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New Zealand teachers shocked at leaked curriculumn – 'Where's the science?'
- dzhiurgis 3y agoSame thing, ad free and from source itself - https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/493178/teachers-shocked-at-leaked-draft-of-science-curriculum-where-s-the-physics-and-chemistry https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/493178/teachers-shocked-... It’s a draft for a reason. It was shared with 5 people who leaked it. A high level draft is missing keywords like matter and particles...
- lostlogin 3y agoA reliably better source too, this should be the linked article.
- defrost 3y agoIndeed, the crux of the matter is: "What we are pushing towards with the current fast draft is more of a holistic approach to how the different science concepts interact with each other rather than a purist, siloed approach." Buntting said the draft was very high-level, as were curriculum documents for other subjects but it was clear it needed more clarity about where teachers should expect to teach various science concepts. Education Minister Jan Tinetti said there was no question the final curriculum would include chemistry, physics and biology and other core science topics. I read this as a basic first draft floating the notion of looking more at the interplay of Physics + Chemistry + Environment + Math + etc in early pre-secondary school in order to gain feedback on final education mix. Broaching change ruffles feathers, and playing up outrage makes for good eyeball catching news fodder.
- gloryjulio 3y agoThe unfortunate truth that it doesn't matter left or right, the parents will be relentless. They will choose the most competitive schools no matter what. They will pay for private tuition and get the children to the private schools if they think the default choices are not enough. Lower the bar would only harm the poor kids who would have a chance to thrive in merit based programs
- hot_gril 3y agoThe draft doesn't say anything about lowering the bar or trying to make it more "fair." They want a different approach to science, whatever it is.
- omg_ponies 3y agoIt is not clear at all that this is a case of lowering the bar; IMO that verges on an inability to engage critically with the issue under discussion. It looks to me to be exploring a different way of presenting the subject matter that tries to answer the "how would I ever use this information" questions so commonly heard about hard sciences.
- jgalt212 3y ago[flagged]
- andersrs 3y agoIn New Zealand we have that but we call the trees poppies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
- Grum9 3y ago[dead]
- calgarymicro 3y agoWould love to hear about how teaching elementary schoolers about "the Earth system, biodiversity, food, energy and water, and infectious diseases" is equivalent to the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda.
- skellyclock 3y agoStrangely enough the Tutsis were the aggressors and the Hutu were the ones who were slaughtered.
- lupire 3y agoLuckily "of" is ambiguous in English
- PraetorianGourd 3y agoIt is concerning to me to center science on what are "the problems of our time". Take "infectious diseases", I doubt that topic would have been included in 2019. Of course COVID changed what is a problem of our time. But what is next? If there is a nuclear incident, does nuclear physics become the problem of our time? If a startup clones humans, does genetic research become the problem of our time? Teach the fundamentals, give students the tools to asses for themselves what the problems are, and how to best approach understanding them.
- lupire 3y agoShould there be any examples along with the fundamentals? If so, which examples? Maybe examples that are relevant to the world students live in? Otherwise, just teach Latin instead of everything else.
- mcpackieh 3y agoAren't classic contrived examples fine? "Jim has five apples then eats three..." Trying to make examples 'relevant to students' sounds like a recipe for cringe to me; adults who can do that effectively seem few and far between. "Jim catches 5 pokemans with his nintendo, then loses 3, how many pokemans does Jim have?" Maybe that's a bit unfair, I guess they mean to do things like "Due to global warming, the ocean level rises 5mm per year, how much will it have risen in..." Teaching arithmetic framed in the context of climate science or something. Still, it seems hamfisted and cringe.
- rhaway84773 3y agoYour latter example makes no sense. There is absolutely no reason Jim had 5 Apples and ate 3 so how many does he have left needs to be changed to anything related to sea water level. When I learnt the greenhouse effect in school in the mid 90s, my curriculum absolutely linked it to sitting in a car and getting hot and also global warming as well as growing crops. All of which could continue in such a curriculum.
