EDUC 6470 Week 7

Week 7 of EDUC 6470.

Readings

They're Not Dumb, They're Different by Sheila Tobias

In the preface, John Schaefer interprets this essay as a call to incremental work in several areas on the leaky pipeline of the path to careers in science.

In the first paragraph, Tobias mentions the work that I would like to do, "not just more tutoring, but more meaningful and appealing introductory courses." (p. 7)

Tobias was prescient in claiming that the content standards of the 1990s would "take much longer than anticipated to achieve." (p. 7)

How do college professors (or high school science teachers) produce students who are not just "younger versions of themselves"? (p. 9) Perhaps we identify that part of education that is most like indoctrination, and start chopping. The irony of our technically oriented physical science curricula might be that it dissuades those who might become good technicians because the there's no pleasure in introductory physical science courses. (p. 17)

I'll use "Eric's" quote about indoctrination.

Tobias quotes Francis Bacon as promoting science as an endeavor open to "conventional minds," but I think she strays from her point in invoking Bacon, because Bacon was writing to say that science could be checked and forwarded by repetition and redundancy, rather than by intellectual strength. Eric's course was just the near-mindless chore that Bacon proposed. (p. 32)