There is Hope

by Elio

Through the years, we have not had many op­por­tu­ni­ties to look for­wards, to get a feel­ing for how sci­ence is taught in mid­dle and high schools. But we have had a cou­ple of won­der­ful en­coun­ters, one with the Jef­fer­son Mid­dle School and Mrs. Put­nam, their sixth grade teacher in Jack­son, Mis­sis­sippi. Their blog, Sci­ence is a Blast is well worth vis­it­ing, which is an un­der­state­ment. The num­ber of great links alone is worth the price! We're glad that this blog is some­where among the ones of­fered to the stu­dents.

Source

The sec­ond of our past con­tacts is a blog called Ex­treme Bi­ol­ogy, main­tained by teacher Stacy Baker at Calver­ton School in Hunt­ing­ton Mary­land. This blog, no­table for its depth and breadth, won the 2008 Edublog Award for Best Class Blog. And MS. Baker was promi­nently fea­tured in an episode of NPR's Sci­ence Fri­day. One of her stu­dents wrote a story about how wood can be treated with fungi to pro­duce Stradi­var­ius-grade vi­o­lins based on some­thing we had writ­ten here.

Not know­ing much about the state of ed­u­ca­tion in this coun­try, we are chary of com­ment­ing on the cur­rent state of af­fairs. How­ever it is clear from our brief con­tact with young­sters and from other anec­do­tal in­di­ca­tions that at some of the best teach­ing is very good in­deed. Let's hope it spreads fur­ther.