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In Biology (and Chemistry), there was/is a philosophical dispute playing out over what should be taught in high school. Many of the text books more or less teac

In Biology (and Chemistry), there was/is a philosophical dispute playing out over what should be taught in high school. Many of the text books more or less teach dumbed down versions of what a Biology undergraduate university student would learn in their first semesters — heavy on the theory, but hampered by a lack of rigorous mathematical etc underpinnings. My father, who was a biology teacher, advocated that high school biology should be taught largely for the benefit of the vast majority of students who would never take another biology class in their life — a self contained curriculum focusing on nature observation and on practical interactions of biology with the world. I went through a high school curriculum focused on classical languages, and went on to a math-heavy CS school. The entirety of my high school math probably helped me for less than one semester. The math of my colleagues who attended a math focused high school track helped them for maybe one more semester at most (Their drafting classes might have been more valuable). Yet my Latin and Greek, which I never studied anymore after high school, still occasionally comes in handy to prop up my vocabulary or read street signs in Athens.

aidenn0 5y ago
Add physics to that list. It's taught freshman year at the local high school which guarantees zero calculus is involved.
- eru 5y ago
  Yes. Though you can do a lot of fun and useful physics without calculus. My view is biased, because I had some very good physics teachers in high school and an interest in the subject. So here again, I doubt that a typical student at a typical school gets all that much out of the lectures.
FredPret 5y ago
I’m an engineer, so I went through university mathematics. I haven’t used it since… but the problem-solving ability I learned has literally transformed the way my brain works. The content of high school math is important only in the sense that it must interest the kids and might be vaguely useful later on. The real prize is systematic problem-solving skills and confidence.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  But it doesn't generally do either. You don't learn any "problem solving maturity" in highschool and most of what I remember was that students who weren't good at number crunching got discouraged and gave up on math entirely, labeling themselves as "not a math person."
- boppo1 5y ago
  > the problem-solving ability I learned has literally transformed the way my brain works Can you elaborate on this?
  - FredPret 5y ago
    I'd say I'm far more disciplined and systematic now. I'm also more confident in tackling messy, complicated problems; I think this is 90% of the battle to be honest.
mncharity 5y ago
> [...] a self contained curriculum [...for a terminal biology course...] Is there any interesting thought on how to incentivize quality in outcomes and content creation there? Where the usual pervasive failure doesn't get the disaster-triage-chain-of-care back-pressure of follow-on instruction? It's an issue I've been puzzling over. Even first-tier college intro biology still struggles to leave students with a firm grip on even central dogma, something that can be taught down through middle-school. But at least improvement is incentivized when follow-on intro genetics is forced to remediate. In contrast, with mostly-terminal college intro astronomy, of the top ten-ish most used textbooks, most all have even the color of the Sun wrong, perpetuating the pervasive kindergarten misconception even into first-tier astronomy graduate school. A failure that's been long-term multi-decade stable, and seems unlikely to improve any year soon. And there's teaching order-of-magnitude size, a part of most-every science and engineering curriculum. But it's little used in subsequent instruction, so there's little selection pressure to teach it successfully. Leaving even first-tier medical school graduate students with little idea how big cells are. And even with narrow objectives and chain-of-care feedback, chemistry education content is described by chemistry education research using adjectives like "incoherent", and as leaving both students and teachers steeped in misconceptions. Science education content is pervasively very not wonderful, and would seemingly lose some of its very few quality constraints by not targeting follow-on instruction. At the other extreme, in the context of pre-K science education, there's been a suggestion that students have a human right to make sense of their world. "Now", not a K-lifetime later in middle-school. We're very not set up for that. (Or even to do that in middle-school, or high-school, or undergrad, or ...). We are largely unable to even imagine what it might look like. Crafting content for it would seemingly require a massive collaborative effort from the science research community. But it's very not clear how to incentivize, or even to characterize it. Which ties back to language learning. I talked with someone doing remote tutoring of French. For students with diverse objectives - the AP French exam, family culture, travel for tourism, and for work. And thus with diverse curriculums. Apparently the AP French exam tests for a particular type of conversational French, and is very hard. So even teaching to the test, it is a struggle to get good outcomes. So there's just not room for expanding scope, for other curricular objectives, for other aspects of what it can mean to learn French. Which reminded me a lot of "physics" education, and physics education research. The pursuit of a worthwhile goal, and hard one. With even the rare excellence of best practices struggling for good outcomes. But also a narrow goal, with little room for scope expansion, with no room for much of the beautiful breadth of Physics. The old professorial lament, of "why would students be interested in majoring in physics, when they've never been shown any interesting physics?". (Or for a feel for reasonable values, etc). Which prompted me to wonder: Perhaps "making sense of the physical world" is fruitfully viewed as a goal distinct from normal "science" education? Rather than framing it as transformative improvement of science education? If we take up a big hairy audacious goal like making sense of the physical world, in K or in college, or just a goal like a quality terminal self-contained "biology for poets", how do we avoid it being the usual dreck, but now without even the usual weak quality checks of high-stakes exams, of dependent follow-on instruction, and of pretending it's not largely a disaster? ... Thoughts? Thanks.
denton-scratch 5y ago
I did biology at shcool. My parents had to buy me a dissection kit - scalpels, forceps, lancets and so on. The curriculum was quite heavy on dissections. We had to dissect frogs, dogfish and rats. We once also had to do an experiment on a live (pithed) frog. We were marked on the drawings we had to make of our dissections. These labs were double classes - a bit more than two hours. I have no idea how worthwhile that kind of instruction was; knowledge of anatomy hasn't featured in my career. I suspect it would have been very helpful if you decided to become a physician.

