Group items tagged

Tons of great sTEM resources for educators, check out the Educator tab

"Jo Handelsman remembers the moment she realized something was seriously wrong with the way science was taught. She was an undergraduate at Cornell University in her junior year, sitting in a biology lecture with an unusually good professor. "It suddenly occurred to me that every idea I had memorized or learned or thought I understood in a textbook was actually the result of scientific investigation," said Handelsman, who is now a professor at Yale. "And that just floored me." She also couldn't help thinking why she hadn't realized this before. "What was missing that it took me so long?""

"The most recent issue of the NY Review of Books has an extensive essay by Andrew Hacker on "The frenzy about high-tech talent." It's behind a paywall, alas,  but I'll try to provide some cognate links that are accessible to all.  Here's his main argument: "A recurring complaint is that not enough of our young people and adults have the kinds of competence the coming century will require, largely because not nearly enough are choosing careers that require the skills of STEM…[Michael Teitelbaum's 2014 book]  Falling Behind? makes a convincing case that even now the US has all the high-tech brains and bodies it needs, or at least that the economy can absorb."

"There are places in the world where kids go to school not in classrooms, but in the woods. The Forest Schools movement became popular in Scandinavia in the 1950s. Forest schools can take many forms - from just one day a week in the woods to schools where there are no buildings: all day, every day is outdoors. These schools serve mostly younger children - 4- to 7-year-olds - but there are some forest school programs that serve older students, too."

"Stories of science are filled with eureka moments-from Archimedes' bath to Newton's apple-but the scientific process entails false starts and mistakes that are essential to success. In his new book, Failure: Why Science Is So Successful, neuroscientist Stuart Firestein makes a case for science as "less of an edifice built on great and imponderable pillars, and more as a quite normal human activity," and says "one must try to fail because it is the only strategy to avoid repeating the obvious.""