Reply to comment

 I think you point out a key problem that most school districts impose on their teachers: teaching toward a common goal that is much too strict.  For an example, I come from a rural school district in Ohio where the goal of each teacher from 9th and 10th grade was to prepare each student to pass (with flying colors, of course) the Ohio General Test in order to secure benchmarks for the school.  I had a great relationship with many of my teachers, and they personally confided in me that they felt restrained and felt like they must expect to receive exactly the same 'output' from students as was necessary to 'teach them the correct things,' AKA, the things that were going to be on the OGT.  If the output was not ideal, there could be no further discussion on that generated output.  Rather, the teacher had to propose the same concept again until the 'correct' idea was reached.

As a student, I felt these classes were practically a 'beat the system' type of deal.  I understood the exact concepts, aced the OGT and moved on.  I remember very little from these classes, save the exact answers that we repeated for specific concepts.  When I entered a college-sponsored American history class my senior year and was faced to ask new questions and derive different answers (think Howard Zinn, out of the box), I was stumped for the first month.  After awhile, I began to open up to things being different and likewise acceptable, rather than there being a clearcut answer.  

However, this was, as I said, a history class.  We could discuss things that happened in the past and hypothesize different outcomes pretty readily.  Doing this in a science class, as you can expect, poses many more questions because a lot of what is being discussed is novel and most students don't come into the class with a general idea of it (as they would the civil war, for example).  I think this brings all the more interest into creating science as being open-ended and based on inquiry, and I love that Susan is willing to take this concept into her classroom setting.  I'm interested to see what the results will be!