On 2/16/2011 11:49 AM, James Guzinski posted to the ChemEd-L discussion list:
I just read in Science, Vol 331, 28 January 2011, p. 405, that “Biology will be the only high school science class for 21 to 25% of U.S. high school graduates…”
please tell your counselors that any student who might want to be a nurse or any other health professional must take chemistry.
The charter school in which I teach requires three years of science to graduate, at least one of which must be a life science and at least one of which must be a physical science. The challenge for the school is that some of the students are as much as two to three years behind grade level in math and English when they arrive. (To be fair, we also have students who are at or above grade level, though these students are not in the majority.) Let’s suppose that the students who are behind arrive in 6th grade (our school serves grades 6-12) and manage to advance by five grade levels in the four year span from grades 6-9. These students, some of whom hope to be nurses and health professionals, will
still be one or two years behind by tenth grade, when they will have passed biology and will be faced with the choice between chemistry and physics.
This is how I have ended up with a tenth-grade chemistry class in which a significant fraction of the students read at a fourth or fifth-grade level and have seventh-grade math skills, and nearly half have not yet passed algebra 1. The students are learning chemical concepts and can demonstrate understanding of those concepts in problems with simple
numbers. However, they do not have the mathematical skills to solve the kinds of chemistry problems that they will encounter in college, and it’s not clear how many of them will have those skills by the time they enter college.
Any of these students who want to study and work in a medical science field need more than to just “take chemistry”. They need to understand how to think and problem-solve like scientists, which in many instances means thinking algebraically. Their college professors will complain about their nameless, faceless high school teachers in the same way that we complain about their nameless, faceless elementary school teachers. However, the reality is that these problems cannot be solved by assigning blame, but by a subtle shift in what we expect students to do and how we expect them to think from the beginning of their schooling, compounded over ten years times 180 days (or in my charter school’s case, 195 days). But yes, at that point, we should also make sure they take a chemistry course.
Originally posted to the ChemEd-L discussion list.
