Teaching science sucks...

I've come to the dramatic conclusion that teaching science sucks. Surprise, surprise.

Yes, the very subject that I've grown to love is not something that can be uniformly taught to the uninterested masses. These kids don't give a shit about DNA or what it's influences are. They don't care about how drugs work since they're not the ones making the drugs to begin with. They don't care about evolution since they have alternatives that are easier to understand.

I sometimes wonder how people can live in this way where people grow smarter and smarter while they remain stagnant. One parent I spoke to was concerned that her daughter was mentally crushed by her own failures. She's lost the motivation to graduate. Her friends have openly asked her what it feels like to be left behind. She definitely hides it well if she truly does express concern for her own academic progress to her mother. Her classroom behavior and demeanor doesn't reflect that urgency or concern in any way. I have given her opportunity to perform and she has taken those opportunities and thrown them away. And so she only has herself to blame.

It's not only a science thing, it's a general attitude towards education that scares me in this generation of youth. My job is made more difficult because I teach a subject that has the most potential yet the greatest difficulty in terms of academic development. In essence, teaching and learning science has zero tolerance for ignorance (which is common in this group of students).

Teaching and learning science relies on students retaining some information from previous years. These kids come back from summer vacation as clean slates as if they were neuralyzed or something. I could give a 7th grade science exam to my 10th and 11th graders right now and they'd all fail... Miserably...

It's not just a problem in science, I'm sure that it is the same for history. I know that in high school that I didn't remember any of the 6000 years of global history the year after. But at least I knew what it took to learn that and to write essays and to analyze events. And history doesn't necessarily build on previous years like science does. The events of China's history don't really influence American history during the Revolutionary days. But knowing the metric system and scientific notation is something every science requires.

Less than 1% of these kids would ever make it in a scientifically rigorous curricula in college because of this sort of shuffling forward. This is just sad.

I can see now why it is so high demand to find science teachers in urban schools. When educators finally realize that this is the sort of learning potential and attitude towards science their students demonstrate, it's clear that there's better job opportunities elsewhere. I don't blame science teachers for leaving, I blame society for driving them away for settling for less. There's so little potential for great achievement in the sciences when you grow up in the hood. You are raised in a pop-culture environment and you either dismiss the science as elitist or don't care because you don't get it and ultimately give up (in the past two years I've observed that students who accept failure as an outcome are guaranteed to fail).

Many students are struck by the racism, sexism, and social inequalities of science face first, but they do nothing about it. This is not a generation that's interested in taking on challenges head on. They don't take the initiative, they sort of settle in like sheep. This is a generation of students that's more interested in buying $35 baseball hats of teams they don't even know. We're preparing a generation of future consumers rather than a generation of innovators. Arguably, this is a pretty bad indicator for our economy in the future. But I suppose I am a bit biased since I've surrounded myself with students in the bottom 30% of the nation in terms of meeting the national science standards.

This begs the question, what am I still doing teaching here then? Or will I come back next year? Or why would I continue teaching a bunch of ingrates when I could be making more money doing research or pursuing medicine? I don't need to be appreciated or acknowledged to do something but I don't need to be automatically dismissed or disrespected as a teacher who fails students who are genuinely incompetent (and they're okay with that!).

I find that providing an analogy is pretty effective to illustrate a frustrating situation. I suppose the best analogy for me as a science teacher is comparable to a mechanic who is told to fix a VW bug after it was broad-sided by an 18-wheeler or hit by a freight train after stalling on the tracks. Fixing the VW bug would cost me thousands of dollars more than the owner is willing to pay and more than the car was worth. Even if the owner is stupid enough to be willing to pay for such reconstruction, I would basically pocket the excess money after buying a new VW bug for the owner. Otherwise, to save them the time and the hassle, I'd basically tell the owner to fuck off and buy a new one. If my employment were on the line based on this job, then I'd quit and find another job that doesn't require such obnoxious demands from customers.