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Sputnik Moment Or No, Science Fairs Are Lagging
An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times is running a story about the response from some high school science teachers to Obama's State of the Union address. It's nice that he wants to celebrate science fair winners, they say, but his obsession with standardized math and reading test scores means they have no time to teach students the fundamentals of how to do science. 'I have so many state standards I have to teach concept-wise, it takes time away from what I find most valuable, which is to have them inquire about the world,' said one teacher."
I'm a judge at one of the major Canadian Science Fairs and we've been given direction that we can't criticize and only good comments are allowed. Some of the projects are absolute CRAP for the age level... thrown together overnight... judges should be able to say "Your project is CRAP... prepare for a job at Burger King"
Back when I was a kid, you could legitimately blow some shit up with your Jr. Scientist kit. Enthusiast experimenting books from Dad's era suggest using hydrogen cyanide kill the bugs for your bug collection. Stop pussifying science, and maybe kids will be interested again! I'm seeking funding for the Greyfox Science Kit, which will include a 2 inch "supermagnet", samples of lithium and sodium metal, a burner you can hook up to your gas line, a 1 watt laser and... what's that? I'm being the first lawsuit has already been filed...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The reason that we're falling behind in science is that we, as a nation, don't value scientists anymore. It's hard to learn science and be good at it. I'm in my mid-50's, worked in the pharmaceutical industry for many years but have been out of work for 3 of the last 6 years. I'd doing a post-doc now. That means about a 1/3 salary. It would sound like whining but I have tons of friends in the same situation. Ivy League PhD's, out of work or "consulting". Good careers for a while, then all the jobs go off to China. The STEM crap is just a ruse to get more people to go to school for 9 years post high school and work for 80K if they're lucky. And then be out of it permanently at 45.
You can make a lot more money doing something else. You should only do it if you love it. Science is the new Art History.
I got into the best magnet high schools in my city, but chose to go to the best Catholic high school in the city (which due to an endowment, was free). One reason was we did not have to take state exams. As the school was very selective, and as students scored high on the SATs and got into Ivy league schools, the school felt no need to partake in state tests (the normal Catholic high schools in the city did though). Thus we got a chance to really learn. I know many graduates who say they learned more in our high school then they did in college, and for me this is has often been the case.
While I am egalitarian, even for those who are less so, it is incredibly wasteful, for US productivity, to have the top 1% of students, which I always was on these state exams, have to do the kind of rote, teach for the test learning that the bottom 1% of students on the test take. We can be self-directed and go on a Deweyite learning curve where we would really be learning, and advancing at our own speed, not going along with everyone else and doing this rote for the test memorization.
The real truth is the Bolshevik revolution is what made schools in the US great in the 1950s and 1960s for engineering. The Russians engineers I met who came out of the USSR school systems are the sharpest I've ever met. But beyond that, advances like Sputnik scared the US in terms of falling behind the USSR educationally, so US schools had to revamp to make sure they were staying competitive to the USSR. Not that the USSR was a big threat to the US - the US GNP dwarfed Russia's in 1917, and continued to do so. But now that such threats have abided, all of these things - teach-for-the-test, closing schools, these charter schools which will soon be on a profit model and are being pushed for by the US's billionaires and the like can all come about. There are no threats to the US so dumbing down the sheeple and pouring Glenn Beck and fundamentalist religion in their minds is seen as a better course by the elites - or else they might get smart and start causing trouble like in Egypt.
Standardization is the thief of creativity and creativity robs standardization.
It seems that no one is ever happy. The countries with high graduation rates and high standardization like South Korea have a low dropout rate. However the annual standardized test in South Korea always coincides with massstudent suicides.
Education is the USA is moving to a point where there is no depth, no love of learning, and no respect for the transormative power of education. Much of this is a direct result of standardized tests and limited teacher autonomy and resources. The weekly cycle of cover the standard: Powerpoint Lecture -> Read the Chapter -> Do your worksheet -> Scantron on Friday. move on to next state standard then rinse and repeat crushes any love of learning.
