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Teachers Back Away From Evolution In Class
RedEaredSlider writes "A study (abstract) from Penn State shows that a lot of teachers — some 60 percent — are reluctant to teach evolutionary theory in the classroom either because they fear controversy or they just aren't comfortable with the material (as not every biology teacher was a science major). It shows the importance, the authors say, of training teachers well before they step into the class."
How can one be a Biology teacher without having a major in at least one of the sciences? Sad. Schools ought to demote these persons to HomeEc or English, and hire some actual degreed science majors to do the teaching.
Maybe they can't do that because of Union rules.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Could someone explain?
What are the state requirements for someone to become a licensed biology teacher in the U.S.?
So the reason US students fall behind might be because some teachers don't want to teach the theory of evolution?? Yeah, that must be slowing down the US production of Evolutionary Scientists. Let's see the ridiculous straw arguments now that this somehow explains why we are behind in Math and other Sciences.
If three people with scores below (1) are talking to one another in a forest.... I mean slashdot, does anybody hear them? ;-)
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
...shows that a lot of American teachers...
Fixed that for you.
If even the teachers aren't educated enough to understand this - what hope is there for the rest.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
You must be new here. Perhaps you just arrived off the boat from a strange faraway land or you're using one of them new fangled distance communications devices.
Teachers are primarily required to have a "teaching" degree. Actually being trained in what they are teaching is not really expected.
Welcome to America.
If you find a teacher with any real training in what they teach then you've just encountered a happy fluke.They do happen on occasion but they certainly aren't the norm and "knowing what you're doing" usually is not a requirement.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
For once I feel I am completely on topic when i say...
What. The. Fuck?
It truly seems that the only unlimited natural resource in this world is human stupidity. I'm not saying that evolution, as a scientific theory, shouldn't be challenged. But not teaching it at all is just incredibly idiotic. Those teachers should grow some balls...
.: Max Romantschuk
How can one be a Biology teacher without having a major in at least one of the sciences? Sad. Schools ought to demote these persons to HomeEc or English, and hire some actual degreed science majors to do the teaching.
Maybe they can't do that because of Union rules.
Wow. It's pretty evident you don't understand what's happening in schools in America.
Having dated a couple teachers, let me explain to you how it works. If you're a teacher (and I'm talking grade school or high school) you get shit on. You don't get paid shit and your 'customer' treats you like shit. What's worse is that you cannot refuse your customer and it's your duty to make sure no child is left behind.
So let's say you get a degree in biology. Any lab job or anything else will pay much better right off the bat than a teaching position in grade or high school. Why anybody would get a degree in education is beyond me. Most teachers I think are psychology or sociology majors that, if they teach something like biology, have taken some specialized courses in teaching that material. Not actual high level biology coursework -- because they're not teaching that to students.
Your attempt to blame this on the unions amuses me. Public schools don't make money. That's not what they're there for. They're not some corporation or car manufacturer, they're a public utility that provides a human right to education. As such when a school is operating in the red, it would normally be really tempting to just cut teacher's wages. The unions are there to prevent crap like that from happening. Furthermore, they can't walk away from a customer so really bad interactions occur. And the unions are there to make sure that the teachers have the appropriate representation and responses. Schools don't compete with each other for the best students like a manufacturer competes for customers. The same can be said of hospitals and nursing unions. I don't know how a union would make sure that you can't teach Biology without being a Biology major.
The fact is that teachers have a really crappy job, they don't get paid much and that's why you don't see someone graduating with a Masters of Science in physics to go teach fourth graders science. Maybe you pay extra to send your kid to a magnate school or some private school where they guarantee that the teachers are such distinguished individuals but certainly not a public schools and until you're willing to pay a lot more in taxes to make those jobs desirable to such a graduate, I'd shut up.
My work here is dung.
This is an excerpt from a news piece in the 1920's:
"A study (abstract) from Penn State shows that a lot of teachers — some 60 percent — are reluctant to teach a non-heliocentric model of the universe in the classroom either because they fear controversy or they just aren't comfortable with the material (as not every science teacher was an astronomy major). It shows the importance, the authors say, of training teachers well before they step into the class."
Where would we be right now if we allowed "universe deniers" to shape our view of the galaxy (and subsequently our childrens' view of the universe)? Teach science, damn it. It isn't about "comfort", it's about fucking observation and knowledge! It fucking works, bitches!
The article is making is sound like the teachers can and know how to teach the material, but have to be conditioned to not fear it. It is sounding like they want to desensitize them to their beliefs because they do know it, they just don't believe their way enough. How else do you fix it? You social engineer it. Welcome to the re-education camps.
It's ridiculous, but science is being bullied in our Western democracies...
There are fights about the greenhouse gas, about evolution, and several other topics... and if teachers say something about that, they are said to choose a side and teachers should be politically neutral.
That, of course, is ridiculous. If teachers can no longer teach science, because some theories (which have a lot of evidence) might undermine the political course set by our Great Leaders or because they might upset certain religious people (science always does that), then we might as well close our schools.
"training teachers well before they step into the class"
I thought you could just pick the first redneck passing by and drop him in a class.
Why stop at creationism? Might as well throw in a language class or two in Klingon while you're at it.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Now the evolutionary theory, which follows a degree of scientific rigor (compare it to other theories to explain the same phenomenon) is controversial. What's next? Advanced physics teaching that the sun goes around the earth? Carbon dating deemed heresy because we all know the earth was created in 7 days?
God Bless America.
Is THAT hard to go to the library, take a book and read it to prepare a class? Geez, they don't even have to do it in a yearly basis.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
How do the conclusions reached by the various scientific disciplines coincide with those contained in the message of revelation? And if, at first sight, there are apparent contradictions, in what direction do we look for their solution? We know, in fact, that truth cannot contradict truth
...
... ... It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.
It is necessary to determine the proper sense of Scripture, while avoiding any unwarranted interpretations that make it say what it does not intend to say. In order to delineate the field of their own study, the exegete and the theologian must keep informed about the results achieved by the natural sciences
new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.
Interesting times, indeed.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Believing in God doesn't mandate a belief in Creationism (though believing in Creationism requires the belief in God). Anyone whose faith is so fragile that it could be damaged by a rigorous class in evolutionary biology should go back to CCD or Sunday School or whatever their faith's equivalent is.
No, they can't teach Creationism since we've already had that trial and it has been determined in court that ``science is what scientists do''.
People who believe in the literal Word of God as the Bible remind me of the grand-daughter of a family friend --- he was a woodworker, old school, wanted me to be his apprentice so he could put me to work re-sawing wood rather than purchase a band saw. He made a cradle as a gift for the grand-daughter in question, for her to keep her dolls in --- she was very impressed when her mother told her, ``Your grandfather made this by hand.'' and immediately evinced a desire to see his and to see his shop and to watch him make something. The visit was arranged and upon arrival, the young lady was taken out to the shop and the large door rolled open, revealing rack upon rack of chisels, saws, hand planes, a simply unbelievable quantity of clamps and other hand tools --- the girl let out a shriek such as only a 5 year old girl can and yelled, ``Mommy! You lied! Grandpa doesn't make things by hand! He uses tools!''.
God is quite capable of using DNA and RNA and quantum mechanics and other theories which we have yet to learn about to make people and the world.
Moreover, those who believe that humanity is incapable of learning how God works are being blasphemous and not remembering the lesson of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:6) which indicates that humanity's learning capacity is without limit.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I hate how pussified all of our teachers have become! Afraid to teach evolution???? WTF??? It's a theory as solid as a fossil and these fucking people cannot man-up about it and tell the religious freaks that would have us living in the dark ages to fuck off and die? No wonder everything is about to go to hell in a hand-basket!
-Oz
[my wife is a teacher (15 years teaching), she's just glad she's got an engineer husband to support her teaching habit... I'm just an enabler, I guess]
Because they studied the "teaching" half of that job title.
I don't know how the American school system (well there's no such thing I guess, how the US school district then) works, but when I was in high school in another land the teachers were "science teachers". The guy who tought me biology at school clearly knew his physics (well his high school level ones anyway) but also taught chemistry and biology.
Aye, word of His Great Noodlyness the Flying Spaghetti Monster gets the attention he deserves!
I am officially gone from
Unsurprisingly, the summary is wrong. 28% actively teach evolution as if it is a correct theory, 60% teach both evolution and ID and do not make claims as to their validity. The last 12% actually only teach creationism. All of this survey was done with biology highschool teachers.
Could someone explain?
What are the state requirements for someone to become a licensed biology teacher in the U.S.?
In lower grade levels teachers aren't necessarily hired for a particular class- the school will ask them to teach anything it needs. So a physical science teacher might be asked to teach biology for instance. They're not going to be completely incompetent (usually), but it is also true they won't have as in depth understanding of the subject.
Oh dear. Anti-union BS alert! So the unions have been calling for larger classes and lower pay for teachers, yes? After all, that's one reason for poor recruitment (just ask any HR department on their hiring technique for the upper management).
And I guess that it was the unions insisting on paedo suspicions on all teachers, annual checks on the background and the continuous persecution of teachers, yes?
Unions also made parents toss lawsuits and complaints at teachers who didn't give their little dahling an A in class?
I guess it must also be the unions that insist that unruly kids cannot be punished or dealt with by expulsion too?
If the union is "partly to blame", then it's MOSTLY government and busybody parents who are to blame, since THEY are the ones who generate the most absurd environment possible for teachers.
This really worries me. Are teachers afraid of religious fanatics who want them to teach the bible in school? Or are teachers too dumb or not enough educated or well trained to be able to explain why evolution makes sense? Next we know the big bang is not taught any more, and Galileo isn't, and we go back to the stone age.
Smart people should have more children. Otherwise, evolution is in favor of the anti-evolution people.
no, I don't have a sig
O.K. not going into the whole evolution / creationism debate
But the linked article starts with:
"Teachers who are unable or unwilling to teach the theory of evolution in biology might be one reason U.S. students are falling behind in science, according to new research."
And that's just plain stupid (as stupid as not to teach evolution in school). You can be a good biologist and not really care about the whole macro-evolution debate. Remember, 3 experiments, finding new fancy stuff about how life works....
Most science does not depend on evolution being right or wrong, important is how it all works!
So the intention of the article is mostly politics... not about the real problem here, why kids don't go into science!!
If Biology is a "pet subject" then so is Physics.
Sarah Palin is that you?
"However, my view is that it is down to the parents to do the teaching, and to delegate to schools as they see fit, and also to make up the difference."
It's called the school board. That's where parents raise issues in regards to what little Johnny is taught in school. And no it's not the responsibility of parents to do the teaching. If it was then kids would be home schooled and I would not have to pay school taxes!
"No-group has a right to have their pet subjects taught to children"
Evolution is not a pet subject.
Moron.
And weep. The idiocracy in action.
It's almost like shuttling weak students who are afraid of math and science into teacher training programs was a BAD idea.
(Disclaimer: I'm employed by a college with a tremendous population of education majors.)
Classical Religion contains logical paradoxes that would make any logician proud.
If you "believe in God" then it is exceedingly difficult to try to disregard fragments of the Bible in the modern style of "Oh, that doesn't apply." (Never mind it's the same technique the Christians themselves used.)
God is a Division by Zero effect. For some reason this supreme being can't figure out how to say hello to us. Without the most basic confirmation of rationality, everything else becomes a Non-Euclidian demonstration in ... something.
What to do with all that grand theology? It does hold together, in its own world, just like when they first worked on Hyperbolic Geometry. " IF you had a God who did this and this and this, then all this neat stuff would apply."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I agree completely.
Our kids should not have to learn mathematics, history, and geography or other subjects in school.
All they should teach them is to read and write English.
The parents can then teach their kids whatever they want in their spare time.
From my perspective (Europe), the US is digging its own grave with hundreds of shovels at the same time...
this is just one of those shovels.
