Incompetent Science Teachers

[Torg]

Hello. I am a junior at a high school with a math, science and computer science magnet program. I ride the bus to school with two freshmen new to the magnet. In middle school they had science teachers I would describe as criminally incompetant. Fortunately for them, they knew most of what they were taught was bull and tried to correct their teachers, only to get yelled at. Among other things, they were told that:

-The sun isnt a star (apparently for a star to be a sun it has to be exactly the right size and have "points")
-Black holes are areas where "the big bang forgot to put stuff"
-The Hubble goes in a figure 8 around the earth and moon
-Their teacher mixed up galaxy and universe
-They did not know what an orbit was

Thats just the worst of the astronomy/cosmology. They were also told:

-Cells are red
-DNA is green
-Protons, neutrons, and electrons have been proven not to exist
-One of them did not know what the theory of evolution was

These teachers should be fired and banned from teaching ever again.
Have I been sheltered from terrible science teachers by going to science magnet programs since 6th grade, or is this just an isolated case of idiocy?

[Candy]

I've had those type "teachers" before. I sum it up to a learning experience. I had great teachers in the past, and bad ones. I remember the great teachers the most. I hope your friends don't get discouraged.

[Fortunate]

Hi Torg,
It is a pleasure to hear from you. My advice is to take maximum advantage of favorable situations - learn as much as you can at the magnet school. Good luck.

[trinitree88]

Hi Torg. As a science teacher, it's unfortunate your friend had a bad experience. It's not the norm, though. Most teachers are pretty good at their jobs, enjoy it, work hard at it...like most students. But there will be a few not quite up to snuff. New teachers can be overwhelmed by the combination of paperwork, class management skills, and subject matter knowledge required to do a good job. Science and social studies teachers in particular have an enormous history of subject matter to learn. Some rookies simply don't have the idea that not knowing "everything" is actually OK....nobody does. Telling "untruths" is not a good way out. They need to learn to be more resourceful....Google that, I'll get back to you on that (and check it out)..ask a colleague....or assign the topic as an extra credit research question to a volunteer. I doubt anybody in this forum never heard a few dumb things from a science teacher along the way, and there is a good deal of misinformation in the books, and even the peer-reviewed journals too. A text that has been around is usually free of errors after a few printings...but some of it's ideas are outmoded. On the other hand, a brand new text may be current, but often has typos. ( I was asked to use a lab manual that had over 50 errors in the instructions for years, because the school had a supply of them they needed to sell off to recoup their overorder)...the kids didn't trust it.
Somebody in your friend's school needs to assign her former teacher a mentor to sharpen up her skills a bit. We all learn, and sometimes need to unlearn a few things. You'll find people picking me up on some long held ideas here..it might be you correcting me, or vice versa tomorrow...it's a process...like growing a garden over the years. Don't forget to take time to smell the flowers along the way. Enjoy. Pete.

[01101001]

Having a teacher that isn't a teacher, early in life, at least is good practice for the real world, where you will run into one or more of: managers that aren't, co-workers that aren't, good neighbors that aren't, doctors that aren't, friends that aren't, and lovers that aren't.

[Ken G]

As this is a skeptics forum, another possibility to consider is that all of the information in the OP is second hand, and therefore might not be completely reliable. Some of the claims are a bit far-fetched, in fact. I would not hesitate to consider the possibility that the extent of the problem is trumped up, though no doubt is pretty severe anyway.

[Torg]

I also considered the possibility that they were exaggerating. I think they may be paraphrasing to make it sound more ridiculous. I think i've come to know them well enough since the beginning of the school year that im sure they're not just making up stories though. That particular middle school also has a bit of a reputation in the area for bad teachers and oversimplified classes.

Both of them are in the magnet program now and really like it. The program has some of the best science teachers I know. You can ask them anything about their subject, and they'll either answer you because they have great qualifications, tell you they dont know and have you look it up, or get sidetracked on the question and spend the rest of class building a railgun or something (that happened to one of my friends last week in an advanced physics class. They launched a magnetized hacksaw blade several feet ). The teachers don't make up answers or pretend to know stuff they don't.

