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Why Kids Should Be Building Rockets Instead of Taking Tests
An anonymous reader writes "MAKE Magazine founder Dale Dougherty has an article in Slate about how educators are missing the punchline when it comes to getting kids interested in learning. He describes a recent visit he made to a middle school: 'The science lab was empty, as were the library and the playground. It was not a school holiday: It was a state-mandated STAR testing day. The school was in an academic lockdown. This is what the American public school looks like in 2012, driven by obsessive adherence to standardized testing. The fate of children, their schools, and their teachers are based on these school test scores.' Dougherty's preference would be to more tightly integrate basic engineering projects into the science curriculum. 'I see the power of engaging kids in science and technology through the practices of making and hands-on experiences, through tinkering and taking things apart. Schools seem to have forgotten that students learn best when they are engaged; in fact, the biggest problem in schools is boredom. Students sit passively, expected to absorb all the content that is thrown at them without much context. The context that's missing is the real world."
They're doing exactly what they've been told to do by the system that politics has created. To fix our schools, you need to keep congress's nose out of the process, return responsibility to the individual states and local boards of education.
It may be a suboptimal result but it is at least a demonstrable result.
People like to whine about rote learning and facts, but before you start applying "more sophisticated thinking" you have to have a solid grasp of the facts.
You have to have something that can be measured.
Clearly this idea scares a lot of people.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
To fix our schools, you need to keep congress's nose out of the process, return responsibility to the individual states and local boards of education.
Would you also eliminate federal funding and let states and localities pay for their own schools? Unless you do, the feds are going to put conditions on what they're paying for, and justifiably so. Personally I'd like to see the feds out of many areas, including education, since their participation comes with a lot of strings.
My third grader informed me one day that "science is boring". You could have hit my in the nuts with a hammer and it would have hurt me less. I inquired more and found out that he is reading a lot of stuff and he just doesn't find it exciting
I collect old books, including some old textbooks, and one thing I see is a definite shift from the use of the practical to explain science in texts to an almost complete reliance on theory. The former is interesting and the later bores the hell out of most kids.
One of my favorite books that I've collected is a junior high school general science text from 1932. If you're used to modern school science texts, the thing that immediately jumps out at you about this book is that for most subjects, practical, real world examples are used to introduce the concept to the students... usually using machines that do our various jobs... and then followed with some light theory behind. For instance, flight is taught not with a dry paragraph of theory, but with a picture of a WWI fighter in action, with notes on how the various parts work. That grabs their interest with the cool factor. Then a paragraph on the opposite page has a brief description of Bernoulli's principle to explain how it gets off the ground. There's a chapter on energy that starts out with a diagram of an old Dynamo, with an incredibly cool description of how everything works, what the various parts do, and thenyou get some info on electrical theory. It's fantastic, and I read it cover to cover. I never had a science text like that, and I was in my mid-30's when I bought it, had a bachelor's degree, and I still learned things from it. It was fun. When's the last time you saw a middle school science text that could be described as fun?
Go to Google Books, and poke around in some of the old science texts from that period. You'll see what I'm talking about. I absolutely love the idea of teaching by means of examining how a machine works, especially when you do it by building one on a small scale yourself. So I completely get the "have 'em build rockets" notion. There's a lot to that.
When's the last time you've seen a school science text
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I've never had an Estes rocket blow up by accident.
They are safe as houses.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'