I would rather see a USA where we foster a love of learning, go deep on interesting topics then work on them in a meaningful project based way rather than the drive-by, inch-deep mile wide education system that we have become. If we work in a meaningful way the questions about math and science will come and apply to a realworld situation instead of being taught in abstract isolation.
When the USA can not longer produce innovators with a love for learning and/or attract innovators from foreign countries, we will become the low-cost labor market for those who do innovate. I implore everyone who reads this to help stop this madness. When George W. Bush was in office, he had a plan to take the Perkins-IV funding and shift it away from career and technical learning programs (nursing, welding, computer programming, cad, autobody) and shift that money to fund more standardized testing. If that would have happened, programs would have ceased to exist and dropout rates would have soared even higher.
Before our time, when our parents were children, the world was at war with itself. Great technologies were developed with significance so broad, the greatest minds of the planet trembled at the wake of their unfolding. Each and every action performed by the simplest individual was a thread sewn into the fabric of this country. Each forward notion was a declaration of intend for a better tomorrow, a promise they made hand in hand that the world they saw on the brink of annihilation would some day be preserved for their children, and their children's children. There was a pride and a hope, and through this there was no time to consider the derivative effects of how we would factor together as a society. How could they have known what was to be? On the edge of destruction their thoughts were of the present.
In the future, their progeny yields the shining beacon of their ultimate savior, prolific technology that has changed everyone's life on the planet. But through this ubiquity the change has become a constant. Our grandparent's hopes and dreams are our faded concrete walkways and crumbling bridges. Our pride is worn with the wind and faded with the sun. Our goals no longer are how to stay alive, but now simply how to stay atop the throne the rest of the world approaches. Our goals, our national fate, our fears as a nation of people. A nation so scattered with opinion that it is a raft adrift the sea, each paddle pushing outwards from the center.
But when you ask the single oarsman how his sons and daughters are, you may find that he has not consigned the fate of his children's knowledge to the government. You may find that he is proud enough to ensure his children learn. The maths, the sciences, the dramas and comedies. The satires so that they too can someday ignore the beating of the drum on a march through the shanty towns of our idyllic past. For this oarsman knows that the success of he and his is not the duty of a corrupt far away bureaucracy, but safe within the confines of the home has has created.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
In their never ending quest to Make The World A Better Place, the do-gooders continue to dig us into an ever-deeper hole Because It's For The Children.
One of the biggest problems with big government solutions to everything is the difficulty involved in making changes as needed. Every decision requires congressional approval, every decision becomes political and once the decision is made nobody has a choice. Public education is a classic example of how such a system loses focus on it's primary reason for existence, i.e. educating children. I instead it becomes a vessel for social engineering experiments and and the political interests of the teacher's unions and politicians du jour.. The children themselves have essentially no representation as the various powers that be fight to further their agendas.
The worst part is that you can't buy or legislate the single biggest predictor of academic success: parental involvement. No amount of money, no law, no program can motivate parents to get more deeply involved in their kid's education. You can not change parents that want to dump their kids and attendant responsibilities onto the school districts.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Back in the day --- which, old as I am, wasn't all that long ago -- the role of the teacher was to explain concepts and teach. The homework, the rote exercises, the role of counselor, the teaching of discipline and social skills, was left to the parent. Add to this that kids have no voices in government, corporations see them as an access valve to parents' money and government sees them not as potential leaders but as a liability, it's no wonder that teachers end up underpaid, overworked, and asked to do much more than is appropriate.
Politically, there are a few obstacles:
There is a lot of pressure for the status quo. An easy tactic to maintain the status quo is to counter a request for change by saying that no problem actually exists. If someone says that the richest country in the world is not maintaining a lead or is trailing in education, someone counters that the statistics are skewed or the data is being misinterpreted or that there's nothing wrong with the status quo. Not taking any side, but we see the same with global warming and deficits and gun control and tax reform.