[novaderrik]

was this, by chance, a parochial school with a religious affiliation?

[Huevos Grandes]

Having a teacher that isn't a teacher, early in life, at least is good practice for the real world, where you will run into one or more of: managers that aren't, co-workers that aren't, good neighbors that aren't, doctors that aren't, friends that aren't, and lovers that aren't.

+1.

Stories like this are common. Remember that you will have teachers and professors that are good, and those that are lacking. It's a job that is staffed by fallible human beings. Sometimes, laziness, ineptitude, and political agenda will rear their ugly head in the way that some professors teach (wait until you reach college). It's going to be up to you in life to hear all of the various voices and decide which ones to "trust".

Hopefully, after acquiring some of the tools to understand other peoples' motivation, you won't ever worship any one source, nor discount others summarily out-of-hand (e.g. a convicted armed robber can offer no advice on money management, or President Bush tells the "truth" of intelligence to push the United States into war).

[Ken G]

The program has some of the best science teachers I know. You can ask them anything about their subject, and they'll either answer you because they have great qualifications, tell you they dont know and have you look it up, or get sidetracked on the question and spend the rest of class building a railgun or something .

Those sound like good teachers indeed. Oh, and, welcome to the forum Torg!

[Maksutov]

Torg,

I checked your public profile and no location was listed. You wouldn't be in Kansas by any chance, would you?

Meanwhile, welcome to the BAUT, where ideas unsupported by evidence have half-lifes shorter than many transuranic elements.

But not all: check out the ATM forum.

[Torg]

I live in maryland, and it was just one of the public middle schools. I just think the school system here doesnt care. In elementary school none of the teachers were allowed to spend school time organizing a science fair, and my parents had to step in and do it. In the last few years the school system has been adding silly rules left and right and becoming generally inane.

[beskeptical]

As this is a skeptics forum, another possibility to consider is that all of the information in the OP is second hand, and therefore might not be completely reliable. Some of the claims are a bit far-fetched, in fact. I would not hesitate to consider the possibility that the extent of the problem is trumped up, though no doubt is pretty severe anyway.

An incompetent teacher or mis-heard teacher are both possible. Either way, one must be careful about concluding which occurred from the information given. Perhaps it was a mix of the two.

I know from teaching that students come with preconceived ideas that color how they hear what you say. I try to address that very issue at the beginning of my classes. But that merely puts a dent into the problem. Most don't get what you are saying. They have no insight that their own intake of information is filtered through all their past learning.

On the other hand, teachers have resisted ongoing competency testing requirements. And in K-12, in the USA anyway, when there is no science teacher, anyone might be assigned to teach the material. If you've ever seen that interview of Harvard graduates or Jay Leno's Jaywalking, it becomes obvious how ignorant many educated people are of such basics like what causes the seasons and the phases of the Moon.

And in the BA's blog today we have the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" question of, "What is the closest star?" that the contestant needed a lifeline to answer and about 20%* in the audience didn't know either. You might be thrown off such a question under stress, but with multiple choice you have to truly not know the answer.

*subtracting those who would answer wrong on purpose but, also, adding in those who didn't know but guessed correctly

[trinitree88]

As an experienced teacher, I can say the key to a good school lies also in decent administrators, parental involvement, and a sense of community with the school's neighborhood. There are schools that thrive in areas where others fail miserably. I met a superintendent of schools inadvertently, while working summers at a garden center, and learned a valuable lesson from her.
During summer break (for students + teachers)..she would go out to lunch or dinner with other supers, or their assistants...lots of lunch & dinners. The conversation would roll around from niceties to the latest educational programs. By neatly picking brains, she culled all the programs that didn't work that well, from the ones that did, and when I saw the state's rating for school systems, they were near the top in almost every category, in every grade level...yet were not considered much more than a middle class town by most people. Valuable lunches indeed...and mostly on her nickel. It's actually the same technique that launched Wal-Mart...he never talked to the owners, it was the day-to-day managers that gave away the Crown jewels of information. Pete.