But still, it's pretty scary :s
On the other hand, I wonder what the numbers would look like if the survey asked teachers if they were reluctant to teach creationism in class. Probably much higher, in public schools at least. (Given that trying to teach religion in public school is *illegal* for good reason). I'm not sure there is anything to worry about here. Unless you happen to be a creationist.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Christians around the world give thumbs up for evolution. What went wrong in the U.S.? Come on now, you're an embarrassment to the world.
We've spent over $2 trillion dollars so far in three wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, and "Drugs." That's $1.1 trillion in the years we've been in Afghanistan and Iraq, and $1 trillion for the 40 years we've been fighting the War on Drugs (a.k.a. becoming a police state---see http://www.cato.org/raidmap/ ).
Let's cut our losses on that shit, and reallocate the billions that would have been spent on killing people and making everyone hate us. We could even legalize and tax some things to provide even more revenue, while we're at it.
So we'll take all that money, and we'll hire teachers. LOTS of teachers. Bring the student-teacher ratio in every school in the US down below 20:1. Ten to one would be great. How do you get all those teachers?
Hire people who are trained in the fields you want them to teach--not people who are trained to teach. Science teacher? Hire someone with a BS in Physics, Engineering, Chemistry, Biology, etc. Not a BS in Education.
Offer competitive salaries and benefits, so they won't have to be insane to take teaching jobs instead of going on to grad school. The really brilliant/ambitious ones will still go to grad school, but grad school numbers will be thinned out. It will mean something again. And you won't have a bunch of people sitting around with 4-year degrees working at frozen banana stands and stealing cars to pay off student loans.
Most importantly, you won't have honor students being taught history by their gym coaches. You'll have History majors teaching History, and Athletics majors coaching. Hey, everybody wins!
And I learned evolution in a Lutheran school! My how the last 40 years have changed.
Perhaps the real reason is because they've lost too many discussions from *students* who are well-versed enough in both the theory of evolution and its alternatives to be able to teach it adequately. I am a young Earth creationist, and not because "the Bible told me so." When any of you can accurately understand the scientific arguments for creationism, I will be happy to listen to arguments against them. My issue with the political / bureaucratic side of evolutionary theory is that even its most ardent proponents are too ill-equipped to engage in rational debate that they have to effectively bully their way into the education system. I have the same issue with religious right-wing politicians who think "faith is enough." God gave us brains so we can use them to understand the world in which we live, not check them at the door when someone says something we don't agree with.
If I got it right, both chemistry/biochemistry teachers had chemistry degrees, the maths/physicists had degrees, but I'm not sure who taught biology since I was in the Sci/Tech program intead of Sci/Nat. The thing is though, the "controversy" never came up at all. While we got some backstory on "scientific thought" and the evolvment of the scientific model, the focus seemed to be on teaching us basic physics neatly intertwined with the math courses. That the scientists who worked out the models was using fallible tools and understanding, and that the models themselves where so "high up" from our understanding that we would have to study a lot more to concretely understand them where sort of implicit.
The religion courses where compulsory, but that guy (who at least seemed like he had a degree of some sort, he "seemed academic") mostly seemed keen on trying to teach us to think about religion in the abstract besides teaching us about the fundamentals of the major religions like Chatolicism and Islam etc., (Eg., "what is sin, as a concept, from a christian perspective?") but I'm quite certain creationism and related concepts where only mentioned in passing unless I missed that class.
In "Junior High" I don't think the (all female) bio teachers had a degree either, since they taught mostly from the books (it seemed). We had "sex ed" in bio class, but it was more like "genital anatomy". They took in some sort of weird female consult (who I now am perfectly sure had Aspergers) for actual sex ed, which included condom usage, oral/anal sex (briefly) and "the importance of cuddling". The most fun part of that year was our Social Sciences teacher (great guy, had been in the jaeger corps when he was younger, apparently had enough "teaching" university education to give him a Masters equivalent) putting on the Monthy Python "Every Sperm is Sacred" skit.
Emotions! In your brain!
From TFA:
Teachers who are unable or unwilling to teach the theory of evolution in biology might be one reason U.S. students are falling behind in science, according to new research. [. . .] The findings come at a time when the national Center for Education Statistics, a part of the U.S. Department of Education, released findings that said only 21 percent of students in grade 12 scored at or above "proficient" in 2009, with 60 percent reaching the level of "basic."
First off, bad reporting -- what are those statistics referring to? When we go to the NCES website, we find this is referring to science performance in general. This trend in biology teachers is distressing, but I'm not sure bad teaching of evolutionary teaching is resulting in 88% of students not achieving high marks in, say, physical sciences, earth sciences, etc. NCES itself notes immediately after the statistic in its own report:
Twelfth-graders who reported taking biology, chemistry, and physics scored higher than students taking less advanced science coursework.
In other words, students who take more science and harder science do better on science tests. Duh. I'm not sure the teaching of evolutionary theory is even on the map compared to problems like students not taking science, not being interested in science, and probably poor science teaching in general, particularly in the low-level science electives for students not taking real bio, chem, or physics. I taught high school math and science for a few years, and I can definitely say that the teachers assigned to teach these dumbed-down science courses were some of the worst in the school -- often coaches or people with science degrees or related degrees who weren't able to find a job doing anything else because their skills were so poor.
Is the teaching of evolution a problem? Sure. But I'm not willing to believe it is even in the top 20 causes for these students performing poorly on tests of scientific knowledge in general.
What the Catholic church did for geocentrism in the Renaissance, the mega churches and funny-mental Christians are now doing for intelligent design. With all of our problems at hand I wish I lived in a nation that was mature enough to focus on important tasks and not obsess on homosexuality and evolution. Sadly, some children will visit the http://creationmuseum.org/ "Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden's Rivers" (I swear, I'm not making that up) and have their beliefs reinforced as fact. Seriously! Creation, like Santa, should not be taken seriously as an explanation for how things have come to be.
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
Is knowledge a 'pet subject' to you, to be ignored at the discression of the parents? Perhaps it should be up to the parents whether or not their kids are taught to read, another obvious 'pet subject'. But most of all kids should have a permission slip from their parents if a teacher is expecting to teach kids how to 'think', the most subversive 'pet subject' of all time.
This is really the reason why kids don't receive education. IMO part of the education is to teach discipline, but teachers now have no teeth nor incentive. This is the real problem.
The article is really a flamebait. It says, "Teachers who are unable or unwilling to teach the theory of evolution in biology might be one reason U.S. students are falling behind in science, according to new research." This is not at all where the issue is. I don't see how not teaching evolution will make students fall behind in science, when you have plenty of hard sciences like Chemistry and Physics that will have immediate and obvious application in technology innovation.
When it comes down to evolution, they need to separate origin of species from the package. When you invent new drug to save the world, or when you study genetic disease, you need to know natural selection and mutation. But neither origin of species nor speciation have any bearing whatsoever in science innovation. Don't bundle this controversial, useless knowledge to your science education, and blame the teachers for unwilling to teach it.
And again, it's the lack of respect and classroom discipline that makes the student fall behind. It's not the missing material.
I once had a signature.
It works like this. You go to college and get a degree in biology. You face several choices:
1) You could go be a biology teacher. You could make 30-35K a year to start (not awful, but not great) or even less depending on how much education funding in your state has been slashed recently. In 20 or 30 years you *might* make twice that. You have to spend you days dealing with kids who don't really want to learn what you're teaching them, and parents who alternately abrogate all educational responsibility to you or tell you that your teaching is wrong or even immoral (sometimes the same parents do both!). You probably also have to spend a couple years going to night school getting certified in order to not get fired.
2) You could go work in a lab for 40-50K a year and eventually more. And not deal with any of this crap.
3) You could go to graduate or medical school and make much more money later on down the line as a professor, senior lab tech, doctor, etc.
Which do you choose? A surprising number don't go with option (1) for some reason. This leaves us with a shortage of teachers in biology which gets back filled by people with degrees in "general education".
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
It seems the survey must be mistaken. Those that would not teach are not teachers.
..when I can't do the job I was hired to do, I'm either trained in how to do it or replaced by someone that can do it. If I were a biology teacher and couldn't teach biology, I should be trained in biology or replaced by someone that can teach biology. So you're telling me that these people don't even have a HIGH SCHOOL level understanding of evolution? How can you even call yourself a teacher if you refuse to teach known science because someone might not like it? For people that don't believe in evolution, fuck them. It's science. They still make those people that don't believe in medicine about medicine and medical topics. They still teach Jews about the Nazis even though they're offended. They still teach blacks in America about the slavery era. What's the problem?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Scientists who see that should feel a moral obligation to point out what's happening. It's good to see that some do.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The ironic thing about this article is that its definition of evolution is not in conflict with the idea of Intelligent Design. All this article underscores is the fact that most scientists don't really understand what ID is and is not. Intelligent Design focuses on the origin of life and biological information. It in no way denies that that life changes over time due to natural selection. For anyone who doesn't believe me, I challenge you to find one outspoken Intelligent Design proponent who would say otherwise. Once opponents of ID truly consider it, they will realize that it's not nearly as far off from what they believe as they might have originally thought.
"I don't want to live on this planet anymore."
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
People ought to stop insisting that know-nothings teach science to meet some bureaucratic requirement and leave science to be taught by scientists. It does far more damage to people to learn from morons than it would for them to never learn at all. Let people learn science from research professors and lecturers at universities rather than a bunch of parrots that only teach to collect a salary.
When religion and politics are prioritized over science and the pursuit of new knowledge, we are moving backward. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is increasing its science and technology expertise and we are all "finding religion." If we all become Amish, that would be one thing, but no one is prepared to give up what they have now and fail to appreciate that the status quo is not sustainable.
Religious nutbags need to be suppressed for the good of human kind. And to be perfectly clear, if you believe in a god at all, you are, in my opinion, a religious nutbag.
Actually, if the post is asserting that teachers should be trained more as teachers before they can become teachers, then that is the wrong conclusion.
The main problem is that people who are qualified in subjects are not allowed to become teachers, unless they take two years out from their life and get a teaching degree. This is _why_ we have non-scientists teaching biology, as the posting claims.
The Teacher's Union has a stranglehold on the profession. Lots of people (such as myself) who would like to spend a few years teaching and who are very qualified in subjects are prevented from spending a few years in that role. Do we have qualified teachers as a result of the current policy? Apparently not. Time to try something else.
Oooooh the bad old "gubbernment" and nasty groups like scientists and engineers trying to force their special interests on our children.
The education system is there to provide a standard, which scientists, engineers, artists, accountants, doctors and every other definable skilled sector of adult society should strive to uphold. These scientists are doing their job. If the parents think that their children should be taught young earth creationism or astrology or some other idiocy they can do it while upholding their part of the bargain of taking an active part in their children's education. Give the kids a fighting chance and let them make up their own minds.
And really, young earth creationism is part of dark ages idiocy that has brought us witch burnings, popes and all sorts of other nasty things. Evolution is not some 'pet theory' but part the framework of humanist enlightenment that has proven itself again and again. Go your way, let ignorant parents restrict children's education rather than expand it and it will be true the America has jumped the shark. That is really the way it is beginning to look to those of us watching from the outside.
Not so bleak ?! Sir are you kidding ? 1/3 of the student have a proper scientific education, about 2/3 are taught that science and religion competes for truth, which is absolutely wrong at least from a scientific point of view, but also from a real religious point of view I suspect, and goes to Sunday school everyday. How can that be positive ?
Science and religion do not compete for truth, they don't oppose, they are completely orthogonal :
LOL! You evolutionists are hilarious. Let me translate that: "Not, every teacher was indoctrinated into our religion." Even if someone did scientifically prove God existed, every evolutionist's heart and mind would still not change. This is because evolution is more about denying God than finding truth.