Education has no quick payoff. Investments in education will pay off in ten years or more. Politicians care about the next election cycle and not the long term benefit to the country. It's thus easier to push money to a new baseball stadium or to build a billion dollar fence or fight the evil file sharers than it is to fund meaningful education. Hell, it's easier to pull money from education than it is to maintain the status quo.
Children have little voice in Congress. They can't vote. They can't contribute to re-election funds. They usually can't/don't write letters to their representatives. They have little direct spending power.
If these issues are important to you, maybe the approach is to enlist the teenagers and the twenty-somethings who still remember their primary education to improve the situation. Maybe parents can also be convinced. I don't know if anyone else cares,
Concepts about methods of scientific testing can be taught in a couple of lessons. The basic concepts like postulating and testing theories, repeatability, precision vs. accuracy, double blind studies, etc. are not difficult, so to say there's not enough time to teach them is a just lame excuse. The real reason for declining participation in science fairs is given later in the article: "One obvious reason for flagging interest in science fairs is competing demands for high school students' extracurricular attention." Nothing the president or dept of education does will change that.
I have judged my city's (> 500,000 people, South) science fair for the last several years. It has been about 10 years since I graduated from high school, and I had participated every year in my county (~ 1 million people, not culturally Southern) science fair back then. I remember vividly, back then, having kids with amazing projects that were worthy of MS-level theses. One year, for example, someone found a new Group Theory result (with oversight by a college professor), for example. Many others did medical studies, had detailed demonstrations of traffic pattern simulations, and so on.
Fast forward to me judging the high school science fair here, and I'm appalled at what the "best" these kids could muster is. Most kids couldn't even design a simple experiment. For example, one girl was measuring the conductivity of a solution and varying the temperature, but her "data" consisted of her saying that the conductivity went down as the temperature went down. There was no actual data. The best projects were judged "best" by me by at least having some kind of quantitative data, using proper controls, and having some understanding of the implications of the work. Nothing blew me away, and I had to wonder where the mentor involvement was because it seemed like these kids did everything on their own.
The first thing we need to do to fix science education in this country is to pay math and science teachers more than the other teachers. Not only is it harder to get a science or math degree than it is to be a history major, but there are many more job opportunities for science and math majors beyond teaching. They are a more valuable commodity and should be treated as such.
My daddy mixed up potassium perchlorate and sulfur. He wrapped it up in tin foil (that's hat materiel for you Slashdot folks), and hit it with a sledge hammer. Boom! Wake the neighbors, call the cops! When I was older, I did some experiments in our backyard with aluminum powder and sulfur. It sent up a mushroom cloud, which drifted over to our neighbors house. I skedaddled inside the house and put on a innocent smile on my face. You'd get arrested these days for doing stuff like that.
Well, at least I didn't do the Nuclear Boy Scout stuff . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Maybe it's because I grew up in another era, but I remember that the zeitgeist here in the US during the 60s/70s was all about Science. Your highest aspirations always involved pursuing some kind of career in Science, and if not that, to at least approach life in a rational, objective, semi-scientific manner.
Now it seems like it's all about emotions and chest-thumping. Maybe it's just Devlotuion in action. Don't say we weren't warned!
On a more serious note: I was a science-fair geek, and although I can look back now and see how crappy my work was, it was a very cool and enlightening experience. I remember military recruiters would show up at these fairs, and unless your research had something to do with blowing something up (I wrote computer programs for field biology) they sorta overlooked you.
Fun times. This article is probably just another signpost on the road to our demise.
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
In 1957, a major effort, organized by MIT, was made to revise the teaching of high school physics. This resulted in the PSSC Physics curriculum. Top physicists were involved, including Hans Bethe and I.I. Rabi, both Nobel prize winners who'd worked on the atomic bomb program.
That program focused on experiments, collecting data, analyzing it, and comparing it with theory. Here's some of the lab equipment. It's not elaborate; the original equipment was mostly wooden.
