What I remember of middle-school science had less to do with reproducing basic results and more to do with memorizing lists of organelles and looking at rotifers under a microscope.
Yes. Perhaps we might say, this is what middle school or high school science should be.
Likewise direct demonstrations are the sort of thing I wish science museums focused on more clearly. Often they have 75% of it, but the story of “this experiment shows X” gets lost in the “whoa, cool”. I’m in favor of neat stuff, but I wish they explained better what insight the viewer should have.
Same, here. To get a course that taught replication and experimental design and analysis, I had to go to a residential high school specifically for Math and Science. It was a required first-semester course that spent a lot of time on how to enter data into a calculator and generate graphs/t tests/etc, and I had this nasty habit of spacing out and still completing the assignments. Suffice it to say, I was not prepared for college Physics.
I only ever had one teacher in public school who put emphasis on the science part, but that was primarily in the evaluation I got at the end of the course; meanwhile, I’d been reading Hypephysics and had been commenting excitedly about the particle zoo in the time before the bell, to no good reaction from anyone. Needless to say, rather than getting the point, I applied for the afore-mentioned Math and Science school.
Middle school science was all memorizing lists and labeling diagrams. Hell, College Biology 101 was all memorizing definitions and labeling diagrams and occasionally poking dead animals (in order to label more diagrams).
Have you looked at such books? If so, why not name specific ones?
Do you have such faith in this class of books that you recommend I choose for this class arbitrarily? I’ll try that: half of the hits on the first page of google are for this book, but I haven’t figured out what it is even about. Amazon then suggests this book which is about easy projects. At least I know what that means.
You want books for middle school science teachers.
EDIT: not saying that even most books in this category or what you want, but that many of the books you want are in this category.
What I remember of middle-school science had less to do with reproducing basic results and more to do with memorizing lists of organelles and looking at rotifers under a microscope.
Yes. Perhaps we might say, this is what middle school or high school science should be.
Likewise direct demonstrations are the sort of thing I wish science museums focused on more clearly. Often they have 75% of it, but the story of “this experiment shows X” gets lost in the “whoa, cool”. I’m in favor of neat stuff, but I wish they explained better what insight the viewer should have.
Same, here. To get a course that taught replication and experimental design and analysis, I had to go to a residential high school specifically for Math and Science. It was a required first-semester course that spent a lot of time on how to enter data into a calculator and generate graphs/t tests/etc, and I had this nasty habit of spacing out and still completing the assignments. Suffice it to say, I was not prepared for college Physics.
I only ever had one teacher in public school who put emphasis on the science part, but that was primarily in the evaluation I got at the end of the course; meanwhile, I’d been reading Hypephysics and had been commenting excitedly about the particle zoo in the time before the bell, to no good reaction from anyone. Needless to say, rather than getting the point, I applied for the afore-mentioned Math and Science school.
Middle school science was all memorizing lists and labeling diagrams. Hell, College Biology 101 was all memorizing definitions and labeling diagrams and occasionally poking dead animals (in order to label more diagrams).
Have you looked at such books? If so, why not name specific ones?
Do you have such faith in this class of books that you recommend I choose for this class arbitrarily? I’ll try that: half of the hits on the first page of google are for this book, but I haven’t figured out what it is even about. Amazon then suggests this book which is about easy projects. At least I know what that means.