The reason we have few competent teachers is simple: Education is one of the most poorly compensated professions in the USA and has generally atrocious working conditions. Education attracts many teachers, but most last less than 2 years on the job before switching professions. Very few competent people are willing to grind away their soul day-in, day-out for pennies. At the same time, the cost for a college degree and certification is skyrocketing. It just doesn't make economic sense to be a teacher.
The public has an incredibly patronizing attitude that teachers should accept miserable accept out of the goodness of their heart. That attitude worked back when women faced systematic artificial barriers in most other professions. In our grandparents generation, we were effectively subsidizing our education system by restricting opportunities for women. That was true in the 60s. It's not true now. Women are competing in every profession, and now education salaries must also compete.
Blaming the Unions is a popular game, but they are not the central problem. If schools seriously want the top college grads to go into education, then obviously they need to compete with other opportunities that top college grads are offered. But you can't offer people a starting salary of $33,227 and then bitch and moan when your top applicants are C students from state universities. The Unions are basically the only force keeping teacher salaries competitive. States with a heavily unionized teacher work-force are better compensated and, unsurprisingly, produce better results
I've spent many years learing about evolutionary theory. It seems quite intuitive to me. But it isn't intuitive to many people because it's unlike anything they observe normally. Among scientists, evolution isn't controvercial, but among others, it is. Therefore, others need more convincing. But telling them to "just believe because you're an idiot if you don't" is just religion. To most people, evolution vs. something else is just a war between factions. There's no science in it. And while religion remains relatively stable, evolutionary theory keeps changing; what's "true" one day is "false" the next. The way that evolution is taught is partly responsible for this controversy.
I'm sure it exists, but I've never been able to find it; there's something that would really help: An up-to-date complete treatise of all the basic evidence that demonstrates the foundations of evolutionary theory. Observations of microevolution in the lab, sequences of fossils and how they were dated and how we're certain that they're from the same lineage, numerous clear examples, multiple convergent lines of evidence (fossils vs. dna), etc. In science class, they don't teach this. They teach the end results of the science as though it were FACT, but it's NOT. It is a fact that it's a good theory, but the theory itself cannot be deemed fact.
I have a little girl, and I don't want to just tell her "evolution is true, and those creationists are idiots." I want to show her the science. Besides, its misleading to say that "evolution is true". Evolutionary fact observed in the lab is true. Evolutionary theory is a MODEL that we STRIVE to MAKE true and is the best model we currently have. If it were TRUE, we'd be done. No more to discover. Rather, it is a gradually improving approximation.
There aren't any. Someone qualified to teach middle or high school is qualified to teach, not in any specific subject. It boils my blood every time my wife tells the story of her HS chemistry class. The teacher had been teaching history, and the school needed a chemistry teacher so, he got told to do it.
What did their class consist of? He would print out a page of paragraphs from the text book, and blank out certain words, the class period would be spent reading the text book and filling in the missing words. No labs, no lecture. Just word find in the text book.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I'm trying hard to read this as more than a complaint that "Oh noes, my pet-theory/favourite-subject isn't being taught as much as I think it should"
The general form of the story is well known.
In this case it is a scientific theory so scientists see it as bad for future science.
It could just as easily be engineers claiming about the poor quality of mathematics teaching, or CS professors complaining about the lack of independent thinking.
However, my view is that it is down to the parents to do the teaching, and to delegate to schools as they see fit, and also to make up the difference.
No-group has a right to have their pet subjects taught to children. Except the gubbernment, of course.
But- they are allowed to whine and make a noise about it.
The idea behind the public school system is, at least in theory, to give everyone the basic knowledge necessary to function in the world.
People need to be able to read, they need to be able to write, they need to be able to do math. Folks need to have at least some basic understanding of classic literature because so much of the modern world is built upon it. Folks need to have at least some basic understanding of history, they need to have some understanding of how our government works, they need to have a basic understanding of science.
We consider it fairly normal to know that the heart pumps blood around your body, for example. It may not be necessary to know exactly how many bones are in the human body, or be able to name them... But it's a good idea to know that humans have bones, and worms do not.
Obviously, individual families and parents are going to impart their own wisdom along the way... Or, at least we hope they will. But the whole point of a public school system with expectations and requirements is to establish a baseline of sorts. A foundation to build upon.
Now, you can certainly argue that any particular bit of education is or isn't necessary... Do folks really need to learn geometry? Is it essential to read Romeo and Juliet? Do we have to teach evolution?
I would argue that the scientific method - the process of testing and refining a hypothesis until you've got something useful - is absolutely essential. It's the foundation of the entire modern world. And without a grasp of the scientific method you're going to have a hard time establishing critical thinking skills.
And I would also argue that evolution is essential. The theory of evolution was developed by scientific observation and testing, it isn't something some random person just thought-up out of the blue. It has some basis in reality. And it goes a long way towards explaining how the world around us works. Why diseases change and adapt to new hosts or drugs. Why certain creatures live in one place and not another. Why we have the tremendous diversity of life on our planet. That one theory provides an awful lot of answers.
Now, I suppose, if the problem was just a lack of funding or time or something... If they just couldn't squeeze everything into the curriculum... I wouldn't be so bent out of shape. I'd be very curious what was being taught instead of evolution. And I might very well suggest that it was more important to teach the basics of evolution than to dissect a frog. But I'd at least understand what the pressures and limitations were.
As it is, however, the pressure is not one of funding or time. The reason evolution is not being taught is because it conflicts with an alternate "theory". One that was, in fact, simply thought-up out of the blue by some guy. One that is not based on the scientific method. One that does not have any basis in reality. One that cannot be objectively tested, or used to make any predictions. One that may, possibly, offer some emotional solace... But is absolutely useless in understanding the actual world around us.
I would be just as offended if they stopped teaching Shakespeare in classes for no other reason than because Twilight fans were feeling threatened.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
In other news: when controversial topics arise, non-confrontational types are reluctant to dive in. Especially when it influences their job.
If the Evolution/Creation makes teaching biology such a problem then why not teach something else.
Ok, a balanced coverage of the sciences which includes biology would be best of course but as the article says "Many high school students in the U.S. take no science classes at all, and for 25 percent of high schoolers, biology is the only one." Ideally getting a valid diploma should require more than that but if it doesn't then why push Biology so much specifically. How often does this question come up in chemistry or in physics?
I wonder if some good science could be worked into a class about electronics? I suppose that would be more of a technology than a science class but there is certainly a lot of physics and even some chemistry involved if you explain how and why things work. I remember as a kid in school I used to get so disappointed because on the rare occasion when our science textbooks got into anything remotely technological we would skip it. It's like science had to be something you could only study on paper, not something you could actually work with yourself. As tightly bound to technology as our current society is I think actually having some understanding of the "magic boxes" we are all surrounded by might do more good for waking up the dormant minds of the masses today than knowing where we come from and how the organs of a nematode function.
My math teachers were math majors in college. My English teachers were English majors in college. My science teachers were, well, adequate at teaching the curriculum they were given. Of course, in 1980, NOT teaching about evolution in biology class was akin to not teaching what a noun or verb is in English class.
As someone who was born in the U.S. but grew up in a Chinese family, let me tell you that the differences are stark. The U.S. is already a third world country by ideological and cultural standards. The population is lazy, self-entitled, undereducated, science-illiterate, unversed in either informal or formal logic, and completely averse to quality standards, quality control, or doing quality work.
All that's left is the resultant 1-or-2 generation slide into broken economy, broken infrastructure, broken governmental systems, etc. America is getting by on inertia and its population isn't doing the work to maintain its current standard of living and production, much less return it to some past glory or other.
China, on the other hand, is ruthlessly pragmatic, wholly rational-instrumental in its current approach to the world, science and math obsessed, achievement-oriented, and completely cold-blooded about it. The achievements are stunning to anyone that looks at what has been done in a few short years, and the expectations and determination are much higher. People that are busy worrying about "human rights" in China really don't get it; most of the Chinese couldn't care less about human rights right now. They want Progress, capital "P", they believe it comes from science, work, and sacrifice, and they're willing to give up almost anything to get it. They want to dominate the world economy and they're well on their way.
The recent furor over Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" demonstrates at the micro-level, in very clear terms, why China will shortly surpass the U.S. Incidentally, I grew up in a family much like that. Grades were all-important, people were called "trash" and "garbage" when they didn't achieve or perform, and standards were witheringly high. I resented it very much when I was a teenager. By the time I was in my 20s, I recalled it all with fondness and in my 30s I wish I had worked even harder than I did to meet those expectations. And at the end of the day, I don't feel "abused" at all and plan to work hard to raise my own daughter with very high academic and intellectual standards.
My wife and I are currently trying to decide whether this process will require us to leave the U.S. for either China or Eastern Europe (where she's from, and was a child prodigy at top schools under the old Soviet satellite system) in order to get a good education and avoid the dead weight of American anti-intellectual culture holding our daughter back.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I think you answered my flamebait the worst, so I'll continue the discussion from your post.
"Evolution is not some 'pet theory' but part the framework of humanist enlightenment that has proven itself again and again." is a baseless statement with the same sort of authority as my flaimbait; which is merely this: "that's how I like it".
I'm not a young earth creationist or even nearly one, but from a distance I can't see the difference between the position presented here and the one presented by "creationists".
Both groups sum up to "right thinking folk are against it" and it is an embarrassingly weak position to argue from.
The person who talked about the school boards was a bit better, but the school boards teach the things demanded by parents who call for accountability and less so the things demanded by other parents - which is to be expected.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1350807/How-humans-97-orangutans-New-research-shows-DNA-matches.html
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Actually, if the post is asserting that teachers should be trained more as teachers before they can become teachers, then that is the wrong conclusion.
The school in which I work at as an IT tech demonstrates this well. The ICT teachers are fine with the basic theory they teach year round, but as soon as they are asked a question outside of their 'comfort zone' they are utterly clueless. It's quite amusing to replace their Windows machine with a Linux one.
"Evolution occurs" should not pose any issue to any theists.
"-Only- evolution occurs" as a complete, exclusive causal explanation for intelligent life does, but it also is an unscientific, untestable premise, and for these reasons shouldn't be taught as "science" anyway.
The latter equivocation is, unfortunately, the only form of the premise Dawkins et al care about, but their objectives in this respect have more to do with book sales than anything to do with science. Teachers just need to realize this--there is no issue with "evolution occurs" being properly taught, and that is exactly as far as you can assert without abandoning science and indulging in a personal non sequitur fallacy ("evolution occurs", therefore "only evolution has occurred") for your own, non-science, reasons.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Could someone explain? What are the state requirements for someone to become a licensed biology teacher in the U.S.?
TFA says they're "[not] comfortable," not necessarily because they're unfamiliar with the subject.
But the crux of the study is what the authors call the "cautious 60 percent" who neither advocate for the science of evolution nor push creationism, but simply avoid the issue altogether. Teachers may want to avoid controversy . . .
The part about not being prepared, contrary to what the summary seems to say, refers to the students in the classes:
Not having biology taught properly, Berkman says, makes it harder for students to understand science later on. A sound science education is important, he adds, given that science and technology are so important in everyday life.
You (generally) need a teaching degree to teach in the US. You may or may not need another degree in your particular field of education. (But I don't know why you wouldn't want one). This is one barrier to someone who has a degree in a particular field leaving practice to become a teacher: they usually need an MS in education to get a certificate. I've heard of some places making temporary provisions in cases of dire need of educators or with the understanding the teacher was on track to receive the degree and get his/her certificate.
And everything I just wrote is state-by-state and even district-to-district, so YMMV. What I've seen may be entirely different from others' experiences.
I'd suspect that the teachers are more concerned with the creationist parents coming and complaining to them than they are about the evolutionist parents. I have a theory (well, it's really a hypothesis) as to why, and I'm sure others do, too.
I am not a crackpot.