aidenn0 5y ago

Add physics to that list. It's taught freshman year at the local high school which guarantees zero calculus is involved.

eru 5y ago
Yes. Though you can do a lot of fun and useful physics without calculus. My view is biased, because I had some very good physics teachers in high school and an interest in the subject. So here again, I doubt that a typical student at a typical school gets all that much out of the lectures.

FredPret 5y ago

I’m an engineer, so I went through university mathematics. I haven’t used it since… but the problem-solving ability I learned has literally transformed the way my brain works. The content of high school math is important only in the sense that it must interest the kids and might be vaguely useful later on. The real prize is systematic problem-solving skills and confidence.

hiptobecubic 5y ago
But it doesn't generally do either. You don't learn any "problem solving maturity" in highschool and most of what I remember was that students who weren't good at number crunching got discouraged and gave up on math entirely, labeling themselves as "not a math person."
boppo1 5y ago
> the problem-solving ability I learned has literally transformed the way my brain works Can you elaborate on this?
- FredPret 5y ago
  I'd say I'm far more disciplined and systematic now. I'm also more confident in tackling messy, complicated problems; I think this is 90% of the battle to be honest.

mncharity 5y ago

> [...] a self contained curriculum [...for a terminal biology course...] Is there any interesting thought on how to incentivize quality in outcomes and content creation there? Where the usual pervasive failure doesn't get the disaster-triage-chain-of-care back-pressure of follow-on instruction? It's an issue I've been puzzling over. Even first-tier college intro biology still struggles to leave students with a firm grip on even central dogma, something that can be taught down through middle-school. But at least improvement is incentivized when follow-on intro genetics is forced to remediate. In contrast, with mostly-terminal college intro astronomy, of the top ten-ish most used textbooks, most all have even the color of the Sun wrong, perpetuating the pervasive kindergarten misconception even into first-tier astronomy graduate school. A failure that's been long-term multi-decade stable, and seems unlikely to improve any year soon. And there's teaching order-of-magnitude size, a part of most-every science and engineering curriculum. But it's little used in subsequent instruction, so there's little selection pressure to teach it successfully. Leaving even first-tier medical school graduate students with little idea how big cells are. And even with narrow objectives and chain-of-care feedback, chemistry education content is described by chemistry education research using adjectives like "incoherent", and as leaving both students and teachers steeped in misconceptions. Science education content is pervasively very not wonderful, and would seemingly lose some of its very few quality constraints by not targeting follow-on instruction. At the other extreme, in the context of pre-K science education, there's been a suggestion that students have a human right to make sense of their world. "Now", not a K-lifetime later in middle-school. We're very not set up for that. (Or even to do that in middle-school, or high-school, or undergrad, or ...). We are largely unable to even imagine what it might look like. Crafting content for it would seemingly require a massive collaborative effort from the science research community. But it's very not clear how to incentivize, or even to characterize it. Which ties back to language learning. I talked with someone doing remote tutoring of French. For students with diverse objectives - the AP French exam, family culture, travel for tourism, and for work. And thus with diverse curriculums. Apparently the AP French exam tests for a particular type of conversational French, and is very hard. So even teaching to the test, it is a struggle to get good outcomes. So there's just not room for expanding scope, for other curricular objectives, for other aspects of what it can mean to learn French. Which reminded me a lot of "physics" education, and physics education research. The pursuit of a worthwhile goal, and hard one. With even the rare excellence of best practices struggling for good outcomes. But also a narrow goal, with little room for scope expansion, with no room for much of the beautiful breadth of Physics. The old professorial lament, of "why would students be interested in majoring in physics, when they've never been shown any interesting physics?". (Or for a feel for reasonable values, etc). Which prompted me to wonder: Perhaps "making sense of the physical world" is fruitfully viewed as a goal distinct from normal "science" education? Rather than framing it as transformative improvement of science education? If we take up a big hairy audacious goal like making sense of the physical world, in K or in college, or just a goal like a quality terminal self-contained "biology for poets", how do we avoid it being the usual dreck, but now without even the usual weak quality checks of high-stakes exams, of dependent follow-on instruction, and of pretending it's not largely a disaster? ... Thoughts? Thanks.

denton-scratch 5y ago

I did biology at shcool. My parents had to buy me a dissection kit - scalpels, forceps, lancets and so on. The curriculum was quite heavy on dissections. We had to dissect frogs, dogfish and rats. We once also had to do an experiment on a live (pithed) frog. We were marked on the drawings we had to make of our dissections. These labs were double classes - a bit more than two hours. I have no idea how worthwhile that kind of instruction was; knowledge of anatomy hasn't featured in my career. I suspect it would have been very helpful if you decided to become a physician.