Hey guys:
I wonder if the teachers everyone refers to are really such awful teachers or human
beings. Teachers in most schools are bound by scope and sequence rules and are
overworked. If you could not guarantee when and where an inquiry answer to a
question would "come out" and your superintendent would replace you with *anyone*,
and you had kids at home to feed, how would you "teach"? If you had only 20 minutes
a day to do something other than be responsible for students immediately in front of
you, and if you were required to grade and return each students work in a quick turn
around yourself, how would you modify your teaching?
My point is that the teachers out in the world are not incompetent hacks. They are
working within a system that is not particularly sympathetic to your concerns.
If you want to do something, consider working to change the system. I recommend two
points of pressure. First, go after the policies in your local communities that
lead to the local teaching conditions. Second, work to change the near universal
post-secondary institution infatuation with standardized test scores. If you don't
want to do something, well, remember that a fraction of the readership of this list
are teachers in the situations I describe and may not find your words particularly
collegial.
Finally, are you mentoring any children in the local schools on science projects?
How are the kids to get the opportunities to do inquiry if individuals such as
university and college faculty don't share the true method of doing science?