using a narrative to impart these lessons? When your kid was learning the alphabet, didn't you teach her the song version? Or did you insist that the A-B-C song is a lightweight new-agey tool for stupid children and force her to recite it without singing? No ROY G BIV or other memory aids for her, no sir....
Anyhow, if there's a better way to impart information, I'm all for it. If you're not, well, you're an idiot. And read the fucking article next time.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
When I look at my dad's old math textbooks, they are usually much dryer and "harder" to read than most of today's textbooks, which are loaded with colorful pictures and silly examples to make them more "child-friendly" instead of being concise and to-the-point.
As a result, it is very hard to find the point from all the fluff-talk, and next to impossible to create a good systematic understanding of the topic. With these books, children don't take science seriously, and the result is much worse.
In the recent 50 years or so, there's a very visible trend where textbooks get prettier, topics get more lightweight, school gets to be more "fun" instead of education, and the result (people's knowledge of science) gets worse and worse.
We need to finally understand that we can't teach more/better by making the books easier and easier.
When men used to be men
damnit already, quit allowing the state government dictate what textbooks to buy each year.
I am sure that many many lawmakers would like to contract out their printing of free open content books instead of paying $10 - $15 each for whatever the book publishers want to sell.
I think D-Day, Omaha Beach, and WW2 deserver more than 3 pages in a US history text book.
Seneca Falls women's rights meeting does not deserve the 15 or so mentions it gets in US history books. I would suggest something a little more significant like how everybody gets their rights by being alive and not from a king or government as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
I suspect that college-level textbooks don't get written by committee for several reasons, but here's my main guess: They're not being written for a committee, either.
Since an individual professor selects the text for his or her course, the texts don't have to be written to satisfy the varied and mutually contradictory demands of an approval committee. That, and most of my textbooks are on a narrower subject area than "Science."
While the intent of the subject in the article is noble, it's just another example of educators trying to treat the symptoms and not the sickness. Kids aren't learning science (as well as pretty much every other subject) and the readability of science textbooks have almost nothing to do with it. The problem facing schools today is a cultural problem, not a logistical problem. We keep lowering the bar, instilling some idiotic postmodern philosophy of entitlement into kids who will one day grow into the idiotic adults everyone expects them to be, instead of raising the bar and working kids harder. Can't cut the mustard? You should be embarrassed. Instead, parents blame teachers for their own parental failures and everyone is hunky dory, as long as there is someone to blame. Teachers get beat down by this and feel like nothing they do helps so they quit too, robbing other children of the education provided by Uncle Sam.
It's funny. I graduated high school in '97 and have since gotten a BS in comp sci and I look back and realize my favorite teachers are the ones that made me bust ass. I couldn't stand them when I was under their totalitarian rule but I learned whether I liked it or not. Sure, I had plenty of teachers whose classes were a joke. Nothing was expected of me and so I did as little as I could get away with...what else would a teenager do? I despise those teachers now, as I realize that their insistence on being my friend and not working hard was a disservice to me.
There's plenty of blame to go around, whether it be lazy teachers, apathetic parents, cowardly administrators, or rowdy kids, but instead we pour more and more money into facilities, books, technology, or some other taxpayer funded red herring. Kids of the ages mentioned in the article...junior high age...aren't self-motivated. Less than 1% of kids that age have the self-motivation to pursue knowledge so you have to cram it down the little SOBs throats. Eventually, you'll find that the majority of them will then develop a craving for it and your work as a teacher is done.
It's the exact same way with behavior. You don't ask a child to behave, you have to make them behave. If parents would get over their little ego trip of how high and mighty their children are and treat them like the subordinates they are, this wouldn't be a problem. God forbid we hurt poor little Johnny's self esteem though.
This book seems to fit neatly in a bigger trend.
Textbooks are becoming more and more readable and accessible, typically somewhat at the expense of sophistication.
This is good news for many of those who struggle in school (with science in this case). It is bad news for many talented kids that need challenges and prefer abstractions over colorful examples.
My solution? Realize that all kids are not made alike, and develop a few different books with different methodologies covering the same material. Test the kids for apptitude as well as prefered learning method and give them the book that suits them best.
Tor
This a part of a worrying trend in writing books and movies on complicated subject matters in more accessible way.
... i am sure every high school student will feel good reading about that. I am also sure they will not learn any physics by reading about that.
It is not just science textbooks, i have noticed the same trend in documentaries and educational movies.
Well needless to say it is really annoying. First of all the proponents of this new trend all have two things in common - they think their audience is stupid, and they thing the audience does not want to know about the subject matter.
So basicly they do not teach about the subject matter at all. They teach some details that are some how connected to the subject matter, they are really easy to understand, but do not help the understanding of the subject matter at all. Usually those details are about people, somehow connected to the subject matter. That is because the writers in their belief that their readers are stupid, think the readers would be much more interested reading about people's lives (that of course are written in a way to be similar to the life of the average reader) than history, or science or whatever the subject matter is.
The quote from that woman's textbook serves the perfect example. It talks about how albert einstein was briliant, yet he hated doing homework
The quote from the older text, teaches actual physics. It is perfect it explains an aspect of the theory of relativity in a way that a student, that is too young to be able to learn it, can at least learn how it fits in the general field of physics, and how it applies in the real world. Thus the student will be able to learn classical physics without worrying that he/she is not learning relativity.
The new and improved physics passage leaves the student with no knowledge of physics whatsoever. Now parents and teachers may be happy that the student has more fun reading this passage and maybe even remembers it better, but they are fooling themselves, the kid is not learning any physics.
Maybe passages like this have a place as background sidenotes. But in no way should they replace actual physics. And it seems to me that in that woman's books they do.
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.
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.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
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.
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Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
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.
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...)
My undergrad (Biology) advisor had this most excellent poster on his wall:
(This is what I remember from it... Not an exact quote. But you'll get the gist...)
--Begin Poster--
If Baseball was taught like Biology:
1. Athletes would read about some of the great players in Baseball history.
2. They would listen to lectures about the fundamental concepts of baseball: batting, fielding, pitching, running.
3. Athletes would become involved in group discussions about the rules of baseball and the strategies involved in playing a game.
4. Athletes would assemble for 2-3 hours a week and have "hands-on" experiences with balls and bats in a closed and highly controlled environment.
5. Athletes would learn and practice the techniques of calculating statistics such as the RBI.
6. Then athletes would "take the field" and attempt to play a competitive game against other teams who had limited experience on a baseball field
---End Poster--Begin Rant--
Science is not a body of knowledge, but a methodology of answering questions. Though "the hard facts" are important to understanding Science (like memorizing the carbon atom has 6 electrons) these are simply facts. More and more today we have immediately available facts. I haven't even seen "The Handbook of Physics and Chemistry" in dead-tree format for over 5 years now! We need to realize that since information is readily available, the concepts and methods are important. Instead of pounding in facts, teach students how to become talented information-finders. That type of skill will be more important in "the real world" than knowing the chemicals involved in the Krebs Cycle.
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
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.
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
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.
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.
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.