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How we teach



I'd like to reinforce some of Leigh's comments about the parent's day gem.
All to often I think that in an "attempt" to make science simple, we wind up
teaching science as dogma. Then if someone questions what we are doing
instead of admitting that we are trying to teach a simplified or over
simplified version we simply react with indignation that some uneducated fool
would have the audacity to question what we teach. We justify "conceptual"
science courses because we want to create "Scientific Literacy" but instead
we pass along half truths that create nothing but confusion.

I've had it up to my eyeballs with texts that try to make out that Aristotle
and Ptolemy had it all wrong and Galileo and Copernicus got it right. Is a
student any the wiser if we tell him the people who thought the sun went around
the earth were wrong and it is really the earth that goes around the sun?
Not only do I think they are no wiser, but such teachings just make it that
much harder to teach that in principle we can describe any motion from any
reference and that the best choice is usually the one that makes the motion
easiest to visualize (simpler geometry) or makes the mathematics simpler.
Isn't this really the concept we should be teaching in our "conceptual"
science classes. (When a few weeks ago I mentioned that I thought Chaisson
& McMillan taught science as dogma, this was one example I had in mind.)

I have recently been discussing evolution vs creationism with a chemist
colleague of mine. He is very critical of the teaching of Darwinian Evolution
as a proven fact. I told him I thought he had no right to demand a higher
level of honesty from the biologists than we demand in the physical sciences!

We recently had a lengthy debate about heat. Is heat stuff or a process?
Perhaps we might think about whether Science is stuff (a body of fact) or
a process (a way of making models). It is my contention that the answer to
this question is the first concept we need to teach. Without answering this
question there can be no scientific literacy other than in an historical sense.