Re: What to "cover"

[John Denker <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 10:09 PM 12/6/00 -0500, Herbert H Gottlieb forwarded Jane Jackson saying:
>         "peer teaching principle"
...
> Most middle school teachers are not qualified to do this, for they do not
> have sufficient depth of understanding of science content.

Has anybody considered the following idea?

As an interim solution during the upgrade phase, one could imagine a
team.  One could pair a qualified scientist with a qualified "peer
teacher".  I note that there are something like 40,000 members in the
American Physical Society alone.  Presumably most of these people
understand the science content.  They don't have time to teach middle
school, but if you could get some percentage of them to help teach
middle-school _teachers_, maybe one or two weeks a year, it might make a
pretty big dent in the problem.

As in most teaching, the hard part is motivating the students.  The content
is findable easily enough if you are motivated to look.  This is why the
scientists would need to be paired with somebody who has top-notch teaching
skills.