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| become curious. If I can establish a pattern in a student of satisfying curiosity, by showing him that understanding is both possible and amusing, then perhaps the course I am teaching will have the effect of enriching his whole life. It may also make him a more useful and more sympathetic person. I believe that another motive I have as a teacher is to prepare the students for further learning. Although I know that in reality many of the students may not learn one more thing about science than they find in my biology course, I find that I teach everyone as though they were going to continue learning the subject. The general science students may take a course in physics; the chemistry students may study chemistry in college; biology students might want to read a veterinary handbook. Thus, as I am teaching, I find that I have in the back of my mind what the content of the next course in the subject will be. I want this next course to be easy for them, but I do not want it to be entirely "old stuff." I find this distinction very hard to draw. Parts of subjects that I do not particularly enjoy, such as metallurgy in the study of chemistry I tend to under-teach, even though the students may need the knowledge. Parts of a subject that seem to me especially elegant, such as physical optics, I try to teach even to freshmen, though the subject could more profitably be introduced at a later date. But the line is hard to draw because a certain amount of fuzziness and puzzlement is probably good for the more advanced students. Finally, I try in my reaching to give the students a sense of power to actually do something: to teach them, for example, to get numerical answers, bend a piece of glass, recognize a Spirogyra when they see one, or solve an unfamiliar problem. I think that I find this last objective hardest to fulfill. Yet most people, and adolescents especially, are eager to become proficient in as many things as they can. In fact a frequent interpretation of education is limited solely to the belief that students should learn how to do things. One of the important aspects of sports | is that they enable a substantial number of kids to become really good at something: catching a pass or pitching a bail or working with a group. I believe that a great many students enjoy and are helped by algebra because of the delightful opportunity for proficiency it affords in solving equations. Shop work, sewing, writing book reviews, typing, language courses, band and art are all important, not only because of the useful skills they teach, but because in each one a different group of students may find that they can do something well, Therefore, as a science teacher, I know that I should allow the students to become proficient in as many ways as possible. There are many techniques in science. There is the manual dexterity of setting up and performing experiments, the mental dexterity of solving numerical problems, the technique of observing the results of an experiment and noticing, for instance, what a leaf or a nerve really looks like. And finally, there are the techniques of plausible reasoning, of putting together known facts and relationships to arrive at new conclusions. Now as I mentioned earlier, it looks as though I will succeed in making an alarmingly small number of my students proficient. Others in school may share my difficulty, but some of my problems are specific to science teaching and I would like, in concluding, to outline them. One of the difficulties I encounter is the enormous variation in the initial ability of the students. If I give a test which covers the ground I have tried to teach, and it does not seem to matter which subject or class, the grades usually run from about 20 to 140 out of a possible 160. This range is greater than the intelligence range of the students and must reflect a cumulative effect of intelligence, motivation, and health. Since this spread exists very markedly in the mathematical ability of the students, I have difficulty in cultivating problem-solving proficiency in the students. It is as though one had to teach children both how to climb steps and how to pole-vault with just one set of instructions. | ||