Some states require middle and high school teachers to have degrees in the subject they teach. When there is a shortage of math and science teachers, the schools hire "team teachers". They pair a certified teacher with a part-time person who has the needed degree and typically has experience working in the subject field. Employers let their experienced staff take time off to teach. Students get the benefit of knowledgeable and motivated instructors and the presence of two adults in the classroom. The certified teacher manages the grade book, discipline, and interface to school administration. The subject matter expert focuses on classroom instruction, mentoring, and real-world experience.
I have seen it work well.
Honestly, I find this report hard to believe.
I wouldn't be totally shocked to find it was embellished to make a point or generate sympathy for evolutionists, because I just can't beleive creationism is gaining a foothold over real science.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
The scarier part of the summary is this: "not every biology teacher was a science major". It is, unfortunately, true. Teachers can get certified to teach biology with a degree in education and a minor (or even less in some states) in biology. Contrariwise, a person with a B.S., M.S., or even Ph.D. in biology is considered unqualified to teach their subject without significant financial and time investment for certification. While I understand that not everyone who can do science or has an advanced degree can teach well, is it not better practice to at least have some path by which they can easily and practically attain a teaching position in a quick and inexpensive manner? When non-science majors with a minimum of science education are considered more qualified by the establishment to teach science than experts in the field, is it no wonder that we are lagging in science education?
As a former teacher (and one who has done his fair share of fighting to get the right thing done ), I can tell you that it ain't fun to buck trends, even if you're not messing with political hot potatoes. I say this for two reasons:
* In nearly any school district, a primary or secondary teacher can lose his/her job by bucking curriculum "recommendations" from the district, period.
* Trying to enact change by yourself, and especially without public knowledge or support, is an exercise in pure frustration. I lucked out when getting Linux put in to replace UNIX (and to displace a good share of Windows coursework). Why? Because Novell was headquartered in Utah at the time and was a HUGE donation source for the schools, and because the school districts were still fairly agnostic about OS preferences (Microsoft hadn't really gone out of their way at the time to lavish 'gifts' on Utah schools). In spite of all these factors, I still had to explain to a number of school districts *why* Linux (and not, say, AIX, Tru64, Solaris, BSD etc... you know, the "useful UNIX versions"). Hell, I even spent a summer week on and off the phone (and fax) with the Utah state Attorney General's office trying to explain the frickin' GPL to them! There are nooks and crannies of influence who must be satisfied, and all of them will amaze, astound, and make you tear your hair out. Now if it's that much of a pain in the ass to do this for a technical subject, imagine what kind of roadblocks have to be knocked down to get something political pushed through. ...and if you think I'm kidding, Google for the Scopes Trial... it seems rather relevant, no?
Sorry man, but seeing what most teachers get paid, and what they have to put up with? I wouldn't blame them, especially in this economy, for not wanting to "man-up" about it. Hell, most of them are, sadly, too busy counting the days until retirement anyway.
Now if you want to cultivate a vigorous group of folks who will push the boundaries of their craft and actually enlighten kids? First you're going to have to pay them what they're worth, and then you're going to have to take a machete to the unholy bureaucracy that public education has become. Good luck convincing taxpayers to help with the former, and doubly so when it comes to trying at the latter. Oh, and then you get to weed out the dead wood and the Unions. On those fronts, you'd have an easier time accomplishing World Peace. :/
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Good old 1980... what a civilized time to be a young man. In history class we learned about the Scopes Monkey Trial and all had a good laugh at our ancestors' backward ways...
Alas, for the dumbening of the US.
will.i.am _
_ you believe in an intelligent designer? A lazy one, who needs billions of years to give us his words, which is in its first parts contrary to evolutionary knowledge? A creator of people who have to told nice little tales about 5yo kid to convince scientist, geeks + nerds. You kick your society back into stone age, if your science based on fairy tales. There is no afterlive, there is no god. And people are intelligent, because they don't believe in gods
_ it's thinking.
You don't make teachers teach about abortion, so why make them teach other difficult subjects?
How about, "because abortion isn't a fundamental part of any reasonable biology curriculum."
Seriously, you can't see the difference here?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
What kind of God is it you have that simply snaps his or her fingers and "poof" everything is created just as is convenient for your personal gratification? My God placed all the necessary building blocks of life into our galaxy (and likely others) and then amused him/her self watching how life developed through evolution. You shouldn't need to tell your daughter creationists are idiots, just that they are mis-guided and don't understand the basic facts of life on our planet. If the detailed explanations you seek from science to reassure you that evolution is indeed fact were applied to your religion it would fail miserably.
A good teacher trying to teach something they don't know is indeed a problem, but a subject-matter-expert who isn't the best teacher has its own issues.
Yes, I know degrees don't tell the whole story, but still...
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I find it ironic that scientific people, that pride themselves on being open minded, are so willing to be closed minded when it comes to the THEORY of evolution. Nothing is conclusive about it. In fact, there have been numerous scientific studies on the possibility of creation. You cannot dismiss creationism simply because it is associated with religion. The fact that the earth revolves around the sun has been proven. Period. I find that species that evolve into completely different species requires more "faith" on my part than believing in a creator.
They just taught what they're told to taught.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
The US used to be great. It used to be the land of opportunity. Now, it's the land of the petty, the vindictive, the greedy, the power-hungry and the entitled.
The never-ending debate about evolution (which is clearly evident to anyone with a brain and at least 1 eye), will never be settled. Religious organizations (pick your denomination) refuse to give up control of their sheep. True science threatens that.
Meanwhile, the science zealots refute Faith, even though they can't disprove it using their own vaunted methods.
It boils down to a simple matter of agreeing to disagree and allow others to live their freaking lives as THEY choose to.
Federally funded school systems should stop playing politics and trying to control people with textbooks. Present the main theories and let people think for themselves (or not).
Genetics Proves Evolution: The Creationist's Galileo Moment
When chicken embryos start to develop they have teeth buds and the beginnings of multi segmented tails. As they develop their DNA tells the developing embryo to absorb them. Much like human embryo's absorb embryonic gill slits. Now if you turn off the genes that control this absorption instruction you get chicken embryos that develop long multi segmented dinosaur tails and meat eating dinosaur teeth complete with the serrated inside edge. Other studies have also been successful in regressing feathers into scales.
This is not hypothesis. This is not supposition. This is not interpretation. This cold hard, hold in your hands see with your own eyes type reproducible proof. It has already been done, in Canadian universities no less, and is documented and reproducible. One more thing. No DNA was ever added to the bird DNA. This was done using 100% pure chicken DNA.
They have proved that bird DNA contains genes that create dinosaur characteristics. The only way this can happen is through the evolutionary process.
So like when Galileo first pointed his telescope at the heavens and learned that Aristotle was wrong modern scientists have pointed their microscopes at developing bird embryos and learned that they are correct. Evolution is real.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1026340/Jurassic-Park-comes-true-How-scientists-bringing-dinosaurs-life-help-humble-chicken.html
Note:The 'Daily Mail' isn't the gold standard for scientific reporting but here it does a good job of describing the research so the public can understand it (creationists excepted). Names of people and institutions where the work was done are given allowing Internet searches to the relevant papers and science reporting.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Is our society better off with a well educated public? You get what you pay for. The best education system is in Finland; teachers are highly trained, highly effective, highly respected and highly paid.
...When I need them ? You deserve at least "+6 insightful" on this one.
It's a perfectly acceptable theory to discuss and obviously widely accepted.
It's when they teach it as a dogma there are problems.
What the hell 'Murika. I'm from an ex soviet country and even here, in order to teach something you must have a degree in it from a higher education institution.
This aplies to everything, especially things like Biology, History etc...
The only place where you can get away with not having a diploma is perhaps PE.
"It shows the importance, the authors say, of training teachers well before they step into the class."
Yeah. Cuz we couldn't work _that_ out by ourselves.
Simple, increase pay for teachers and slash taxes for them. Hell, that should be the norm, otherwise the government is taxing it's own money that it is givving to the teachers. Ouroboros anyone?
As a Christian I take issue with this. This constant battle that science and religion are incompatible is ludicrous. Newton saw his discovery of gravity as a reinforcer for his belief in God, not a reason to think he doesn't exist. I see no reason to stop teaching evolution, I do think however intelligent design should be taught at the same time thought.
...why China is outperforming the US in education?
I'm thoroughly fed up with the hypocritical, narrow-minded, ignorant attitudes of American society, especially with respect to religion. We have a President who, in his State of the Union address, talks about the need to do a better job at innovation and education, and here we are, wasting time, money, and effort teaching religious doctrine in science classes in public schools! Meanwhile, the Bible-thumpers are lamenting that their jobs are being outsourced to China and India. Maybe you would have a job that didn't involve greeting people at Wal-Mart if you actually learned something besides how Jesus died for your sins, dumbshits. Maybe you wouldn't have had to default on your subprime loan if you had learned how to think critically when you were in school, instead of obsessing over the opiate that is American pop culture.
It never ceases to amaze me how incredibly, overwhelmingly, willfully stupid some people are. You would think these religious freaks would be able to connect the dots, but evangelism has never been about getting people to think for themselves--quite the opposite, in fact.
That would depend on the grade level in question. Most primary teaching certificates will require an elementary education degree, but secondary certificates typically require an education degree as well as a dual major in the field of their primary subject (or at least a boatload of credit hours).
What can (and often does happen) is that in a small school or cash strapped district (often both together) they don't have the resources to hire a biology teacher who might only have enough students to teach two out of the six periods in the day (and you certainly can't expect a teacher to move to town on 1/3rd of a entry level teaching salary). What happens then is a case where you might hire a chemistry teacher who also teaches biology, physics, and all of the math (often teaching multiple subjects in a single class - i.e. the kids on the left get trig while the kids on the right get algebra).
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing"
Yeah ... [citation needed] because all other indicators paint you as a liar unless you're talking about a private/magnate school. You have either discovered a statistical anomaly or are confused about what is meant by "public school."
If we want well trained and highly educated people to become teachers, we have to be willing to pay for it. If you had $75k in student loans, why on earth would you become a high school or middle school science teacher making next to nothing? We don't pay teachers what they're worth and it's only rarely that we happen to get incredibly passionate and intelligent people in the career since there is no motivation to become a teacher once you leveraged the rest of your life on a costly education.
Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
" ... as not every biology teacher was a science major ... "
Would that be acceptable in any other subject area? That, say, not every music teacher is an arts major.
America, Home of the Brave.
(Can only speak for Canada/Alberta here - but I have several friends and relatives in the teaching profession)
When you get your education degree, you do specialize - you go to school to be a math teacher or a science teacher or an English teacher.
When you get into the schools, it seems to be a whole new ball game - you get put where the school needs you, and it may be a subject you know little or nothing about. Add a bit of office politics to the mix, and suddenly your expert English teacher is stuck teaching math...
The irony being that if we paid the teachers enough in the first place, we wouldn't have people stupid enough to be "teapartiers".
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Instead of arguing about evolution, the teachers should teach about religion.
When I was going to school, teachers wouldn't not miss the chance to tow the party line, and voice their opinions. Many would talke about their support for the US against communism. My 4-th grade teacher would denouce the Civil Righs movement and say that to join the "Black Panters", you had to kill a white person.
Don't miss this opportunity to remind students that the Catholic church protects pediophilacs and sacrifices children. Tell them that Jesus was a political criminal. Remind them that the Bible says that during the trial of Jesus, Piotious Piolot gave Jesus a chance to demonstrate that he was the "Son of God". Why did Jesus perform miriacles on other stated occasions, when he had a full entarage just waiting for Him to prove himself?
Instead of being silent, use the occasion to read these quotes:
http://dailyatheistquote.com/list.aspx
I am sure some will sink in!
That's probably what my post would have looked like (with more F*CKING! emphasis) had you not been faster.