- heisenzombie 3y agoI am sure that there exist good criticisms of this curriculum, but I don't think these are them. As per the HN commenting guidelines, I think they're incurious and attack a weak version of what's being proposed. It seems to me that the disagreement here is about whether to structure a curriculum around bottom-up or top-down pedagogy. Do we fundamentally structure things: - like the tech-tree from a strategy game: I think this is how a lot of us conceive of traditional learning. "Congratulations! You've done enough calculus problems to unlock Newtonian physics!" is the extreme position. - or like a Kanban "just-in-time" system: We start with a large theme and learn things as we need them. "Well, we've been learning about `conflict and civilization` for six months, and you've been trying to build a better trebuchet for a while but in order to for you to improve it any more I'm going to have to teach you this thing called calculus". Obviously both approaches have strengths and weaknesses. Also obviously, any real learning is some combination of both of those. A purely "tech tree" approach would require hellish discipline, and human knowledge is way more messy than a clean DAG anyway. Also no-one would stare at a group of kindergarteners who can't count past 10 and say "lets build a large language model!" I happen to think that the ideal system is closer to the to top-down approach, but there are big challenges to implementing it. I think it's probably much easier to do bottom-up learning if you're treating large classrooms of children like widgets on a conveyor belt. I.e it may be that bottom-up wins on efficiency and so given the current resources of our education system, a much more top-down system would just fail at the implementation stage. Whereas if our education system had way more resources, then top-down would win.
- gloryjulio 3y agoThe problems is that it doesn't matter what happens, all the competitive parents that I know of regardless of race, country, class would choose the schools and private tutors. They will pay what they can afford to push their children ahead. That's just how it is. And then we can see who are truly left behind
- heisenzombie 3y agoI don’t see how your comment is related to mine? Schools have to make choices about pedagogy. I think this is a debate about which choices give the best outcomes. You’re pointing out that access to educational resources is allocated by wealth to some degree, which is obviously true but I don’t understand your point beyond that?
- robg 3y agoAnyone know of a school district that teaches neuroscience from a young age? Basically a user’s guide to the brain? There’s so much emphasis on mental health, shocked schools aren’t teaching how brains work best. The neurosciences have been clear on that topic for at least 30 years.
- late2part 3y ago[flagged]
- PM_me_your_math 3y ago[flagged]
- Arrath 3y agoBurning man oughta hire you to build their titular straw man.
- PM_me_your_math 3y agoHave you studied gender queer and lawn boy? If not, don't worry, your children will.
- hackerlight 3y agoI believe in a breadth-first education. First, teach the broad strokes across multiple areas, including softer sciences, so kids know the basics of all the interrelated disciplines. This interrelated web of knowledge of different concepts and tools will then help them actually understand specific narrow domains like neuroscience. Without it, they will lack the capability to understand, and will learn lists of data in their textbook by rote in order to pass the class.
- hot_gril 3y agoFeels out of context. I couldn't even figure out what age of students they're talking about until I read "One said the focus on four specific topics was likely to leave pupils bored with science by the time they reached secondary school." So I guess elementary school. Now, the complaint is that instead of physics, chemistry, and biology, it's "the Earth system, biodiversity, food, energy and water, and infectious diseases." That's all it says, I don't really know what that's supposed to mean. The elementary school version of chemistry I learned was just making vinegar and baking soda volcanoes. Maybe that's "energy" now.
