So, tracking down the Illinois Institute of Technology lead, I found the SMILE program. http://mypages.iit.edu/~smile/index1.html
dozens of lesson plans for Math, physics, chemistry, biology.
Talk there of something called "the phenomenological approach"...this looks promising. I am hopeful I have stumbled onto the missing science-education paradigm of my dreams.
well...so investigation proves it is not quite that...but still useful, lots of free lesson plans/ideas.
more links of interest:
http://www.sldirectory.com/teachf/scied.html
Monday, March 22, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Physics First
I've got a new bee buzzing about under my educator's hat, concerning the basic approach to teaching science. In brief sketch: Artistotle founded a study of natural phenomena and called it Physics. Since then, the study of such phenomena has branched and specialized, yeilding multiple sub-sciences.
I used to see physics as walking hand in hand with a perverse and vicious 19th-century Scientific Materialism, but I've found a new perspective suggesting that ain't necessarily so. Books by Stephen Barr and Antonio Zee high on the list.
So, now I'm on a mission to learn the basic language of all natural phenomena, and that language turns out to be the highly reductive, abstract yet always concretely applicable, core language of the science of physics.
What I begin to guess, helped by the quote below and numerous books and pages I'll chalk in later, is that science-education should START with Physics, simplified, a bit, perhaps, but it is all so simplified already: only Five Laws to grasp and keep in mind. (http://library.thinkquest.org/10401/5rules.html)
So, whether teaching about weather, or why the sky is blue or the grass is green, whether talking about how monkeys swing from branch to branch or airplanes fly: Teach Physics First, even to the four-year-old. The rest, in all its splendor and glory and God-friendly intellectual illumination, will follow.
Details to be added here as time allows.
Link: http://www.physicsphenomena.com/
Quote, to give a hint where I'm coming from, found on link above under What is Physics?:
"IIT (the Illinois Institute of Technology) has a small poster that they sent out to science teachers that suggested that to be educated in science and to teach science in a logical order you had to build a strong intellectual structure. They selected the pyramid to best represent this structure. The base of the pyramid is mathematics, the foundation of all science. It is the language used to describe patterns and relationships among variables and is used to create models of things often too abstract to contemplate in any other medium of thought. It is suggested by some very intelligent persons that mathematics is the language of the architecture of the universe.
Upon that base is the study of physics so that one may learn the laws and principles that govern all matter.
Third from the bottom is the study of chemistry where one may learn about the characteristics and behavior of all matter.
Finally at the pinnacle of the study of science is biology where the pursuit of the characteristics and behavior of living matter is studied. The significance of this model is that some very perceptive people came to realize that to create an environment where students came to understand science they had to study it and investigate in the order which would permit logical progression of the mind. This means that after mathematics, physics is the next science to be pursued, if real understanding is to come of studying the sciences. Unfortunately, in many schools mathematics and the sciences are pursued out of order creating confusion and difficulty for both the teacher and the student."
I used to see physics as walking hand in hand with a perverse and vicious 19th-century Scientific Materialism, but I've found a new perspective suggesting that ain't necessarily so. Books by Stephen Barr and Antonio Zee high on the list.
So, now I'm on a mission to learn the basic language of all natural phenomena, and that language turns out to be the highly reductive, abstract yet always concretely applicable, core language of the science of physics.
What I begin to guess, helped by the quote below and numerous books and pages I'll chalk in later, is that science-education should START with Physics, simplified, a bit, perhaps, but it is all so simplified already: only Five Laws to grasp and keep in mind. (http://library.thinkquest.org/10401/5rules.html)
So, whether teaching about weather, or why the sky is blue or the grass is green, whether talking about how monkeys swing from branch to branch or airplanes fly: Teach Physics First, even to the four-year-old. The rest, in all its splendor and glory and God-friendly intellectual illumination, will follow.
Details to be added here as time allows.
Link: http://www.physicsphenomena.com/
Quote, to give a hint where I'm coming from, found on link above under What is Physics?:
"IIT (the Illinois Institute of Technology) has a small poster that they sent out to science teachers that suggested that to be educated in science and to teach science in a logical order you had to build a strong intellectual structure. They selected the pyramid to best represent this structure. The base of the pyramid is mathematics, the foundation of all science. It is the language used to describe patterns and relationships among variables and is used to create models of things often too abstract to contemplate in any other medium of thought. It is suggested by some very intelligent persons that mathematics is the language of the architecture of the universe.
Upon that base is the study of physics so that one may learn the laws and principles that govern all matter.
Third from the bottom is the study of chemistry where one may learn about the characteristics and behavior of all matter.
Finally at the pinnacle of the study of science is biology where the pursuit of the characteristics and behavior of living matter is studied. The significance of this model is that some very perceptive people came to realize that to create an environment where students came to understand science they had to study it and investigate in the order which would permit logical progression of the mind. This means that after mathematics, physics is the next science to be pursued, if real understanding is to come of studying the sciences. Unfortunately, in many schools mathematics and the sciences are pursued out of order creating confusion and difficulty for both the teacher and the student."
Friday, March 12, 2010
Becoming Sin for Others
The best I can do with what Saint Paul says of Christ, "he who was without sin became Sin for our sake", is to understand "becoming sin" as experiencing the fact of the disintegration of the cosmos consequent to the fact of sin in such a way as to reintegrate the cosmos in oneself.
To put it another way, any post-lapsarian man has two choices: (a) die alone and under protest for the sins he himself has committed, or (b) die, willingly, for the sins of the whole world--both his own (of which he has thoroughly repented) and everyone else's (whether repented or unrepented, to which he himself never gave consent). This willing atonement for "everyone else" makes possible/contributes to the Integration of Sin; which, in turn, is sin's lone remedy. Insofaras as a person chooses (b), he is 'with' Christ and working in cooperation with the Catholic Church. Insofaras as a person chooses (a), he belongs to the anti-Christ. (This line of thinking also sheds light on the Gospel's famous duo of "whoever is not against me is for me" and "whoever does not gather with me scatters". The idea being that it is all or nothing and one must look to oneself first, one's own conformity to Christ or lack thereof. When looking at others: concentrate on what they are getting right and encourage that, rather than primarily condemning what they are doing/thinking/believing falsely. If/when you notice in others something awry, than take responsibility for it yourself, in your own person, and offer atonement. Something like that. No time to do better.)
Overstated perhaps, but nice and simple, makes easy remembering.
To put it another way, any post-lapsarian man has two choices: (a) die alone and under protest for the sins he himself has committed, or (b) die, willingly, for the sins of the whole world--both his own (of which he has thoroughly repented) and everyone else's (whether repented or unrepented, to which he himself never gave consent). This willing atonement for "everyone else" makes possible/contributes to the Integration of Sin; which, in turn, is sin's lone remedy. Insofaras as a person chooses (b), he is 'with' Christ and working in cooperation with the Catholic Church. Insofaras as a person chooses (a), he belongs to the anti-Christ. (This line of thinking also sheds light on the Gospel's famous duo of "whoever is not against me is for me" and "whoever does not gather with me scatters". The idea being that it is all or nothing and one must look to oneself first, one's own conformity to Christ or lack thereof. When looking at others: concentrate on what they are getting right and encourage that, rather than primarily condemning what they are doing/thinking/believing falsely. If/when you notice in others something awry, than take responsibility for it yourself, in your own person, and offer atonement. Something like that. No time to do better.)
Overstated perhaps, but nice and simple, makes easy remembering.
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