Dismal science education explains dispute over Darwin

[hyphenate]

Dismal science education explains dispute over Darwin
By WILLIAM R. BRINKLEY Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Feb. 14, 2009, 12:21PM

This month we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s seminal work On the Origin of Species and the 200th birthday of the man himself. A provocative discovery made long before today’s era of extraordinary science, the notion of evolution has galvanized everything we know about biology and the history of life on this planet. And by the way, Darwin got it right.

That said, why is the teaching of Darwinian evolution in public school classrooms still so controversial and uniquely American? Powerful arguments and modern science support Darwin’s evolution. Yet the debate over the validity of evolution versus Biblical creationism and its modern-day Trojan Horse, Intelligent Design, persists.

In fact, some polls indicate that at least half the American public today believes the world is eight to 10 thousand years old and that humans, along with all other biological organisms and phenomena on this planet, were “created” in six days.

<snip>

Again, I wonder, why the controversy?

One answer is the dismal state of science education in the United States and Texas. When I co-chaired with Dr. Mary Ann Rankin, dean of natural sciences at UT Austin, a committee of my colleagues in The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (TAMEST), we found that without good science education children would have difficulties accepting and understanding the promise of science and its realization as we embark on new avenues of genome sequences, computational biology and embryonic stem cell therapies. If our public school science education system worked, students would learn enough science to develop a logical and balanced view of the age of the universe and the origin of species. By the time they complete high school, or certainly college, they would have sufficient knowledge of biology, chemistry, math and physics to contemplate natural history and make up their own minds about Darwinian evolution. If modern science education consisted of a mix of classroom science taught by competent teachers along with some simple lab experiments and a few trips to the museum of natural science, most students could be scientifically literate. Education is always the best place to start.


Brinkley is dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and holds the William R. Brinkley BRASS Chair at Baylor College of Medicine. More information on the TAMEST report can be found at http://www.tamest.org/education/index.php

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6263646.html

[BlooInBloo]

1. Well duh.

EDIT: It's the completely predictable result of having people with education degrees teaching kids.

[mopinko]

5. albert shanker used to say

that teacher's colleges were turkey farms, and that the most important organ in the common schools was not the brain but the butt.
regurgitaters, that's all they want, regurgitaters.

[donco6]

6. Right.

So, Mr. Fucking Genius, tell me . . . how would you teach science to a class of 25 kids, 5 of whom are reading at the 3rd grade level (if that, the test doesn't go any lower), about 15 at the 6th grade level, and maybe 5 on grade level on a good day? I can't hope to assign the text reading because a) they won't read it, b) they can't read it even if they tried, and c) there aren't enough books for them to read anyway.

On top of that, hardly a day goes by where my room isn't disrupted with Gabrielle's ongoing feud with the sister of Carlos, which spills into the hallway in front of my room almost daily. Last time, we had to call the parents of Gabrielle and the sister, only to have THEM get into a fistfight so that the cops had to come and haul everyone away. Gabrielle knows the ropes and knows how not to get into expulsion territory, so the best we can do is try some habitually disruptive scenario, and that's taken all year.

I'm kind of surprised my kids learn as much as they do. And I apologize to Herr Doktor Whatshisass that I'm not sending him kids who are prepared as well as they should be. It's not like they got dumber in my classroom.

[remoulade]

8. It's not your fault for sure...the "educational system" has devolved into a morass

where every student is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. The idea is to make sure no kid ever has the idea that any other kid might be a little bit smarter. Rewarding ignorance doesn't produce desirable results.

[donco6]

10. They can't read, but they're not stupid.

They know they can't read as well as other kids. And there's no reward in it, believe me.

I really think people here think we sit around all day, dreaming up ways to hurt kids. It's astonishing really.

Here's the problem: it hasn't been that long ago that HS teachers never had to bother with actually teaching reading. They taught "Literature" and "Creative Writing" and worried about comprehension levels and syntax. Most HS teachers don't even KNOW how to teach reading. You say "phonemic awareness" and they look at you like you're speaking Russian.

But most of the kids we get in 8th grade can barely read anything, let alone a highly technical text like Algebra or Physical Science. So what are we doing? We're learning how to teach reading. We don't have time to wait for the elementaries to figure it out (though they're working on it, too). And with our Latino/a population increasing at 3% per year, it's like Alice in Wonderland - running hard just to stay in place, and twice as fast to get anywhere. We're mandating after school programs, which means staggered work schedules for teachers, which means some larger class sizes during the day. We mandate summer school for those who aren't gaining credits at a rate that can reach graduation (yes, we actually do keep track of that). And we don't graduate kids who don't make it. Our graduation rate is less than 50% between just not making credits and dropping out.

