I want to personally congratulate the National Academy of Sciences they really get it. For to long students have been bombarded with scientific curiculmn that is a "mile wide and an inch deep". Due to this we all can recount a time when we felt that we would A. never learn all this material and B. none of this stuff correlates. Yet they have correctly decided to first develop standards that reduce amount of information learned and to show how these ideas correlate. The push to develop common core standards.
I definitely agree with the push for more applications of engineering, and physics and technology in schools at an early age. The United states has been lapped in the harder sciences and I approve of a stand that brings the hunger and fire back to American Ingenuity at such a young age. Students who can gain a foot hold in these love for sciences can also transfer over to an understanding of mathematics, music and programming. These are the fields of the future. If we can motivate and cultivate this love for knowledge and learning to the next generation America will be well on its way to changing the perception of a the stem programs not only to our own students but to the world as well.
Im quite curious to see how this trajectory will transfer over to the workforce in the next 10-15 years . This is enough time for the students who just entered the K-12 school setting as this push began to matriculate and fully participate in this program.
I totally agree with you! I can distinctly remember the day in AP Chemistry when I realized that the AP test would cover all the material we had learned, but I had no idea how to synthesize all of the information together so instead I had to compartmentalize and memorize. That was not learning! I hope that we can be the teachers who not only encourage students to embrace their natural sense of inquiry and pursue engineering and science educations, but also help students to synthesize and streamline all of our content.
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