It was good to see the reasoning behind the standards that
we’ll be teaching to. A few disjointed
thoughts about the reading:
- About this quote: “But given the cornucopia of information available today virtually at a touch – people live, after all, in an information age—an important role of science education is not to teach “all the facts” but rather to prepare students with sufficient core knowledge so that they can later acquire additional information on their own.”
- I really like this. I don’t see the point in memorizing, for example, the periodic table when I can just look up the element I need on the table. However, if I didn’t know how to read the periodic table I’d be lost. We need to teach our students how to look up information and critically assess its accuracy and reliability
- I liked that there is an emphasis on depth rather than breadth in the NGSS. I have found in my own studies that the better I know a particular topic, the easier it is to learn new information, even if that new information is not in the same domain.
- I also liked that there is a progression in ideas from broad to narrow application in practices common to all sciences to cross-cutting concepts that link between two or more domains to domain-specific core concepts.
- It was also good to see that all the work we’ve been doing so far regarding modeling, developing representations, and argumentation is focused on in the NGSS. I'm looking forward to seeing if and how my mentor teacher(s) put this into practice during my student teaching.
My biology professor told the story of Einstein looking up his own number when he was asked for it--why memorize your phone number when you can find it in a phone book? Surely this can be a lot less of a strain for our students, alleviating the need to memorize. I think it is fair for us to acknowledge some of the merit for memorization; having the material written on our minds can help form our way of thinking, and being able to call material from memory is more efficient than looking up the material. Having said that, yes I think memorization is used by teachers as a crutch and we are better than that!!!!
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