This was acknowledged to be a very good curriculum, but a lot of work for teachers. Schools seemed to have backed away from it by the early 1970s.
That seems to be where things took a wrong turn.
Every kid not spending his week end watching ads on TV is a fucking progress in my book.
I don't exactly know what so special about these science fairs in US/Canada, so I may be offtopic (and please mod me accordingly), my experience is mainly as a staff member of robotics student challenges. I can tell you that I have seen bad projects, bad designs, blatant flaws in implementation, software, hardware, tactics, even sometimes combined in a single project. I still thought that even the worst competitors were people who deserved praises. They had learned a lot (not enough obviously) and were eager to learn more. They show what the other team made, how they made it, they exchanged tricks, and criticism. The one team that many organizers thought deserved strong criticism is one that usually reach the #1 or #2 rank and that do not share its tricks, do not explain its techniques more than the strict minimum set by the rules and uses tools that frankly have no place in an amateur competition.
My point is that when you are student, your realizations are less important than your will to learn and to share. It may sound like a pukingly everybody-is-nice slogan, but that is the truth. A good student is good at learning and if s/he is good at sharing his/her knowledge too, that is the kind of student we need more. It is very different from when you arrive in the real arena of science where something that works and that works better than what the others made is what you want. (At least in theory, my experience on this is a lot more cynical)
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
In China or India, if you are an engineer, you are going to be the chick magnet of the party. In the U.S., my experience is that if you tell people you are an engineer, people call you names like "geek" or "nerd." Nobody calls a lawyer or doctor a "geek" or "nerd." Thus, for a kid looking for a career, forget about math and science, it's embarrassing. For a teenager, forget it, girls will not like you. For an adult, forget it, it's hard work for not enough money. This "It's hip to be stupid" thing used to be just the scourge of African Americans, but it has spread into the popular culture and it's going to sink our boat if we don't find a way to honor hard work and intelligence again.
Currently hooked on AMP
0) Failure in school is constant and brutal to self-esteem - always evaluated and never taught how to deal with failure. A few meaningless phrases at best which have no follow through. To compensate sometimes people do moronic policies like "never say negative things about failure" when actual TRAINING by child psychologists is needed. Teachers should take a whole 4 credit course on the topic. The child's emotional mindset is the biggest factor above all else; genetics has almost nothing to do with it (sorry ignorant parents but your child isn't "special" unless they are autistic...)
1) Science fair projects involve TIME and MONEY outside of school. I've gone to inner city schools where half were below the poverty line. One of my friends had to care for the whole family as the oldest boy (his father died in front of him in a camp in Laos.) He turned out well considering how bad his life was. Not all are so lucky. His homework was non-existent and school had to provide his pencils and paper. HE WAS SMART and mature for his age but only a C-B student; not his fault.
2) Disturbed kids are sometimes born that way, but most the time its their home life; the only thing you can do is fix their parents or move them to another home. A state orphanage would even be better; I've grown up with a few of these kids as well. The schools don't have psychologists and while they should it couldn't fix a large range of environmental problems. Three gradeschool kids I knew are in prison now; it was no surprise they were foobar back then - beyond teacher help, they needed padded rooms or something. Today they'd have been in the criminal system for assaulting teachers before 10 years of age - somehow I don't think that would have helped them; but not doing that in my day didn't help them either.
3) I have family who've had to live through this movement of our Republicans trying to embrace the education issue making it a partisan political football that used to be just given over to the other side. Since this battle for votes began on the issue its WORSENED education in the USA as ignorant political slogans and ignorant parents herd to whatever sounds good to their ignorant minds. You are not a dental expert because you have been to the dentist anymore than you are an expert at education because you've been educated. Worthless statistics and foolish analogies always become the foundation of politicization of issues. You can't measure a quality education in a quantitative way such that political policies can be debated (leaving aside the fact that there is no civil debate in the USA anymore.) "Juking" the stats is the name of the political game and everybody does it. When you base things on simplistic metrics you encourage hacking of those metrics. Furthermore, the other issue is "cutting edge" crap - the USA was ahead of the world but the world has recovered from WW2 and the 3rd world is improving at FASTER rates than the 1st world ever did. See GapMinder.org and learn something about it. You can't be on top when everybody else gets to the summit as well; there isn't much more to climb and even if you reach the peak of human capacity the gap will NOT be as large as it was in the past.