I mean I know now that you're a pretty backward country but how can someone teach something he doesn't know ?
Greanted you need some sort of training to teach (a teaching degree of some sort, we call it CAPES in France) but to actually apply for the CAPES you NEED a bachelor or a masters degree in a relevant field.
We are of course talking about highschool teaching here or middleschool not primary, but I doubt you have actual biology classes in primary school do you ?
What exactly is the point of training someone to teach something he doesn't know ?
I'm really astonished for lack of a better word. This is by far the most f*cked up thing I've ever heard of.
I'd suspect that the teachers are more concerned with the creationist parents coming and complaining to them than they are about the evolutionist parents.
I suspect you're right - and schools these days are fairly risk-averse when it comes to parents and curriculum. Once you start down the "you don't need to teach the kids this" path, it's pretty hard to stop.
Which reminds me, I need to read up on our local Idiot Act (gov't passed a law allowing parents "to have their child excluded, without academic penalty, from instruction, exercises, and the use of instructional materials that deal primarily and explicitly with religion, sexuality, or sexual orientation". My daughter starts kindergarten this year, and I'm *so* looking forward to abusing this rule in the name of sanity. ("Well, Mr. Teacher, I see here that you're using Timmy and Suzy in your math example. I feel that you're implying a heterosexual relationship here, and thus I don't feel my daughter should have to learn about multiplication in that manner. We're gonna go to the park instead.")
(closed captioning for the humor impaired) Yes, I'll make sure my daughter learns multiplication.
What happens is that to be allowed to teach you don't have to know much about the subject you are teaching - but you have to be licensed to say that you can teach - which is a completely different matter. 3-4 years of study in how to become a teacher but only superficial knowledge in the subjects you are going to teach. The method of teaching is more important than the knowledge.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Perfect answer, hopefully the point is made.
I am from India. I have to differ from your world view. I travel between India, US and a bit of China. The idea of Americans as lazy, self-entitled, undereducated, science-illiterate is lazy generalization. The same can be said of any community.
The idea of America still remains. This country still attracts the best of the talent across the world (even if getting a visa is a pain in the back for anyone out of G7.) This is the only country where you become an 'American' the moment you are in the political borders. And the political system more or less works (compared to the rest of the world.)
What can cause a decline to US is the assault on the American middle class...I hope the plutocrats are not so stupid as to kill the golden goose.
You can bring up your child in China or India or anywhere else. Nothing wrong with that. Your child should be fine if you give him/her the right values. But I can see you made sure your child is an American citizen.
Tat Tvam Asi
please
It's blaming religion, not praising it. I agree, it should be more neutral, but you seem to have it wrong.
Public release date: 12-Jun-2003
Natural selection's fingerprint identified on fruit fly evolution
Researchers at the University of Rochester have produced compelling evidence of how the hand of natural selection caused one species of fruit fly to split into two more than 2 million years ago. The study, appearing in today's issue of Nature, answers one of evolutionary biologists' most basic questions--how do species divide--by looking at the very DNA responsible for the division. Understanding why certain genes evolve the way they do during speciation can shed light on some of the least understood aspects of evolution.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-06/uor-nsf061203.php
My comment: Natural selection is scientific fact. Evolution by natural selection is the theory.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
- Why does a worm have a heart that beats?
- Why does a pig have ears and why can we implant pig parts into humans (heart valves)?
- Why are mice and other mammals used to test chemicals and treatments before humans trials?
- Why do dogs/rabits eat almost the same foods to survive that we do?
- Why do insects have hearts and legs?
- Why do fish have hearts and need oxygen to survive?
- Are shark fins similar to legs and arms?
We are all made of the same building blocks. Over millions of years, more complexity was added to get to us humans.
Show her an Atari 2600 video game and explain how those lead to WoW and Farmville. Evolution, that's how.
A majority of these articles are posted on US-based websites and frequently (though not always) from a US perspective.
With a daughter who will be entering the school system in a few years I find this very concerning. I would be absolutely fucking furious to find out that teachers were avoiding teaching evolution properly.
I don't even understand the problem here. I'm convinced that the so-called controversy has been overblown on all sides. Perhaps I live in the wrong (right?) part of the country but I've never met anyone, even those who were religious, who didn't except the idea of evolution. The Catholic church has formally embraced evolution. Do a few idiots in these other sects of Christianity really have that much pull over scientific discourse in this country? Is the media simply blowing things out of proportion for the sake of ratings boosts? I have found that some people do tend to overstate the threat religion supposedly poses to them.
But then, it seems American culture has this imbecilic tendency be polarized about every damn thing and they're quick to throw the baby out with the bath water. Certain details regarding evolution turn out to be wrong, which is inevitable, and the ignorant see that as evidence that the entire concept should be abandoned.
Is this some kind of concerted effort to make Americans stupid at everything?
It may not be the case in other parts of America, but here in Texas, more often that not they hire coaches and have them teach things like History or Biology. Things that the district thinks are unimportant.
Unfortunately not everyone cares enough about their own children to do so.
There, fixed that for you. The uproar on both sides of this issue shows how unwilling today's parents are to do any actual teaching of their own. How about taking responsibility for how your child is raised? Too many think "I got him to 5, now the schools can raise him". If the schools are teaching something you disagree with, take the time and teach your child yourself. If you don't understand the subject enough to teach it yourself, either learn the subject, or stop complaining.
I'm not calling teachers wimpy, but they have very little to fight for anymore. They *are* going to fold on their curriculum if there's enough public pressure (read: further threat of job security). Often they quit teaching altogether.
Here are some example of topics that teachers just won't teach in California:
1) All 4-6 grade students in California have to learn about the Spanish Catholic missions built throughout the state and how much the natives welcomed the religion and the establishment of permanent cities. Except that's not how it happened, teachers know it, and they teach it because it's part of the California standards. If they say, "The Catholics came to the west coast, enslaved natives, forced their religion on them, and killed those that tried to keep their own religions.," they'd be tossed out on their asses.
2) No president chopped down a cherry tree and then ratted himself out to his father.
3) Many of the founding fathers owned slaves.
4) Slavery was popular and the entirety of the initial financial success of the states was built on the backs of kidnapped, raped, beaten, and worked black people.
5) The Civil War still produces some animosity throughout the South.
6) The "first Thanksgiving" may have happened, but it was cautious and tenuous at best. The pilgrims soon saw the natives not as temporary saviors, but as savages who needed to go away or be purged. Even if they changed to Puritan Christianity, they would have still been seen and treated as beings just above animals and far below humans.
7) The US is *not* a meritocracy. That was the plan, but classes carried over from Europe and further developed here. That's a myth perpetuated by people who want *you* to work hard for *their* benefits.
8) No, not everyone can be president. Not anymore. You need to have a saintly background and/or a TON of money. ... the list goes on and on. Essentially, anything that forces children to confront tradition is sharply argued against and often the source of bad reviews. Call it the "snowflake" or "hover-parent" phenomenon if you wish, I call it the "litigation scare".
It shows the importance, the authors say, of training teachers well before they step into the class
Actually, somewhere around the 1960s-1970s, most states adopted a notion of having colleges offer education majors and required teaching certificates. The idea being to teach teachers how to teach. Unfortunately, they were taught how to teach, but not what to teach. I was lucky in high school. My math teacher had a degree in Math, my chemistry teacher was working on her dissertation in Chemistry.
Now, though, math and science majors are not allowed to teach in schools, unless they posses a teaching certificate, which usually is an additional 60 hours of credit work. It seems that we as a country would be better served if teachers were required to major in some subject matter and take a couple of courses, like a minor, in managing the classroom, etc. Maybe then, we wouldn't have biology teachers unsure of things like evolution.
College level?? In Europe, teachers have usually masters in their field. At least at the high school level...
Evolution -> has gaps large enough to drive a truck through, assumes no real design in the universe, that the patterns in nature are all random happenstance, presumes the lack of any driving force, fails to explain DNA properly, pretends that "irreducable complexity" does not exist.
Creationism -> A broad term encompassing those believing in evolution guided by "intelligent design" over vast swaths of time, and the "young earth" crowd espousing a literal 6 * 24hr day creation. (I'm not even getting into a word study on the hebrew word of "yom" and how it can be literal or figurative).
Why can we not teach that we don't have the answer because we are standing at the end looking back and guessing how we got here? We dig through the scrap heat of history and try to put the pieces together. We cannot prove via the scientific process the existence or lack of a driving force, because if it exists, it has intelligence, and if that intelligence far outstrips our own, then it can thwart or avoid our tests.
Rather we could simply teach our kids rational thinking and that truth exists, and they are choosing what they choose to believe.
The separation of Church & State does NOT necessitate the separation of God & Country.
If they would teach biology they would not have to teach evolution, lighting the path of the ignorant leads them to the truth. No one should be able to become educated and stay a creationist. I realize that there are heads-in-sand people out there, but mental illness is not an excuse.
They cannot teach it because God punishes liars, even though he also teaches to forgive them, and stuff :D
nuf sed
Table-ized A.I.
America. A land where young-earth creationists stuff their fat mouths with genetically-modified food, confident in the God-given fact that that carbon emissions from their SUVs will help the plants grow (It's what they crave!).
America. A land where the descendants of immigrants build walls to keep out immigrants.
America. A land where a number one song with the word "Ironic" in its title had no examples of irony in it. Sure it was recorded by a Canadian, but the poor girl was probably overwhelmed by her Southern neighbor's complete inability to recognize it.
America. I will be unamazed to watch them die off one by one from MRSA after botched liposuction surgery. Probably in a sex tape or while on a reality show.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Why is it always evolution? Seriously. Why do you care whether people understand biological evolution?
Of all the things I could wish were taught better in class, the top of my list would be math, communication, history and physics. Evolution's niche of biology affects me almost oh lets see, never. Physics, math, communication and history on the other hand all actually have major effects on society at large.
PS Communication includes reading, writing, logic, spelling and grammar. Math includes financial basics like loans and compound interest as well as other basics.
These are where we are failing our children, IMHO, not evolution of all things.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
A short reminder for those who forget - half of all teachers in America quit within 5 years.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Believing in God doesn't mandate a belief in Creationism (though believing in Creationism requires the belief in God). Anyone whose faith is so fragile that it could be damaged by a rigorous class in evolutionary biology should go back to CCD or Sunday School or whatever their faith's equivalent is.
Let me tell you a story on how we deal with creationism in Belgium. I went to a catholic high school, no particular reason it was just the best in the area, and as part of the deal you get an hour of religious instruction each week. This class was taught by an old priest, couple years away from retirement. We had 1 (exactly one) creationist in our year, an evangelical christian, and one day he brings up creationism in this class and how a catholic school should treat the subject more seriously (there was literally just one sentence in biology class to the effect that "some people don't 'believe' in evolution" and that was it.) So this priest just looks at him and then laughs out loud in his face and it was like a cartoon where you see a character slowly become red from the bottom to the top of their face, like he was about the explode. You see this priest was a teacher and an intellectual and didn't have any problem reconciling all of those things with his faith and wasn't about to go about ignoring evidence to make this guy happy. These biology "teachers" in the US should be ashamed of themselves.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Certainly sounds like somebody that spent four years studying teaching at an American university.
A teacher who teaches politics still has to teach political systems they disagree with.
A teacher who teaches "belief systems" still has to teach belief systems they disagree with.
Note/Disclaimer: I cringe that I just referred to science as a belief system, but you get my drift.
A tack which I've always generates some traction is to state that they could be right. God may have created us an monkeys separately and completely formed, but he also created an awful lot of evidence that we are decended from a common ancestor. I wonder why he did that.
How can people deny the science behind any form of reality? Creationists, stop all modern stuff, no medical or technological stuff.
Be a hunter/ gatherer and rescind ALL modern stuff. Seriously! Die or go away. Grow your own sustinence and eschew all modern stuff.
