A note before I sally forth....

I have to work on an article today. I'll be writing about memory, trauma and the pitiable state of literary theory, with an eye toward reforming the field. With one hand tied behind my back. But before I strike out for Caidearas (sp?) for my bagel and thence to Olin Library's computers, I want to write briefly about something that has bothered me since I was in high school. How we teach science.

The way my high school was organized, and it is my understanding that a lot of high schools are organized this way, we had the following sequence of science classes. Freshmen took biology, sophomores took chemistry, juniors took physics, and seniors took AP courses or whatever was offered (I took environmental science, where we did a long project monitoring the health of a pond on campus and composted like crazy). The math sequence was geometry, trig, advanced algebra, and pre-calc/AP calc. I took AP calc and got my ass handed to me, but passed because my teacher took pity and knew I was working hard.

Now it seems to me that the science sequence is backwards. Biology comes out of chemistry, which comes out of physics. Newtonian physics, in its high school incarnation, resembles the algebra that we were doing in junior high and would seem to be a great proving ground for the mathematical concepts we learned the previous year, and a concurrent course in geometry is a great introduction to theorem building (stress on the theorem building, which would translate into the illustration of how scientific hypothesis become theories, or laws--and show the relationship between "theorem" and "theory," fer chrissakes, so kids don't forget the confidence we have in scientific theories). That's the freshman year.

The sophomore year is our first chance to rectify the problem of continuity. High school courses are taught in isolation. The physicists and the biologists rarely, to my memory, ever addressed one another, and nobody liked the chemists. In the second year of high school then, teach chemistry as an extension of physics. This means, fundamentally, that you don't stop teaching physics. Man, I wish I remembered more from my freshman science class, and the way you preserve such material is by staying in contact with it. So there. Does that mean sophomores will be taking 2 sciences and a math? Maybe. The same philosophy would govern the progression from chemistry to biology. I think that the chemistry and biology should meet at the level of DNA, where the third year would start. Talk about molecules that replicate themselves and show how they do so chemically, introduce mutation and competition and this will set up evolution. I have a feeling that by this point students should have some sense of statistics. In the senior year, students, having been in continuous contact with the science that they encountered in earlier years, would have a leg up for the AP courses.

I think I understand why the science sequence is the other way around. The products of biology are concrete and observable. Taxonomy and classification is easily teachable, and is perhaps more amenable to the freshman mind. But an important part of the understanding of how those categories of critters arrived is lacking, as well as a sense that there are goddamned uniform laws underwriting the development of critters. Physics, especially the introduction to quantum physics and chemistry can seem more abstract because a lot of what is taught--take the models of the atom and the capricious leaping of electrons from energy state to energy state with nothing in between, for instance--is just not within the realm of experience of the freshman mind. So I get that. Show them things they can cut up and smell (I still choke when I smell formaldehyde).

So, what would a good accompanying math sequence look like for high schoolers? I think that this is important since the risks of having a scientifically illiterate citizenry have not been higher, especially as technology becomes more powerful.

HJ