Oh, and our school district budget is getting cut by 6.8% next year.

So what the hell are we supposed to do?

[BlooInBloo]

12. There's no doubt that the teaching environment is utterly craptacular...

and about as unfriendly to learning as it could possibly be. All that you described is part of it. As is the fact that education majors simply don't know anything. It would be nice if they did, because they would be able to teach the hell out of it.

And then the parents suck too. That's a harder problem.

Solution to the learning environment problem is conceptually easy, though. Here's a good conceptual start:

1) Quadruple teacher pay.
2) Halve average class size.
3) Remove all barriers entry to teaching for non-education majors.
4) Make advancement in the teaching profession contingent upon (among other things) obtaining graduate degrees in academic fields (i.e. not education).

Actual knowledge is a sine qua non for good teaching, but quite obvious not in and of itself sufficient. In particular, the art of teaching plays an important role. For quadruple the pay, I expect would-be teachers would have no problem being required to take appropriate coursework along these lines as well.

But it all starts with actually knowing something. Without that, nothing.

Solving the parents-side of the problem is somewhat more difficult.

[donco6]

13. I've taught alongside non-ed majors.

Talk about craptacular. Seriously. I've only met one really who actually panned out. He's now the principal. I really don't think it's that simple.

I was an engineering major prior to switching to ed (because that's what I liked), so I had Calc III, Eng Physics I and II, Organic Chem I and II, Modern Physics (nuclear), and a lot of other stuff ed majors didn't get. But I've had science collegues who were very knowledgeable as well. But I've had other collegues who just stunk. And it wasn't because they didn't know anything - they just weren't CURIOUS. At ALL. And they didn't instill this in their kids either.

I find that most kids do want to know how things work. They'll be with you all the way until it just gets to be too much work. For example, they love to do the experiment on acceleration of gravity with the tennis ball machine. They love making the projections and hypothesizing on what will happen. But when it comes time to actually calculate the figure - they fall apart. Most of them get the overall concept, but getting them to care enough about the actual math is very difficult.

So, I disagree that getting rid of education majors will do the trick. Requiring more content courses is a good idea - people get lazy. I took a course on astronomy recently, which was great. And most of the courses I've taken have been in science - geology, plate tectonics, biochemistry. But I don't think it was just because I was a science major - I'm just really curious.

[BlooInBloo]

14. Your attempt to disagree with what I said failed.

[donco6]

16. What? "Craptacular" wasn't descriptive enough?

So, we had one non-ed major who conspired with the kids to respond to a code word (funky monkey). At the word, they would attack the kid in the class who was misbehaving. Physically attack whoever it was. She got away with this for weeks, until one of the kids ratted her out.

Another one was from Russia. Non-ed math guy. He would turn kids' desks upside-down with them in it and make them sit that way. He got reassigned to copier duty for the remainder of the year.

Another one was in an alternative licensure program. Somewhere through the year, she realized she didn't like kids at all. So she stopped coming to school. We had to sub her out for the remainder of the year.

I had one in the classroom next to me a few years ago. His technique for classroom control was to TALK REALLY REALLY LOUD. He made it through the year (with a lot of help from me, and a reduction in his class size). But he didn't go back to education.

I swear on a stack of Bibles that these are all true.

[hyphenate]

17. I must confess that I am one of the ones

who might have loved more science had I been taught math better. It didn't help that first year Algebra was a farce, with a teacher who had cataracts and couldn't see more than three inches from the board, and who therefore never saw all the spitballs that were sailing across the room, or the notes being passed, and who couldn't see anyone who might have raised their hand to ask a question. It was difficult enough to learn under these circumstances, and there were quite a few of us that didn't quite cut it. Of course, with an astonishingly difficult subject, it likely killed quite a few of us to higher levels in science courses which required higher math than which we were subjected. I had, as an example, once wanted to become an architect--a delusion I quickly lost any loyalty to once my math instruction was curtailed.

Fortunately for me, my English teachers (for the most part) and I were fairly close, and as I already had far more talent as a writer, I stuck with English and the decision to become part of the writing world.

I had a friend who was a teacher, but who also was involved in the coordination of mainstreaming of children with emotional and social problems. In her district, there were hige problems with some of the students for some of the reasons you stated--in addition, the system had to placate parents and bite their tongues when it came to criticizing the family environments of some of the students. As a result, every student suffered from the impact made by only a few students.