Please.
They aren't "forced" to.
They can find another job.
But if they aren't teaching evolution, then they aren't teaching biology.
If they're paid to teach biology, then they're responsible for teaching evolution.
Science is doing fine in schools . Read this for counter point.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/kids-study-bees/
You can teach kids that the Easter bunny made the world but when they go to compete in the global science arena they don't bring him along. Why? Because real science just is. Everyone knows the formula for gunpowder, there is no discussion.
Texas (for example) is an uber conservative christian state . Lets examine this good christian state. You can, buy an assault rifle, fully auto class 3 weapon, electrocute a retard, castrate a pervert (with real castration),Meet up with one of the hundreds of hate groups(most hate groups), Knock up a teen (highest teen preg rate in USA) ETC. What a joke.
PS: I don't think the original poser RTFA where is this 'study'? I see a link to a bunch of retards trying to sue their way into converting a public school to a private christian one.
Well, I have went through biology teaching in former Soviet Union while it was collapsing. Evolution teaching was the only thing they could teach children in former USSR, this went well along communists ideas and rejection of any religion. Our teacher was once an active participant in the communist party and you should understand how certain she was in teaching evolutionary science. All well, right? Until the very last day of the class, when she was probably needed to ask the very important question - "So who thinks that evolution theory is right?" She had certainly made a good effort to prove it within several months. Couple of people openly disagreed with her stating their faith, while majority of class 25-30 people sat quietly agreeing with what the teacher was saying, Until the culmination came. This teacher said - "And I believe that life on Earth was brought by UFOs". So much for the "exact science", ideology and being an expert in evolution with many years of experience teaching it. To me this statement ruined all of the conclusions that she made about evolution during the class.
And until they're told of the BEST GUESS at the truth can they then branch out and decide what they will act on.
The parents are NOT the customers.
The children and the future of them are the customers.
The future isn't against evolution being taught and the children don't yet know anything other than what their parents tell (who are not the customer), so cannot yet give a demand to the teachers.
If you don't like evolution, don't home school since this is your DEMAND you are right and correct. Except if you KNOW, there is no FAITH. But you can teach them what you think is right and let the child learn from both the best of society in the past has learned and what you believe to be true.
Or do you not have faith that your truth can withstand scrutiny?
Now go ahead and prove evolution by creating life from scratch in the lab.
I'd be happy to oblige. Now all you need to give me are a planet much like what earth was like about 4 billion years ago and a few hundred million years time to run trillions of biochemical experiments. Then I think it might be quite easy.
Ongoing evolution on the other hand is another story.
Evolution can be seen for example in the DNA of all living things. It can be simulated on a computert. Observed in bacteria in almost real time and traced in the fossil record. It is after all a very simple concept that only requires variation and selection. I highly recommend Relics of Eden a book written by a christian. Anybody who read that would have a really hard time to deny that humans are the outcome of an evolutionary process.
When 1person suffers from a delusion,it is called insanity.When many people suffer from a delusion,it is called religion
A recent program on PBS (I think) that discussed the The State of Tennessee v. Scopes in 1925 where a teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution. It was said after the trial (teacher was found guilty and fined $100), schools across the country continued to teach biblical creation. After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, evolution was brought into school curriculum because, "we are behind the Soviets in teaching science."
As science is taking a backseat to sales, marketing, and religious dogma, I can see how evolution will be removed from school curriculum. But then those godless commie's in other countries will churn out more engineers and scientists while we bitch and moan.
mfwright@batnet.com
In Europe, this ain't even an issue. Evolution isn't taught in school, it is fact. School explains the fact same as school explains gravity. You have to be educated that gravity exists, just how it actually works.
That evolution is even up for debate shows a LOT about the USA. There shouldn't even be a debate. You don't debate facts. And if you claim evolution is not a fact... happy beard in the sky day.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
makes medicine, makes the internet, makes planes fly, explains why birds fly and where babies comes from also tells us that evolution is how we got to where we are. Modern biology *is* evolutionary biology. If you want to become a doctor or a scientist or even a moderately informed citizen--you need to understand evolution and fit it into your belief system somewhere just like millions of other people before you have--including millions of engineers/doctors/scientists who are also Christians.
Try that.
I'm not sure why this story wasn't tagged as troll, it seems to merit it. As the RTFAers have noted, it misstates the actual results. I presume this "exaggeration" is to spark a bunch of posts by others for whatever jollies the author gets from such, which seems trollish to me. Sadly, one of the few thoughtful posts gets smacked by "you're stupid" replies, even though it comes for a person with a pro-evolution belief (person wondering about a good source of facts to support teaching her daughter the theory). She has a good point, one I've often had as well, that just because a bunch of people believe something to be true doesn't make it so, no matter how well educated or respected they may be. So better to demonstrate the facts and then explain why the theory is the best explanation. If you have the facts as a basis and are teaching students how to think for themselves, then by all means go ahead and also teach every theory or major notion in current circulation - critical thinking is what you want to stimulate, not turning out regurgitating puppets. Those here touting the line that we need to educate students so they know evolution is the truth - really? That's how you want to phrase it? Evolutionary Religion 101 perhaps? We'll teach you what is the "truth" as we see it and make sure you get educated so well no one can tell you otherwise. Now who have I heard accusing who of doing just that on a related subject?
All life around you proves evolution. Just as pretty much everything around you proves gravity. Or conservation of energy. Or that is something can fail, it will fail. Or that my cat canhascheezburger if I am to busy commenting on Slashdot, proving that the ordinary housecat has evolved to the top hunter of the world, the one that gets others to do the actual hunting.
The real proof however is in watching a creationist try to explain away T-rex. Real scientist are not sure if T-rex was a hunter or a scavenger. Creationist claim he was a plant eater. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Museum No, I did NOT make this up. This place exists, but it shouldn't. America, hang you head in collective shame)
I don't know what the plants were like in T-Rexes time but they must have made being a vegan a LOT more exciting back then.
Small birds evolving different beaks to deal with different seeds because the best seed eater is the best breeder? I can buy that. T-rex ordering a salad I can not.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I laugh because given the probability that creating life is so small, and even smaller is the ability to create life which can design microprocessors, create musical masterpieces which can be reproduced, lament another's passing and be joyful when your team wins. I love when scientists beat the drum of evolution because it gives them purpose. As scientists they have a natural tendency, indeed the need to discover and can't help themselves when their discoveries are so trivial that they can't fully explain life. Evolution is the only thing that most scientists can grasp and not even presenting another theory on life is ridiculous. If evolution was indeed the mechanism by which we came to be then wouldn't you expect that over the millions of years other species could in fact create music, write down some plays or something...where are the species which are "close" to human but not quite....Chimps, Whales, Ants...c'mon. No, it seems that we are so far above the other creatures that inhabit this planet that we must have "evolved" this way. It's like saying that given the same ingredients and lots of time only one pie out of 1 trillion attempts is good enough to eat...everything else is no edible. Really, it sounds as though we cannot imagine something greater than ourselves, something that is so abstract from our limited thoughts that we will not even admit that it's possible that evolution is not how we arrived at this place. Sure we can make genetic soup, but all we know for sure is that if we create something that is more advanced than us we will destroy it because of natural selection...which would seem to conclude that evolution is it's own worst enemy.
If I had the power to set curriculums but didn't have the balls/backing to take a stand against mystics, here's what I'd do.
Don't stress evolution. Instead, talk about how science works. Explain what a "theory" is, how they come into being and how they're tested. And then do not move on until the student understand these basics. Make it 50% of their grade if you have to.
Only then can you get into details. If the mystics demand that faith be taught as a rival to evolution, let it happen; all you have to do is frame the issues in scientific terms. Let's see how long faith lasts as a "theory," in the face of kids being assigned to come up with falsifiability tests for it. Let's talk about exploratory experiments and all the observed evidence that leads people to suspect and form the "theory" of creationism. It'll be a mockery and the mystics will demand creationism be withdrawn from science class, since those fucking science teachers keep talking about things in terms of science.
You see, what the mystics don't seem to get yet, is that a science class that teaches evolution but not creationism, is actually neutral on the subject of creationism. If creationism is forced on the class and gets discussed as science, that class will necessarily become anti- religion, not pro- religion. There is no way to talk about the world in terms of observation and confirmation and not have religion come out looking fishy. So the last thing religion proponents should want, is for their subject to come up in a context where students have to look at things in those terms. They should be fighting to include creationism in literature class, where it's actually pretty strong and will come out looking good.
The job of a science teacher isn't to tell kids how the world works; it's to tell kids how to figure out how the world works. Don't let the kids ever walk out with the impression (which they'll tell to their parents) that you told them they are "descended from monkeys." Give them evidence; it's not your fault that 100% of the available evidence just happens to suggest that humans and apes shared a common ancestor. Invite them to find any evidence which doesn't fit.
Give in on the specific theories, and fight hard for the method. They can't question you on this. The nuts are able to get away with saying, "science class should expose our children to all the possibilities," but they won't get away with "science class should teach our kids to ignore their observations" or "science class should not explain how theories are tested."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The irony being that if we paid the teachers enough in the first place, we wouldn't have people stupid enough to be "teapartiers".
As opposed to insanity, that is, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? I think most people agree that education is really important, including most teapartiers. I also see agreement that a considerable portion of public education isn't working. But disagreement comes in figuring out a fix for the problem.
As I see it, underfunding the teachers is a problem, but it is more a symptom than the core problem. In my view, the core problem is that many public schools have strayed from and in some cases have abandoned the primary goal of educating and training students. And as long as a school doesn't try to do its job and there's no incentive to improve things, then additional funds are pretty much wasted.
We can talk about how "stupid" the teapartiers are, or we can talk about fixing yet another case where government throws good money after bad.
Seriously, that's one hell of a coherent argument.
I find it kind of funny - since around 1950 or so, Catholicism has officially had zero problems with evolution as science (and said nothing on the matter until then), and you'll find the same story with most of the mainstream denominations.
IMHO, the ID vs. Evolution crap (seriously - the whole controversy and ensuing politics are pure crap) has come about exactly as you've described... and came from two general sources:
* reactionary fundamentalists who found common cause with right-leaning commentators and politicians
* arrogant elitists who found common cause with hard-left politicians and commentators.
A pox on all their houses. :(
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
...and logic gets a flamebait moderation. How troublesome that parents should be responsible for their children outside of food and clothes.
This is definitely good news for me. My wife and I play a very active role in educating our children. So while all of those children whose parents just dumped them off at school are getting a horrible education, my children will be surpassing them. For instance, my son in Kindergarten can read above a third grade level here in Georgia while the MAJORITY of the children in his class can barely read at all. It pisses me off too when the teachers act like my children were just born smart and that I am lying when I tell them that we study TOGETHER atleast an hour a night beyond what the school has been teaching them.
My children understand evolution and who Darwin was. My 9 year old daughter knows basic algebra and American history. I plan on teaching her beginning programming concepts this summer as well as more advanced writing techniques.
I manage to do all this while working a 60-80 work week. I'm not saying I'm some kind of super parent, quite the opposite. I'm saying that if I can manage to raise intelligent, well rounded, and physically fit children, then anybody can. You just have to prioritize your life and realize that what REALLY matters is your children.
Sure, I have no real hobbies. I don't play video games or watch sports. I spend almost ALL of my free time taking care of those children and continuing my education by taking distance learning college courses. If a parent isn't willing to sacrifice their time, then they shouldn't have had children.
So I say go ahead and let the teachers avoid teaching fundamental science, I'll teach it my damn self and MY children will have an advantage over all of those children whose parents can't give a damn.
"It is not enough merely to win; others must lose."
— Gore Vidal
That creationists and evolutionists stop bickering. The fact is that we are here NOW (for better or worse) and we need to enjoy the present and spare some thought on the future.
