Jamie Rosen ([personal profile] jrosen) wrote in [personal profile] terriko 2011-01-03 08:59 pm (UTC)

Really, that's what science is, isn't it? Cheating the game. :)

I think one of the difficulties with teaching science is that it's become something of a vicious cycle -- students are bored by science, grow up and become teachers, and have to teach science, which as they know is boring. (I'm referring to grade school, rather than secondary school, because teachers have to cover a bit of everything at the earlier years.) Some teachers won't have that attitude, but a lot of them will -- they're teaching it because they have to, not because it interests them.

Once you get to the secondary school level, this problem should clear up, but there's another problem -- a lot of people interested in the sciences go into the sciences, rather than into education. It wouldn't surprise me if this was something of the flipside of the elementary-school problem: they don't want to teach science because teaching is boring. The teachers they had didn't speak to their interests, or they saw the boredom of the science class and came to associate the two.

It's not a problem limited to the sciences, either. A lot of teachers in the early grades wind up teaching subjects or material that doesn't interest them, and this comes across in the lessons.

On an unrelated note, have you seen this game? Strange Synergy. It's out of print, but it sounds like something you'd enjoy. I'm going to see if I can track down a decent used copy somewhere because it looks like fun.

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