Re: Physics for Ninth Graders?

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 9:03 -0400 9/26/01, Michael Edmiston wrote:
> I know elementary school teachers who are supposed to be teaching science,
> but actually admit they just leave it out.  They do this because they don't
> know science.

Often true.

>   But they rationalize their actions by saying, "my students
> are having trouble reading and writing so I have to spend more time on that
> because it is more important."

Also often true. IF ever there was a fundamental need, it is reading.
If they cannot read, they cannot do almost anything in school,
including math and science. If any student is not reading up to the
level expected of him or her, that student's education should *stop*
and all efforts made to bring the student up to the desired level
before going on. Failing that means that the student won't learn
anything anyway and will still be deficient in reading.

>   I also know teachers who say they are
> teaching some science, but it amounts to collecting insects and leaves and
> recording the temperature each day.
Collecting is a natural activity for kids in the primary grades, and
can be the basis for some useful science teaching, if the collections
are used for more than just decorating the walls of the classroom.
Just recording the temperature doesn't do much for me, but if they
made some other observations, like cloud cover and precipitation, and
recorded the temperature several times a day (with the other
observations), and the teacher used a little foreknowledge and had
them record the temperature a lot on days when a frontal passage was
expected. And of course, the temperature recorded has to be the
outside tepmperature. Watching what happens to the leaves of trees
during wet and dry spells can also be instructive, and give the
students practice in hypothesis-forming and testing in ficuring out
why the leaves do what they do. Building erosion plane models and
watching ant farms develop, observing animals giving birth and
nursing their young, are all activities that can be very instructive
for primary students, if they are carefuly guided by the teacher. And
all of these things are basically collection activities.

After all, the first steps in any scientific effort is the
classification of what starts out as random observations. These
things can be student initiated and teacher guided. First the teacher
gets student input on what they might want to collect, and then he or
she (usually she in the primary grades) should get them to suggest
what things should be looked for in the process of collecting. For
example, if they want to collect leaves, it cannot just be bring in
all the leaves you can find. They need to consider, shape, color,
location, other types of leaves in the same area, amount of sunlight,
presence of water, what birds, animals or insects live in the
vicinity, and any number of other things. Then they should try to
correlate the leaves they collect with some of the concomitant
observations, and see if they can use these observations to make any
predictions.

These guided collection activities can teach the students what it
means to take acientific data, and it is of historical significance
since it is pretty much what the early naturalists did and which led
to the development of the field of biology. Their science doesn't
need to be quantitative beyond the designations of more, less, or
about the same, and maybe this goes with that, and it can get into
some early issues of causation (does the fact that this follows that
mean that that caused this?).

Science teaching in the primary grades doesn't have to be pointless,
but it does require a teacher who can direct the students toward
correct answers, and teach them that in science there are wrong
answers and that any answer they come up with has to stand the test
of observation.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

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