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. That's 152 years ago, six generations ago. Within less than a decade, the fossil record provided overwhelming proof that his theory of natural selection was correct. Late 20th Century and early 21st Century genetic research has provided additional irrefutable, supporting evidence. Charles Darwin was correct. Scientifically this has been known for well over a century.
And yet Creationism, a.k.a. Intelligent Design, still prevails in many classrooms.
We have historical precedence for this, the Ptolemaic system. It held sway scientifically for over 1400 years. Many regarded the Copernican system as blasphemy many decades after it was scientifically established. It took centuries to overcome this hurdle.
I suspect the same will be true for Evolution versus Creationism. Perhaps in 2111, Evolution will be taught in every American public school classroom ... but then again, perhaps not.
HRH The Duke of Windsor
The way to deal with it is to tell the student that whether or not they accept evolution...
There is an even better way which points out that really they probably believe in evolution too. Just ask them whether they were worried about the swine flu outbreak last year or the bird flu a few years before. Assuming that they respond that these were valid causes for some concern ask them why because, if there is no evolution, then there will be no change in infectious diseases either so there is nothing to be concerned about. Then let them think about that for a while.
While many people may profess otherwise when push comes to shove they do believe in science. This latest science-religion controvesy is utter nonsense. Science and religion have coexisted well for hundreds of years. Yes, with occasional conflicts - but lets not forget that a lot of science was actually conducted by religion early on. It only seems to be recently that a few idiots on the fringe of religions seem to have garnered undue support...which is probably not unrelated to the declining educational standards in schools.
" it's what scientists accept that will be taught."
This is total antithetical to science. The fact that scientists accept it is not the reason it should be taught, rather the reason is that all evidence scientists accept it is because ALL evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that evolution is a fact. We are the way we are because our ancestors evolved in ways that left us with the genetics that we have. There is no other rational explanation.
The teacher should have pointed out the fallacy in the student's reasoning. The student nor the teacher evolved from "monkeys", but it is virtually certain that both evolved from an ancestor that shared an ancestor with ancestor of monkeys. In this context the teacher would then be in a position to begin to enumerate the great many reasons scientists know this to be true. Namely, the many features their ancestors share in common. More importantly, not only do they share such features in common but what we know about the genetics of each of these features indicates that these features share their "similarity" all the way down to the molecular level of organization. Consequently, if they did not descend from a common ancestor one is forced to confront the necessity of developing an alternative explanation that doesn't involve anything about these organisms that science has been able to learn in the past 200 years, whether it be their anatomy, their physiology, their genetics, their ecology, their behavior, or any other known aspect of their biology. There is no testable, scientific alternative explanation that has yet been proposed. Scientists accept the theory of evolution 1) because there is no credible alternative explanation, 2) all efforts to scientifically reject Darwin's theory have been rejected as inconsistent with observable facts, and 3) because of its explanatory power. We can learn even more about the biology of these animals by examining the consequences of evolution by means of natural selection.
America hasn't jumped the shark. Sharks will probably outlast America, as it lets its education system fall behind in science and technology to other nations, such as the Chinese. In the end, survival of the fittest has some very real consequences.
Teachers have become political toys within the system. A parent may call a mayor,a principal,a congressman, and the teacher is left twisting in the wind. The only way that teachers can actually teach is to eliminate parental influence on the school system. And it's not just in the sciences either. Classics that should be studied in literature may easily upset parents due to racial or ethnic portions of the works and God help the teacher if some nut job parent considers any portion of a classic to sexual in nature. There is no greater hazard to education in America than the tragic malformed,ignorant, all too common, parent.
I seriously don't understand all the hub bub. Look, there is only so much instructional time in Junior High and High School Biology anyways. When I was in High School, the teacher spent, 1 Day describing the basics of evolutionary theory, and in fact then said, however some people believe in creationism. Which you believe is not important for the context of this class, as we are focused on actually examining and learning about the differences in life. Evolution didn't even get brought up for the next 179 days of the school calendar. Frankly, I was fine with that, if I wanted to learn more about bio, then with a bit of basic understanding, then it would make sense in College, or advanced AP bio to be introduced. I just can't get over people throwing a fit over something that really I don't understand why its 1. a big deal, or 2. why it is such a big deal based on the total class room time actually spent on it. Maybe the way science was taught has changed in the last 20 years... who knows.
I knew a teacher in Austin who was paying for school supplies out of her own (underpaid) pockets. And I remember seeing statistics that there were more non-teaching staff than teachers in the district. Time to google...
The school district employs 12,183 people. Of these, 6079 are teachers (that is less than half). Now look at the reductions:
In other words, teachers are 49.8% of the staff, but 86.9% of the reductions.
What they ought to do is fire 450 administrators.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The creation story, as told in the Bible, is a parable, intended to make intelligible to primitive tribes that God had created the world --- it's not literal historical truth, and it's only attempts to view it as such which cause the difficulties which you cite.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
This is just freaking sad. In the 21 st century human knowledge is still not being exposed for debate because of mysticism and fear.
We're all the descendants of retarded fish frog squirrel monkeys!
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/155351/retard-babies-butt-sex
In the US, the counties pay the teachers, and the state and federal governments tax them. The state and federal governments also give money to the counties. But it's far simpler to have government employees pay taxes just like everyone else than deal with the complexities of exempting them, esp since multiple governments tax them.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Hint: the "government" that is paying them is not the same "government" that is taxing them.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Why is a teacher allowed to chose not to teach evolution?
School is supposed to be about facts. Grounded, proven facts to educate kids. Evolution is a fact, its been proven time and time again scientifically. So why is a teacher allowed to not teach it because they arent comfortable with it? Isnt educating their job? If they dont want to teach evolution then they should be teaching something and make room for a teacher who is willing to cover it.
We dont have to look any further than our own bodies for proof of evolution. We share brain sections with repitles and other animals, our eyes are on the front of our heads because we are predators, we have finger and toe nails for clawing and killing, we have organs that are are out growing and do not need like the pancreas, we have canine teeth for biting and tearing meat, sexual urges like men wanting to sleep with many women in most cases because males have a ingrained desire to spread the seed and women have more of a desire to stay with one male because they are more nurturing, just like women desire decorations with lots of pillows and comfort other things because they are nesting like animals do, we have territorial instincts animals have, and so many other things about us directly linked to animals.
The reason many dont want to believe in evolution is because mankind of self centered and selfish. We want to be made to feel important, we want to be special and not just something that evolved from an animal. People also like easy answers there is no greater example of that then "everything happens for a reason", thats no answer. Its just a simple basic response so people can try to make it sound like good or bad, everything that happens to them is for a reason. That way they can explain away things they cant explain.
This brings us to one of the first claims of religion:
to know god, god must first reveal himself to man
and also to one of the claimed claims of God that he will reveal himself to all his creations: http://lds.org/scriptures/bofm/mosiah/27.30?lang=eng#29
"I rejected my Redeemer, and denied that which had been spoken of by our fathers; but now that they may foresee that he will come, and that he remembereth every creature of his creating, he will make himself manifest unto all."
- now when? That's his business, but it would be a low sort of creator that forgot his creations.
Anway, I just wanted to demonstrate where philosphy leads when it considers science and religion. Maybe Godel got there first.
Science and religion are useful independent, but the quest for truth makes a tool of them both; and I'm after truth, not a plausible debating position. If there is a god, and one worth knowing, I expect him to notice that and take an interest; I expect to find him. I find the journey very satisfying, very delightful, and very subject to rational scrutiny. One might wonder if god is more scientist than religious - after all superstition so often masquerades as religion.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Traits not essential for survival and reproduction will disappear - critical thinking and intelligence in this case.
If you are alive and can quote a verse from the Bible, you can teach in Alabama!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I don't think America lost it's science mojo just because people oppose teaching of evolution. I'm sure books on evolution are not banned outside schools. Books can't be banned in America, no?
Federal law requires that they have had the equivalent hours of a science major before they can be "highly qualified" to teach science. For instance I'm a Social Studies teacher who majored in History in college, but recently I've considered getting an endorsement to teach Science to make myself more marketable. I already have a minor in Geology. To get a science endorsement I would have to take the equivalent of a BS in Chemistry or Biology before I can be hired as a Science teacher. While I technically wouldn't have 'majored' in science, the program hours would have to be equivalent or I cannot be endorsed. The summary is misleading. For the most part (and the article says this) teachers don't teach evolution because they're attempting to avoid controversy and angry calls and visits from parents. My father is a science teacher and when he gets to his one month section on evolution (a unit he developed) he does all sorts of things to try to placate parents like send home letters before hand. My father isn't one to duck controversy, but parents are a pain in the ass.
This isn't my observation, don't recall where I first heard it but suspect it was /.
Some near optimum designs are 'natural'. Function dictates the design. For example the water trap at the bottom of basically all flush toilets (including overseas designs; 'trench', integrated bidet etc etc).
For a thing like a toilet the natural material is ceramic. Ceramics can last for geological time scales.
The reason we know there wasn't a short lived intelligent dinosaur species is that we aren't finding their crappers. Lizards in general get even sicker then mammals when exposed to their own shit.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Microevolution was invented by creationists after they could no longer claim that evolution had never been demonstrated in the lab.
You can't let the creationists control the language. They know nothing about the subject, why would we humor them? They have a long history of using dishonest tactics in discussions simply to muddy the waters and then claim their is a controversy where non exists.
When we force a new species in the lab the creationists will just move the goalposts anyhow.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Sometimes I wonder if the only way to get someone to believe in creationism is for the target to be actively trying to delude themselves.
My parents were as far as I can tell atheist and never went to church, but still tried to introduce me to religion by sending me to camps, religious summer schools, and services. Some of it was kind of fun, being around other kids and always having a book to read, but even as I sat in a service or lecture I was astonished at how many of the things the lecturer would say were utterly contrary to what was written in the Bible, and struggled to make sense of this discord. What really irritated me was fake miracles, kind of magic tricks that some of the youth leaders would do and be like, "Look! God is great! A cross appeared!" As I grew tired of this, begged my parents to stop sending me, but to no avail.
Well, eventually they decided to send me to a youth group when I got to middle school, which I was really excited about because it seemed like those kids had a lot of fun hanging out with their youth group friends. I had never been exposed to creationism before nor had a real biology class, only what shows like NOVA told me, and at the time honestly believed that no person living in our modern world actually held. On this first day at the youth group, the youth minister started talking about how evolution is a lie, we didn't come from monkeys, and that God created us in seven days. I laughed, and then the whole room just kind of goes silent and glared at me. The conversation between Youth Minister and Me went something like this:to make me see the faithful as
YM: "What are you laughing about?"
Me: "You're joking, right?"
YM: "No! Of course not!"
Me: "Seriously?"
YM: "No." (Now extremely angry)
Me: "No, seriously? You actually believe the world is six thousand years old?"
YM: "Yes."
Me: "What about dinosaurs? Carbon dating? Light from stars millions of light years away? The rocks this building is made of are older than that!"
YM: "They were put there to test our faith!"
Me: "You don't think it's possible that those parts of the Bible were a metaphor, that they weren't literally true?"
YM: "No. The Bible is all literally true."
Me: "Ok." (Resigned, and from the looks I was getting, realising that any hope I had of making friends with the kids in this room was forever lost.)
