Why science is so hard to teach...

I have loved science all my life, until I started to teach it. I now loathe finding ways to make what I've dedicated a significant portion of my life interesting to the desensitized urban youth of the Bronx.

But why?

I always knew growing up that the most lucrative fields were law and medicine. Be a doctor or be a lawyer. The students I have aren't raised that way. Many students of mine are lucky to graduate on time.

It's interesting that many of these kids don't struggle with science, they just treat it like it's bullshit. For one reason or another they know that they need to focus on English, math, and history but science is always treated like it's just some sort of elective on the side.

It's commonly understood that science requires a strong foundation in math and reasoning. You don't need a strong grasp of language to learn science. Some of my ELL's are the best and most aggressive learners.

The most effective science lessons are lessons where you tell stories. Science gives math context. It also gives significant people of history credibility. I haven't been too effective at emphasizing the history of science but it will soon get to that point where I have to develop a story-based lesson around the history of science.

The paradigm of science teachers is to implement inquiry up the ass. To keep the kids always thinking and asking questions that they investigate themselves... HA! Good luck trying to do that all the time.

Yesterday was an interesting day. I finished a lesson really early, like 15 minutes early. And you can tell that the kids are getting that itch to pack up and wander towards the door. So I turned the lights out and put on this flash animation on the evolution of the Earth.

I told the story of the Earth and it's 13.7 billion year history all in 15 minutes. In the storybook of Earth's existence, humanity would represent the period of the very last sentence in the book. Of all the living things that have inhabited the Earth, more than 95% have gone extinct, never to return. The Earth is a cruel place to live. Humans are the product of thousands of years of natural selection and if the Earth had gone through a different path of development, we would be very different or we might not exist. What if the asteroid missed that killed the dinosaurs (who have lived on Earth for tens of millions of years)? What if the Earth didn't undergo an atmospheric transition (from no oxygen to oxygen-rich)?

Students surprisingly responded well. It could have been that they were distracted by all the neat animations in the time line, but perhaps I was actually getting to their natural curiosity... I'm optimistic, but I have my reservations.

Why is science so hard to teach?

You can only tell so many stories before you have some ridiculous standardized test to get students to pass. Science is hard to teach when you have a group of uninterested students who settle for D's. Also, I don't have a story for every occasion. I'm getting more and more but it's still a struggle to come up with some interesting ways to deliver the most interesting and meaty topics of science without bludgeoning my students to death with notes from the projector.

As much as I love science, teaching it has made me very reflective.