Re: Sixth grade science teaching

Paul J Gans wrote:
> BruceW <LevelOneDiag@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
>>Robert Grumbine wrote:
>>
>>>Roger Coppock <rcoppock@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>
>>>>[snip] What a difference Sputnik made!
>>>
>>>Indeed. Probably the single biggest disaster in the
>>>history of US education was our response to Sputnik.
>
>
>>Why was education's response to Sputnik a disaster?
>
>
> Because it got rid of techniques for teaching math,
> physics, and chemistry that more or less worked and
> replaced them by all sorts of new wizz-bang notions
> (like 'new math') that didn't work.
>
> A lot of idiots had their hands in it. My favorite
> is that one should NOT memorize a multiplication
> table. One should *reason* out the answer to a
> multiplication problem.
>

I was in school at that time (born in 1957) and I'm sure I had to
memorize multiplication tables. We probably also did some things that
weren't effective, but I did learn my math facts.

Personally, I like the Montessori approach. My son learned his math
facts *and* understood why it worked, without the pain of sitting still
and reciting tables.

> Another was teaching set theory to young kids as
> a basis for arithmetic. It is, actually, but kids
> have to learn how to compute. They can learn nice
> theory later.
>

Yeah, I vaguely remember doing set theory in elementary school. It
wasn't particularly helpful in understanding basic arithmetic.

> In physics the notion was to no longer teach them
> things in an authoritarian way, using the occasional
> experiment to demonstrate that what the teacher said
> was true. Instead the quaint notion that you could
> have kids do experiments and "deduce" things from
> them.
>

My high school physics class was... poor to mediocre, I'll admit. Part
of it was the teacher. His name was Einert. If you dropped the first
letter of his name you had an exact description of his teaching style. I
love physics but he made it *so* boring!

Now, our high school chemistry teacher was great. He taught a lively,
entertaining class and we learned a lot.

> ----- Paul J. Gans
>

.

Relevant Pages

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