[X-COM]

A good school needs a healty budget so that it can afford to attract well educted teachers, with good teaching skills and also give them access to further education on a regular basis. It amazes me to see politians that do severe budget cuts to schools and then, ten years later be totally clueless about why the business world cannot hire competent workers... Education pays, and costs.

[Candy]

I previously wrote on another thread about a show I recently saw - Incredible People. There was a Principal that took on the role as parent. He would go to the kids home if they were missing from school. He would take on the bullies. He brought technology into the schools. He provided two required meals (breakfast and lunch). He mandated afterschool activities.

The guy changed kids lives. I was so impressed. The school went from nothing to something. They competed against private schools for science fairs. The school now has a 97% attendance rate. The kids stated they weren't afraid to come to school (this was a bad neighborhood in Baltimore).

The State was going to come in and take control of the inner school systems, but instead promoted said Principal to Superintendent. Hopefully, his direction will make a difference for our future generations. I was really impressed with this program.

Skept, is the answer the Sun? I've always been interested in Astronomy, but lacked in the teaching department. I, too, come from an under-funded background. I'm making up for lost time, and I'm not afraid to say it.

[Swift]

Hi Torg. I would suggest that you and your friends hang out here if you are interested in science. There are a lot of interesting people of all ages.

I do not know what the situation is like in Maryland, but I know in some places there is a severe lack of science teachers (I supsect because the positions are underfunded) and so teachers who are not trained in science are forced into teaching it.

I think trinitree88's comments are right on. I do not teach, per se, but I do nature interpretation for a local park system. One of the best things I ever learned to do was to say "I don't know", when confronted with a question I did not know the answer to. One should then follow it up with, "but I'll find out if you are interested". Knowing what you don't know can be as important as knowing what you know .

[Tuckerfan]

I had a college science teacher who told us that "when rounding numbers, you round down on the even numbers and round up on the odd." So its not limited to the K-12 grades.

[trinitree88]

I had a college science teacher who told us that "when rounding numbers, you round down on the even numbers and round up on the odd." So its not limited to the K-12 grades.

too funny, too, too funny.. Thanks for the laugh...

Actually, in chemistry you have weird rounding, too. Because chlorides are used so often as salts...when calculating weights chlorine comes out near to 1/2....so when you go to an equation with Cl sub 2...you lose or gain a whole digit, if you've rounded. So only in chemistry we recommend round 0.3, 0.2, 0.1, down.....0.7, 0.8, 0.9 up....but keep the 0.4, 0.5,0.6 the same... all because of chlorine compounds. Have to be careful not to have the kids go to math class and do that.
Pete

[wayneee]

When it comes to science teachers in the public schools , I have found them mostly burned out , and going through the motions. They might not mis-inform, but as far as I have noticed they rarely teach. I realy think School formats are wrong in general,. There is never enough time to devote to any subject matter. IClasses are only 45 minutes long, after attendence , homework review, giving homework, a smidgen of nonsense, theres about 20 minutes left to teach.
We should realy go to a more intense course study term by term , instead of tring to teach everything at the same time. Its no wonder kids are Attention defiecit.

[Swift]

I had a college science teacher who told us that "when rounding numbers, you round down on the even numbers and round up on the odd." So its not limited to the K-12 grades.

That rule actually sounds vaguely familiar. I think it has to do with rounding numbers that end with .5 (1.5, 12.5, etc.). If you just round all of those up, you bias things to higher values. If you somehow split them (half up, half down), you remove the bias.

[Tuckerfan]

That rule actually sounds vaguely familiar. I think it has to do with rounding numbers that end with .5 (1.5, 12.5, etc.). If you just round all of those up, you bias things to higher values. If you somehow split them (half up, half down), you remove the bias.

'Cept he wasn't talking about removing any bias. He was making a blanket declariation of what you do in all situations, so that 12.4=12 and 12.1=13.

[Tobin Dax]

too funny, too, too funny.. Thanks for the laugh...