I sat there for the rest of the lecture in silence, and afterwards no one would even talk to me when they handed out ice cream, except to say, "Why don't you shut up?". The next week, when I was getting ready to go back for another dose of ostracism, my parents got a call from the youth minister asking that I not come back. In fact, my parents decided never to make me attend another church event after that. All said, I was actually pretty hurt that people that preach love and acceptance couldn't tolerate a dissenting opinion, and that the kids didn't want to be my friends any more. I never asked them, but sometimes I wonder if my parents' goal with all of the religion stuff wasn't to make me believe and to teach me morals and values, but instead to push me irrevocably away from religion by exposing the lies and hypocrisy.
anyone with a strong science degree is making more money somewhere other than teaching. so either we have to pay science teachers more, or we need to accept that science isn't being taught by science majors. take your pick
Are music teachers ignorant/incompetent in music? Well, science teachers should not be ignorant of science or incompetent in teaching it. If that makes a science teacher more expensive than a music teacher in your country, then so be it. Solve your problem, don't just gripe about it.
and i will bet you a GNP that every other country has the same problem
So you now owe me the GNP of Finland. There is no problem teaching science here in Finland, where teachers traditionally come from the upper half of university graduates (being a teacher does not make one wealthy, but it confers respect and social status), rather than the dregs as in some other countries. Moreover, those who teach math or science in high school are expected to be qualified in the same areas that they teach.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
China has been around forever. It has dominated the civilized world, instituted highly meritocratic societies, and lost it all. Repeatedly. Should we be amazed at China's progress in the last couple decades, or the fact that it was so far behind in the first place?
A place where people who don't achieve or perform within the prescribed guidelines are called "trash" and "garbage" (regardless of whether they feel bullied by such abuse) is no model society. It will either evolve into a cruel, dystopian feudal state (don't tell me that can't happen in China) or moderate and dilute all of its supposed advantages over the decadent modern societies it is trying to catch up to.
I can assure you that in most of the EU, you go to your local school and that's that. Wherever it's tried, choice just leads to ghettoisation.
In Belgium, freedom of education is in the constitution. So pupils (or their parents) can choose to which school to go (rightfully so in my opinion), but it does indeed lead to ghettoisation by religion.
Almost all schools are funded by government. The largest school network is the Catholic one. They teach their own programmes, have their own inspection and all that is being paid with state money. The second largest network are the community level schools (we have a Dutch-speaking, a French-speaking and a German-speaking community). Some schools are not state-funded, I think a couple of Steiner, Jewish and Sudburry schools are truly private (and consequently expensive).
My kids, not believing in any god and therefore avoiding Catholic schools, go to a Dutch-speaking-community high school in Brussels. (I insist on my kids making their own choices on what to believe in and what school to go to - their mother tried to convince them on Wiccan nonsense but she has little credibility being in mental hospital for years, my own mother tried to talk them into believing in Jesus.)
About 80% to 90% of the pupils in their school are muslim. The vast amount of them does not believe in evolution - which is a pity because only half a century ago the muslims had no problems with evolution.
There now is discussion on whether it would be a good thing or not if there would be a separate muslim network or not. A very first muslim school has opened recently because muslim girls are not allowed to wear a veil during class in community and Catholic schools.
Most teachers in community schools are atheists, they have to be very creative. My son's French teacher once drew 2 rectangles on the blackboard. The first one was a painting of god by an atheïst, it was emty, since there is no god. The second one was a painting of god by a believer, it also was emty because god forbids making depictions of him. Some students accused the teacher of blasphemy, because he had made a "cartoon of god" (no formal or official accusation, just during the class discussion after him drawing the rectangles).
In the Catholic high schools (which I attended, before going to an atheist university), evolution and big bang are accepted by almost everybody.
An up-to-date complete treatise of all the basic evidence that demonstrates the foundations of evolutionary theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
Read it from beginning to end. You're welcome.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I think you missed that religion and science are branches of philosophy that try to answer different questions.
That is probably the way things should be. If it were, religions would progressively be confined to irrelevancy for everyday life, or perhaps limiting themselves to conducting rites of passage for individuals in society.
Unfortunately, most religions cleave to any of several pre-scientific mythologies which are arbitrarily deemed to be unquestionable "truth", rather than being rooted in abstract philosophical narrative which can be revised based on contemplative analysis and observation. This results in a tendency for religion to attempt to answer questions which are clearly in the domain of science (i.e. testable hypotheses). A well-known example is the "power of prayer", which is susceptible to real-world double-blind testing with statistical analysis of results - hint: prayer was demonstrated to be powerless in the tested scenario. In the worst cases, zealots attempt to override scientific results by aggressively brandishing their stone-age mythology - resulting in the tragedy of ID being taught in science classes.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
A tack which I've always generates some traction is to state that they could be right. God may have created us an monkeys separately and completely formed, but he also created an awful lot of evidence that we are decended from a common ancestor. I wonder why he did that.
And the response you'd get to that is a smugly confident "He did that to test our faith".
Now, you may note that response works for any argument they want to win without straining their brains very much. They don't see it that way. They simply see it as "convenient" and stop thinking at that point.
There really is no reasoning with the painfully anti-science people. Come to think of it, that's sort of the definition of anti-science people.
I encourage everyone to find out which side of this issue their local teacher union is on. It's very likely the science side, and this is an example of why tenure has an important function of protecting academic freedom. People pooh-pooh the role of academic freedom in k-12 schools, but it does matter.
We used the issue in one of our interview questions when deciding whom to endorse for the local school board elections. And I live in a pretty conservative area.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
"Just over 5 years ago", yup, it's a slow news day...
Do not call it science call it literature. On the Origin of Species is on of the best written science books ever written. I remember reading it as a child and thinking that if that was a regular science book the rest of them had to be interesting too. It took a lot of science books to convince me that very few are anywhere near Darwin's writing level.
I'm from Hungary, ex Soviet satellite state (Hungary), and at the university I had a professor (head of CS department) who trained to be a math-physics teacher, but got involved in math research (statistics) so he became a full-time mathematician.
This is how things work here:
if, you want to be a highschool teacher you need almost science degree. In the old, undiveded 5 year degree program scientist and teachers got the same subjects in the first 3 years, then teachers get some additional pedagogy, psychology lessons. In elementary school, you need a teaching degree, plus some coursework in the subjects you'll teach, but it's less advanced, and these teachers were trained in 3.5 year programmes. In the last 4 years we switched to bsc/msc programmes, but I don't know how that does apply to teachers.
So let me think this one through. We start with razor teeth, killer claws, and end up with... A chicken. I think I'll stay unevolved thanks ;)
Newtonian physics isn't "wrong". It models and predicts events and works very well within certain operational limits (innertial systems). It's still usable if you know its limits. It is an approximation however so it deviates from reality in an usually negligible way. In fact, classical mechanics is all that is necessary for many physics engineering models because it is simpler to calculate and most things don't go at the speed of light.
No shit. I heard Obama talking about how more and more jobs will "require an associates degree".
Now, I can understand requiring some sort of special degree, and/or some sort of very specialized experience for some jobs.
What I can't imagine, is how any job would require an associates degree. Is it just a statement about how abysmal some high schools are that a generic "HS Diploma" doesn't cut it? Because, from any reasonable school, I don't see where an associates is anything more to brag about.
Oh nice, you, took all those pre-req classes that basically exist to even out the gaps between different peoples high school experiences, great.
Honestly, that recent survey of math scores really scared me more about the future of the society I live in than anything else. Its sad what our educational system has become in some places.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Wow, that scary, so as I see it, the more evidence that exists(that evolution is fact, and it is), the more those with vested interests will try to stop it, and to what end?
Dose the USA want to be the first "first world" country to become "third world"? Thats the path that teaching ignorance will lead to.
Not to mention molding a population that is deluded enough to start wars with essentially innocent countries...
Teachers should start teaching that "the world is flat" and be done with it.
I think in some instance religious devotion should be classified as mental illness, and that there should be more safeguards to protect those so gullible that they can be manipulated to support an issue as blatantly incorrect as this.
And if there is anyone that dose "believe" reading this: Why couldn't have God created evolution too, didn't he/she create everything, including evil and ignorant people, and oh yes, science too?
These teachers are obviously intimidated by all the righty thugs who seem to be calling all the shots these days. These dupes of the plutocracy are unwittingly aiding the war against the middle class by leading the charge against education in this country with their anti-science, anti-intellectual agenda. Add to that the fact that soon, only the rich will be able to afford a college education and we'll end up with a generation of weak minded fools who will believe everything Glen Beck and Fox News tells them.
This post is LAW where prohibited by VOID. Prosecutors will be violated.
Perhaps ironically, all of my PE coaches in highschool had kinesiology degrees. Two of them taught History outside of Phys. Ed. Funny
The problem with evolution theory is that it is too wrapped up in materialist ideology. I don't mean materialism as in wanted a really cool computer or car, but in the sense that everything must be explained in terms of material or natural causes. While this is essential for empirical science, it is an artificial constraint when it comes to questions regarding the origin and development of life.
Many scientists for example, have speculated that life appears designed because it is designed. Other scientists think that life on earth was seeded in some way. For example, proto-forms of plants and animals could have been seeded and then evolutionary mechanisms drove their adaptation and development.
If you've gotten this far, congratulations. Most people have an automatic turn-off mechanism when it comes to even questioning the basic assumptions of popularized evolutionary theory which says that there was a prebiotic, naturalistic origin of life event, which resulted in molecules that could reproduce and most importantly evolve. And then, over time, with various selection pressures and beneficial mutations and other genetic combinations of chance, life evolved into the forms we know today. This is referred to as the "goo to you" history of life.
The problem is, the evidence for "goo to you" is weak, it hasn't been experimentally confirmed, and it excludes all of the evidence and experimentation that refutes it. For example, think about DNA. DNA stores information that is used by the cell to manufacture proteins and to direct the activities of the cell. DNA is coupled to many other mechanisms that read, store, and translate genetic information such that the cell can carry out its many functions. So, in addition to data, there is also logic which specifies when, where and how to do specific things. With respect to construction a bacterial flagella, DNA specifies all of the proteins needed to assembly the flagella, the order in which to attach these proteins to one another and test cases to ensure that the assembly is done correctly. If a mistake occurs, the construction is reversed and restarted. (Sounds a bit like test driven development, no?)
Now, if you are still with me, you might be thinking, just because we don't know how this could have evolved doesn't mean that it didn't. That would be the dreaded argument from incredulity, and you would be partially right. What it also means is that it may have been designed or it may have originated via some other mechanism that we don't currently understand, but that may ultimately suggest design rather than naturalistic origins.
This is the question that cannot be discussed, not for scientific reasons, but for religious reasons. What religion? Secular humanism and atheism. In fact, if you look up the backgrounds of the leading censors of this question: Larry Krauss, Richard Dawkins, the entire NCSE you'll discover their religious affiliations and realize that their motivations are based on a belief that the universe and everything in it came about naturally. ("The universe originated via a perturbation in nothingness" - Stephen Hawking)
Well, maybe the universe did originate that way, but maybe not. And because these people are motivated by religion, you won't get a chance to discuss the other possibility if you attend a US public school or college. And, you'll never learn about evolutionary theory, because, well, there really isn't one. We understand genetics, and we know that life changes over time, but how and to what extent is unknown.
Flanders: Science is like a blabber mouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends.
Well I say that there are some thing we don't wanna know. Important things!
It is obvious that evolution is false just by observing the Neanderthal ascendancy over Homo Sapiens Sapiens who conceived a humanistic enlightenment only to return to the dark ages of fundamentalist quasi spiritual thought. No insult intended to Neanderthals, I guess they were just more culturally advanced, genetically, non?
Yes
We've already debunked your claim that low karma == censorship (you got more replies at a natural -1 than with your karma bonus modifier), the only way this post of yours can be taken is that you are trolling.
But please, keep on trolling. I enjoy modding you into oblivion, especially your "wah wah I'm being censored for being called what I am" posts. :)
I cannot teach Math as it goes against my religion. I choose not to believe in 2+2 = 4. All numbers are created equal and unique by the intelligent designer, and two numbers can not magically be made into another. I am a... Cremathionist.
Which religion(s) use this type of description? I have to admit that I know quite little about many religions but this description does not feel familiar to me, not from any religion anyway - and while I am probably mistaken on some religions I very much doubt that it is so with all...
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.