Lots of issues involved here. Plus a lot of people only see education as JOBs - which warps the whole thing into industry looking for new cogs for the corporate machine and not actual thinkers--- unless you are elite and can afford to send your brat to a private school which teaches management or marketing -- "practical" school is job skills training to way too many people and that is NOT the biggest benefit it has provided but its where we are heading. I expect to see private/charter schools by walmart or mcdonald's within my lifetime with single minded goals (it won't be quite that simple but the influence will become noticeable enough.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Two mornings each week, I volunteer to teach physics to local 12 & 13 year old kids.
They're homeschooled kids; we meet at one of their homes for 4 hours a week. I'm teaching the science class that I wish I'd received when I was in 8th grade.
3 months of Newtonian physics, then a month on wave mechanics (made a glass wave tank!), we're now finishing thermodynamics and will soon start E&M. Heavy on experiments: bicycle wheel gyroscope, conservation of momentum when throwing a football while standing on a skateboard, entropy & heat of crystallization using Sodium Acetate. We use the physics apparatus that I've collected over the years ... some professional equipment and a lot of homebrew demos. An oscilloscope that cost $25 at a yardsale.
This past Tuesday, we measured the distance to the sun by comparing the warmth of sunlight on the kids hands to the warmth from a 100 watt incandescent lamp. By adjusting the distance from hand to lamp, they found the distance from the light where it was "just about as warm as sunlight". Then they looked up the solar luminosity and used the inverse square law to deteremine the astronomical unit. Got it to with 30 percent of the canonical value. (of course, Slashdot people will see the circular reasoning here, but letting the kids figure that out is part of the fun).
No tests - it's immediately apparent when someone doesn't get something, and when to take a different approach. Occasional homework (always an experiment: for instance, determine the vertical distance (in meters) from the sidewalk outside your house to your bed. Knowing your mass in Kg and the gravitational constant, find the amount of work it takes to walk into your house and go to bed. Notice that there's no "right" answer to this question, and it's unlikely that two kids will get the same answer)
Parents often bring muffins & goodies; the kids are curious, enthusiastic, and motivated. Best part: I take home a broad smile ... it's the high point of my week.
A friend of mine - a PhD chemical engineer - volunteers at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Another friend works as a docent at a nearby bird sanctuary.
All of us are busy, yet each of has something to contribute. Mix your interests with enthusiasm, toss in some creativity, then get out there and volunteer. You'll never know how much fun it'll be!
-Cliff on a sunny Saturday morning in Oakland, California
The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Book_of_Chemistry_Experiments , an amazing book now considered dangerous. The book was apparently removed from most public libraries. I think you can find a pdf via the wiki p links though - it is an amazing book.
Check out Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments. Also check out Theo Gray's Mad Science: Experiments You Can Do At Home - But Probably Shouldn't.
While unfortunately I didn't have this book as a kid, I had some others that were similarly "dangerous", along with a chemistry set with most of the necessary chemicals. I made gunpowder once to prove to myself I could do it.
In high school chemistry the teacher would let some of us do our own experiments in the lab, before school, during lunch, and afterwards. To see if it was there a friend and I went to the library and looked in an encyclopaedia for the nitroglycerin entry and from there we thought we could make some. And we did. When we did we'd fill those small paint jars modelers use, then we'd go out into some woods and throw them around. We only did it a couple of tymes before stopping. The first tyme it was a kick, the second tyme though was "We already did this".
Falcon
Should there be a Law?