Actually, in chemistry you have weird rounding, too. Because chlorides are used so often as salts...when calculating weights chlorine comes out near to 1/2....so when you go to an equation with Cl sub 2...you lose or gain a whole digit, if you've rounded. So only in chemistry we recommend round 0.3, 0.2, 0.1, down.....0.7, 0.8, 0.9 up....but keep the 0.4, 0.5,0.6 the same... all because of chlorine compounds. Have to be careful not to have the kids go to math class and do that.
Pete

Huh. I remember that in high school chemistry we were told to round even on 0.5, since pairs were more common (IIRC). But that wasn't college level. That halves thing makes since in that context.

[hhEb09'1]

That rule actually sounds vaguely familiar. I think it has to do with rounding numbers that end with .5 (1.5, 12.5, etc.). If you just round all of those up, you bias things to higher values. If you somehow split them (half up, half down), you remove the bias.

Yeah, but the question becomes, who was it who misunderstood the rule?

Here's a few good ones, some I've talked about before:
1) A middle school science teacher made up a geology section vocabulary study sheet. It had an entry for both lodestone, and iodestone that had similar but not identical definitions. The textbook was in a typeface that made the lowercase lodestone look like an uppercase Iodestone, and the definition was reiterated in a sidebar.
2) A respected geology professor holding a prestigous chair at a large university described the mechanism of the geomagnetic field by using the right-hand rule--the hand held in the direction of the earth's rotation points up to the North Pole. Nevermind that current direction is defined opposite to electron direction, that the Earth's North Pole is actually a south pole, or that the geomagnetic field turns with the earth.
3) A physics teacher in a private school who is so passionate about his subject that he gets ovations at parent meetings, casually mentions on an exam that the speed of sound is taken as 5 million feet per second. Clearly, he did not believe that 1000 whatever per second could be feet, and had to be miles.

[Hugh Jass]

I’m wracking my brain and cannot for the life of me remember what in practice we used the odd up even down rounding.  It has to do with weights into solutions and concentration measurements along what trinitree was saying. Ah well the mistake is passing this along as a general rule of mathematics

In my middle school oh so many years ago, we had three science teachers all of roughly the same decrepit age. Two of whom were notorious for making horribly inaccurate statements that we all knew were bunk some may have been as bad as these in the OP. I wish I remembered some of them. The other teacher however I still consider one of the best I’d ever had, and a pleasure to have had him.

In high school I debated with a history teacher for about 30 minutes why I thought Madagascar IS part of Africa. I don’t remember how it came up, something about their government and I don’t know. I actually kept the back couple pages of a notebook in that class as quotes I would jot down from him making all kinds of ludicrous claims. I wish I still had that notebook.

We had a Government auditor mark me down as deficient for incorrectly recording refrigerator temperatures. They had full degree calibrations and I was recording +/- 0.5 degrees. Well if it falls halfway between the two demarcations you record 2.5, just like I learned in my general science class in middle school, (the good teacher that is).

[trinitree88]

My first year teaching, I asked the rhetorical question, "What came first, the chicken or the egg?"...hoping to lead to dinosaurs laid eggs, and came before birds, which led to chickens...so eggs! Right? (Gr.7). Nope. Little girl raises her hand. "Eggs don't come from chickens, Mr. Peterson, they come from the supermarket!"....and all but two in the class agreed. They would be surprised to learn that regular old supermarket eggs, placed under an incubator ( 12 of them)....have a 50 % hatching rate 21 days later. Some, horrified, never ate eggs again. Sigh... Pete.

[Hugh Jass]

Careful with that question, the answer you could have received is God created the first chicken that then laid the first egg, so of course the chicken came first.

[Enzp]

A favorite cartoon I have shows a chicken and an egg in the bedroom smoking cigarettes, and one says "You always come first."

[Maksutov]

I had a college science teacher who told us that "when rounding numbers, you round down on the even numbers and round up on the odd." So its not limited to the K-12 grades.

In industry, especially those that are government suppliers of things ranging from cruise missile parts to submarine reactors, we were contractually obliged to use specification ASTM E29 for rounding procedures.

There are some statisticians out there who rail against the E29 requirements. Here are examples:

Link 1

Link 2

Here's the actual spec (intro only).

[Ken G]

Careful with that question, the answer you could have received is God created the first chicken that then laid the first egg, so of course the chicken came first.

Why certainly the chicken came first-- God would not want to have to sit on the egg.