teaching science – Science teacher

December 28, 2025December 28, 2025

On the atom

Dear Elementary School Teachers,

Young children learn all kinds of nonsense in school, not the least is the composition of atoms using a model from 125 years ago. It’s cute hearing fourth graders talking of protons, and it’s an easy thing to test, but “knowing” about neutrons, protons, and electrons does nothing for a child’s understanding of the universe.

One important part of the atomic model is that everything is made up of tiny interchangeable bits that can be assorted various ways in various states of stability, but that’s for later in high school, if ever.

The other critical point is that these particles are always moving –*always!*–for reasons we cannot fathom.

Pollen grains getting pushed around by water molecules.

Have the kids run around a room screaming “I AM AM MOLECULE I CANNOT STOP MOVING” colliding and a spinning and acting like, well, mindless particles.

It’s why balloons pop, bridges shrink in the cold, why we age, why time itself happens.

And who knows, maybe it will spark the next Rutherford, Curie, or Franklin.

(You can see Brownian motion with a tiny drop of milk in a drop of water focused under a microscope. Amazes me every time….)

December 27, 2022

Gearing down

I took a walk along an abandoned Norfolk Southern rail that runs through our town. A few decades ago I would pull my little ones in a red wagon to greet our neighbors as they came off the train.

These gears moved the gates that blocked the road, a job once done by humans when the railroad first ripped its way through our neighborhoods.

If you run a small current through the rails, a train’s axles will short the current, and the system will “know” something is up.

The newer signals no doubt rely on computers. Our kids pay a price for this. Knowing how to manipulate an Arduino UNO is fun, but not a whole lot of thought goes into figuring out how the “machinery” works because there is none.

Coding is literally symbolic. It’s clean, it’s cool, it’s profitable.

No gears, no grease. (Yes, I know plastic gear kits are available for Arduino kits. Why not just use a servo?)

Still not all kids are living virtually. Just a few yards from the dead gears and torn wires is an art show seen by few humans, and maybe only one from the 1950s.

The mechanics of an aerosol can are be more easily understood. The kids are alright.

January 29, 2022January 29, 2022

To “Errorometer” is human

Science is about recognizing when something doesn’t fit a current model of the natural world, which is just about all the time in science. Science is all about telling someone else they’re wrong.

Schooling is all about being “correct” and getting high grades. High school science is an oxymoron. I wrestled with this for years until I met Chris Harbeck, a different kind of teacher.

While sharing pints with a few teachers upstairs at McGinty’s, Chris took a “sip” of Guinness, then tossed out a few words that changed my teaching–

“I give out points for anything, a thousand here, a thousand there. They don’t mean anything.”
Chris Harbeck

Print out your Errorometer, laminate it, hang an Expo marker next to it–done.

Simple. Cheap. Effective.

Every time a student gives me a reasonably well thought “wrong” (or even an unusual but “right”) response to anything going on in class, even if only tangentially related to the natural world, a student can put a point up on the Errorometer. For every 10 points, everybody in class gets 10 out of 10 points in the Test/Quiz category.

Yep, everybody.
Yep, it diminishes the “value” of points individuals receive on tests.
Yep, everybody’s grade gets a boost.

But, as a wise Canadian math teacher told me over a pint (or three) of Guinness, if points mean nothing (and we agreed that was true), then giving them out freely and frequently means nothing as well.

(The fancier pedagogues among us might even call this metacognition.)