Educators involved in drawing them up said the guidelines were intended to combat widespread scientific ignorance, to standardize teaching among states, and to raise the number of high school graduates who choose scientific and technical majors in college, a critical issue for the country’s economic future.
I'm sorry, we already had a solution to this. STEM grads were through the roof in previous decades. We
lost the lessons that allowed us to interest students in them, along with places willing to employ them in their fields. That's the real problem. There's no point in fucking with the curriculum if no one is willing to hire the graduates for more than minimum wage making burgers, cleaning floors, pouring coffees, and assembling weapons to use on Iraqis.
We put men on the moon, created the computer age, split the atom, discovered and mass-produced antibiotics, and beat back diseases. How many of those people went to school in one-room schoolhouses in the sticks, or in a public school with forty kids in the class and twenty textbooks, but with a teacher who helped them along where they stumbled or nurtured a spark of interest? Maybe we should focus on recruiting and retaining quality teachers who give a damn about students.
If we want STEM grads, we should go back and talk to the scientists and engineers who were inspired by the promise of the space program and Silicon Valley, or by media that depicted the best of what humanity could
become rather than wallowing in the worst monsters we can produce. Fund and regulate colleges and universities so that tuition doesn't cost as much as a house and carry at 29.99% interest. Change policies to focus development back on pushing the boundaries instead of tweaking the existing just enough to gain a new patent. Fund NASA, the NSF, NIH, and the other agencies that actually make scientific progress. Offer a good GI bill for the hundreds of thousands of soldiers involved in the last decade of war to go to college and university. Hold hearings on reforming the intellectual property system. Show minority students that their contributions are valued and their capacity to learn is equal. Ensure that kids can do simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division without having to pull out a calculator or smartphone. Rebuild the industrial base so that the graduates will have somewhere to ply their trades for a living wage. Or we could always go into full fantasy-land and make sure that our prospective graduates don't have to worry that some bank will prey on their families or that, if they get sick, that they'll die broke and in the street.
The focus would be helping students become more intelligent science consumers by learning how scientific work is done: how ideas are developed and tested, what counts as strong or weak evidence, and how insights from many disciplines fit together into a coherent picture of the world.
Back in the day, that fit into the first half of my grade nine science class. I have a university science degree.
Outlining how the standards might change science classrooms, educators said they foresaw more use of real-world examples, like taking students to a farm or fish hatchery — perhaps repeatedly, over the course of years — to help them learn principles from biology, chemistry and physics.
Leaders of the effort said that teachers may well wind up covering fewer subjects, but digging more deeply into the ones they do cover.
I worry that kids just won't get exposed to any breadth beyond whatever the focus project is for that year. If it's not their thing, they may turn off from science in general. I hated biology, but chemistry became my second-best subject because I had a very good teacher, a professional chemist, who was able to show me things that piqued my interest and then where to go from there.
When a kid gets to college or university, it's too late to show them a big degree of breadth. At that point, most students don't have a lot of money to throw at many expensive courses to find out what they might or might not be interested in, and they may not have the prerequisites.
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