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
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
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.
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?
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.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.