Samian’s Fifteenth Account: How can we make science education easier and more interesting for American students?
I’m a soon-to-be US college graduate, and I’ve been thinking about the fact that many of the high-demand jobs out there (medicine, nursing, engineering) are very science-based.
However, I am getting out with a liberal arts degree, and even as a child I’d found science subjects to be immensely difficult. There was too much memorization, it seemed so arcane and boring, and required intense study for long long periods of time.
How can we make science easier for young people today?
Answers and Views:
Answer by smile!
Bill Nye the Science guy!!
It needs to be more hands on. Lecture was 90 percent of chemistry, bio and physics when I went through, since lab is so expensive.
Lecture is so boring.
Show kids how science translates into real life, and they will eat it up.
Answer by Rob TFirst off, abolish all health and safety legislation relating to science teaching. In the days when kids actually did practical work, nobody much got ever got injured, let alone killed. If some of todays kids are so unfit for living in the real world life that they can’t survive in a lab, taking them out of the gene pool would be a benfit in the long run.
Second, forget about “making science easier”. The result of making it easier is that bright kids are bored to tears with the feeble stuff they are actually taught. Don’t make it easier, make it harder and more challenging. Never tell kids “science is hard” – if they enjoy it they will just get on and do it, however hard it is.
Third (and probably the hardest one!) stop pretending you live in a country where church and state are indepedent, but where schools still mess about pretending creationism and intelligent design are “science”. If some people want to be religions fundamentalists, that’s fine. Just make sure they don’t get any chance to screw up everybody else’s education.
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