Re: Rigorous Evidence For Evolution

On Apr 2, 7:59 pm, "Ian Chua" <i...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 2, 7:41 pm, "Martin Hutton"

<mdhutton1949REM...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2-Apr-2007, "Ian Chua" <i...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Apr 2, 2:35 pm, "Martin Hutton"
<mdhutton1949REM...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2-Apr-2007, "Ian Chua" <i...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Apr 2, 6:46 am, Kevin Wayne Williams <kww.niho...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Ian Chua wrote:
On Apr 1, 11:50 pm, Kevin Wayne Williams <kww.niho...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Ian Chua wrote:
But right now, there're lots of gaps to need to fill.
Would you please name a few of them? Most of the "gaps" that
people
report are simply misconceptions on the part of the person making
the
claim, not legitimate deficiencies.
KWW

Again, it depends which age group you are targetting.
For young kids in school, when the textbook starts a chapter with,
"Billions of years ago....", they already lose lthe connection wth
science.

I've only noticed that problem with people that reject science in
it's
entirety, and insist that the earth is only a few thousand years
old. No
educational system can pander to such people. If their parents
believe
such nonsense, it shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of their
child's education.

I notice that you didn't provide me with any examples of "gaps".

KWW

The example cited is the big gap between the child's zero knowldege of
evolution
and the textbook phrase, "Billions of years ago....". The problem is
like
Algebra introduced Secondary 1 (Grade 7).

What's the problem? Children brought up in the Hindu
tradition have no problem with "billions of years", so
the fault lies not with the children but with their
parents and educators.

As students moved onto
Secondary 2,
many of them still can't solve algebraic problems. Our online math
program
now has lessons to bridge primary school math from "models" to
"algebra" not
found at all in textbooks, which teachers like. Learning gaps are not
unqiue to
teaching of evolution but occurs in every subject.

There are a number of teaching methods available that
give the young 'uns a way to wrap their minds around
the very small and the very large - both in size and
in duration.

The first episode of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" did a very good
presentation of the 15 billion year age of the universe by
mapping it to 1yr.

Use one episode of "Cosmos" per week to your students
(using the rest of the week to discuss and elucidate the
points raised) and they'll have a better set of concepts
of where and when they live, what they are and what their
immediate and distant environment is like.

For a quicky demonstration of a distance scale, check out
the 197? video by Charles and Ray Eames of IBM called
"Powers of Ten". This should be suitable for kids down
to 7yrs old (I showed it to my daughter when she was 5
and she got
it):http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6945724039283018435

--
Martin Hutton

Thanks for your contributions.
PBS also has some great videos - this is available free online for
now.
J. Bronowvski's "The Ascent of Man" produced by BBC is one of my
favourites -

I'm rewatching that from a very noisy recording.

but no one replied my email regarding licensing for use
in our system.

Try writing a hard copy on letterhead to the BBC in London.

Will do....the email probably went to someone who has no power to make
decisions.

But the concern of teachers is that the lessons must first meet the
requirements of the specified curriculum to that students can get high
marks in the exams.
Hence, for math alone, we have developed over 1,000 online interactive
videos.

Ah, the idiocy of test based education.

Tests?? We have more than 20,000 questions for math alone and it's
till not enough!!

We thought that students generally don't like to do homework.
But we have a system which enables students to see their ranking and
performance compared to other students
and this seems to become an attractive feature for them. They're now
competing with hundreds of other students
(currently only amongst students within the same school) in a somewhat
multi-player game environment but
minus the games and strictly math. They're now doing hundreds of
questions a week each. It was not too difficult
setting math questions. But Biology will be a challenge.

--
Martin Hutton


.

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