- revelio 3y agoSeems pretty obvious what it's supposed to mean. Those topics are all selected for compatibility with ideological indoctrination and anti-science thinking. Basic science like physics and chemistry are a problem for woke authoritarians because you can do experiments in high school labs, and this introduces children to things like standards of evidence, the scientific method, statistical rigor, the idea that some things are universally true and false etc. More importantly it teaches them to think for themselves. Science is at its best when the teacher says "X is true" but then also "and here's why you don't have to take my word for it", which is a powerful introduction to adulthood. All the replacement topics are united by an inability to do experiments. Instead these fields rely heavily on unvalidated simulations of assumptions. These specific topics are also clearly selected for left wing environmental radicalism e.g. "earth science" means climate change, "infectious diseases" means teaching kids how important and brilliant lockdowns and masks are, "biodiversity" means the importance of not building anything and so on. Universities are a power base for the left because they strictly teach students to silo themselves and never question professors, especially not those from a different field. High school doesn't teach that mentality to the same degree. If this curriculum does goes through, science will immediately be redefined as "here is what academics say, memorize it, regurgitate in exams, if you do that accurately you're good at science". This is exactly what they want, because if there's one thing that COVID revealed very well it was the rampant fear of those in power of anyone who doesn't define science as blind acceptance of the word of government and academic authorities.
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- grass_is_green 3y agoThe problem is that this isn't the only news about a wacky new science curriculum. There's also the attempt to shoehorn "Matauranga Maori" - Maori (the indigenous people of NZ) "ways of knowing" in there. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/19/what-are-maori-ways-of-knowing-and-should-they-be-taught-in-science-class-as-coequal-to-modern-science/ https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/19/what-are-maori-way... I get the feeling the people dreaming this stuff up don't know what science is or why anyone might care about it. If it's going to be severely watered down, why bother teaching it at all? (throwaway account, this is a hot button topic in NZ)
- Affric 3y agoIt’s a well written piece but I think (in a similar vein to that article) a lot of it is driven by the codification and deification of “Science”. Given down to children, their heads filled with our best theories. There are different systems for generating information. Knowledge”, and therefore “Science”, are dangerous words. Our modern Western Liberal colonial societies don’t have it all figured out but have a hegemony that often chafes indigenous peoples. I think we would be better recasting what we teach, and what we try to teach as Empiricism or something similar. Frame it around experimentation. Frame it around students own desire to learn and share their learnings. Go after the “why?” that they love so much. I think it’s at once compatible with non “Science” knowledge systems, cultivates curiosity, and engenders that which creates knowledge. It also protects empiricism from the urge some have to deny what lends authority to good science.
- tjpnz 3y agoI hope my High School science teachers are long since retired because I couldn't imagine them suffering through this bullshit. But if the Ministry of Education is fine teaching religion perhaps they should also consider including Intelligent Design and Gaia Hypothesis too.
- EricE 3y agoStupid people are easier to control.
- phire 3y agoFor some context, this isn't really an argument about how much science should be in the curriculum, but how detailed and prescriptive that curriculum should be. New Zealand's High School curriculum is very perspective. There is an exact list of skills that students are expected to show, and all assessments are managed centrally. Teachers are more or less expected to teach to the test first and then fit actual learning around that. It does work well when the curriculum is well designed. This article is talking about the the primary school (elementary) curriculum, which has always been much less prescriptive. There are no centrally managed assessments, just a set of learning guidelines that teachers have freedom to design a learning program around. This new science curriculum draft is taking this anti-prescriptivism approach to the extreme. It's a pretty short document that lists a few overarching mega topics. It's expecting that teachers will read between the lines and manage to teach all the important science skills within context of those topics and get them ready for high school. On the positive side, this gives teachers even more freedom to customise their teaching programs. But it also places a massive workload on those teachers to actually work out what they need to teach students. Good teachers with strong science skills might be able to achieve this, but the rest will struggle. Opponents of this draft are arguing the majority of students will receive sub-standard science teaching, find it boring and then stay away from science courses at high school. Science is one area were you really do want a more prescriptive curriculum, simply so these generalist primary school teachers know what they should be teaching.
- heisenzombie 3y agoThanks for this, sounds right to me. It’s interesting to me that the ideal curriculum changes as a function of the resources available.
- nicwolff 3y ago"science would be taught through four contexts - the Earth system, biodiversity, food, energy and water, and infectious diseases." Where's the semicolon?