I love teaching science!  Have I said that before?  Perhaps that is why I feel stifled this year.  Nothing against math, and thank goodness for good math teachers, but YUCK!  Now I know there is a great deal of integration that can be done between the two, but both of my first two cores (out of three in all) are math classes.  When I taught self-contained fifth grade classes I taught all four core subjects, and if asked to rank the “main four” I would have listed them in this order from most favorite to least:

1. SCIENCE!!!
2. Language Arts
3. Social Studies
4. Math

I know that seems kinda strange since Science people tend to be math oriented as well, but I’m definitely NOT!  My love of science has led me to spend WAY too much of my own money over the years so my kids could enjoy experiencing science.  I almost never teach from the textbook, I mean, how boring is that!  Most of them are written at a college level which my students can’t read anyway!

So all of this rambling to say that I loved reading David Wetzel’s August, 2008 post which he Twittered the link to today.  It’s entitled “Science Education – 4 Ways to Improve Student Learning”.  The four improvements David elaborates on are summarized below:

1. Let kids explore science and investigate science problems. This will avoid killing the curiosity of kids by the time they enter high school.
2. Students need to learn that they will not always have the right answer and that there is typically more than one correct answer. This is not an esteem thing – this is real science.
3. Students need to be challenged to use their brains and think. They need to learn to ask questions…
4. More money needs to be spent on science education.

AMEN!!

Photo Credit: Flickr – Future Scientist