I see a lot of it as being related to lazy parents. I'm not talking about necessarily physical laziness, but as about how much parents give to their kids in the areas of curiosity, enjoyment of learning and other intangibles such as these.

For example, I love astronomy. I read quite a lot on the subject, and could probably tell you the names of most of the constellations (at least in the winter sky), as well as discuss everything from novae, pulsars, event horizons, black holes, etc. But there is very little of that that I obtained in school--such things were never discussed. I learned about them because I went camping, because my mom and I used to take drives to darker parts of the suburbs, and just look at the night sky. Parents in my schooling years gave a lot more attention to such things, and we learned to enjoy some aspects of learning without relying on the public school system. If someone tries to tell me that's all well and good for a "family" to do, I call bullshit. I've known single parent households which pitch in to the PTA, who enforce homework and other additional learning at home, and push their kids to excel and to find things they enjoy reading about. Any parent can achieve a higher level of education in their kids just by being there to help them when they need it. Of course, parents like to blame the teachers for a piss-poor job, but the burden should be on the parents, not on the teachers or the education system.

[donco6]

18. I agree with everything you said. But . . .

I tell you, teachers can be lazy, too - regardless of their degree. They could be bringing some astronomy into a classroom with just a little work (hey kids, did you know Jupiter, Mars and Mercury are in confluence this week?? - I bet you can see it from the bus stop!) It really isn't that hard.

Some of our most active parents are single parents. So that's true too.

[ColbertWatcher]

2. Some of the blame falls on the Christers who can't leave science well-enough alone.

They're the American Taliban and they won't quit until America is a theocracy.

[havocmom]

15. Yep. SO much easier to just take the bible literally and not think anymore

"The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it!" is so much less work that studying and using some critical thought.

[The River]

3. It Makes One Wonder

where this Country is headed when basic science
is replaced by feel good myth. In a very real way though
science bears most of the responsibility for this schism.

With the ascendancy of science the world was reduced to
a world of observable "things", a flat land of exteriors
which could be measured and observed.
The "interior" qualities, everything that was unobservable,
was largely ignored and left to "religion" to explain.
The eventual rise of the social sciences has tried / is trying to bridge the gap
but we are still very un-evolved compared to our mastery over the physical sciences.
It's not quite killer apes with ray guns but it's real close.

It's not surprising really that for the less educated, the less curious, the less secure
and really, anyone who isn't ready to face the existential angst of science 100% and
venture into the world of the unobservable, clinging to the comforting myths contained
in various religions is a backlash against modernism.
The worse of these are the hard core fundamentalists who just can't handle "it"
so they deny rationality in favor of their mythic world view.

What sucks is that the more public education fails the more their numbers grow.
What sucks worse is their insistence that we all have to believe like them to be "good".
Whats sucks 10X worse is their involvement in politics to the point of wanting to
"take over"........

[anonymous171]

11. Modernism? Try Naturalism. nt

[aikoaiko]

4. STEM education could be better of course, but its fundamentalist/literalist religions

that are to blame. Science teachers do as good a job with gravity as they do natural selection, yet no one doubts gravity.

[abq e streeter]

7. Ahem , I believe you meant to say intelligent falling

[remoulade]

9. That's true but gravity can be demonstrated with a bowling ball. Evolution requires thinking

and that's in very short supply in our schools these days. :grr:

[surrealAmerican]

19. It's interesting that most of the posters here are focusing on ...

... science education at the high school level. I think a large part of the problem is the lack of quality science education in the earlier grades. Even in my kids' schools (and these were "good" schools, with no real anti-science influences), science was a joke. They had maybe one half-hour lesson every other week (science alternated with social studies), and to make it worse, they called anything that didn't fit neatly into other subjects "science". This would mean things like fire safety, dental hygiene, bus safety, etc. were counted as "science", and replaced teaching things like the scientific method. It's a tragedy, considering that young children are almost universally fascinated by science.

[hyphenate]

20. You are absolutely correct

There are many opportunities to have younger students learn more about science. I recall I was a curious child, always asking "Why?" to just about everything.

Taking a good sampling of these "why?" questions, the science behind it could be explained to children in a straightforward manner, and hopefully teach the children to enjoy science as they grow up. Field trips could enhance their knowledge, and get them to love science right from the beginning. I drove my parents and others nuts with my questions--it would certainly be a boon to get kids to understand parts of it early, and boost their desire to know more exponentially.