Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Reply to comment

Jess Martzall's picture

I really connected with Mr.

I really connected with Mr. Greene's article because I'm interested in becoming a teacher and it is incredibly sad how school frequently manages to destroy the love of learning. Luckily, I've had some amazing science teachers (Physics) who allowed us to experiment and learn from more than just notes on slides, but I've also experienced the the opposite type of education.

At my school, Biology and Chemistry were almost completely lecture-based and most of our time was spent taking notes on discoveries made hundreds of years ago. Our classes were only forty minutes long which isn't very conducive to in-depth labs, so any type of lab was rare. It was mostly all memorization and then multiple choice tests, and we never talked about current discoveries in any way. I wanted to give biology another chance in college, so I could focus on understand instead of regurgitating information.

Unfortunately, I do not think that science education in my area is going to improve any time soon. During junior year we had to take a standardized test for science, and instead of testing the type of logic or reasoning used in science, its goal was to get us to recall facts from middle school. How will it be possible for teachers to enable us to remember every minute detail we've learned in science? The test wanted us to spit back information, so science teachers will be even more pressured to teach to the test instead of trying to inspire a love of learning.

Reply

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
2 + 8 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.