Engage now
Anastasia De Waal, 4 December 2009
The United States is suffering from the same scenario we in the UK are: too few young people are going on to study science and maths, detrimental to the economy, and of course to horizons.
To try and tackle this mathematical and scientific apathy, the White House is inviting everyone who might be an inspiration, from the first woman in space to Sesame Street’s Elmo to encourage young people into maths, science and engineering.
The approach the ‘Educate to Innovate’ campaign is taking is to inspire young people to understand why these subjects are potentially so exciting. In particular, to show young people the ‘value’ in the grown-up world of science and maths.
Whilst this type of campaign should be welcomed with open arms, the value of science and maths should, if all is well in school, be evident in lessons, not just as outcomes. As the New York Times puts it, Educate to Innovate focuses largely on activities outside the classroom to engage young people. Both the US and the UK, however, do still need to look hard at the classroom.
As well as engaging young people in the potentially exciting outcome of these subjects, even more important is to make maths and science themselves exciting. It should not be a case of grin and bear your physics lessons so that you can become something as exciting as an astronaut. Physics lessons should be exciting. For pupils who’ve recently sat through a double-period of physics drawing alkaline battery diagrams, this may quite difficult to imagine. Yet if taught well science particularly should be fun.
To focus on science, at the heart of the current problem in English schools is that very few practical experiments are taking place. Precisely what is stimulating in a chemistry lesson is more and more absent, be it on account of overzealous health and safety policy or even less happily on account of a misguided perception that doing experiments doesn’t maximise to A*-Cs at GCSE. Clearly this last belief is all wrong: the best way to get pupils to perform well is to engage and stimulate them – not to thrust them the Lett’s revision guide. Furthermore, you can be sure that there’ll be no A*-Cs in GCSE chemistry when no pupils do the subject at all because they got so bored in their early science lessons.
I taught science for over a decade. Particularly rewarding was the pupil feedback from organising exciting demonstrations and interesting experiments. The school was labelled by OFSTED as ‘very good’ and A level physics ‘outstanding’. The reason why similar schools are doing less science than before is due to Government policy which has dictated the removal from teachers of the ability to give sanctions to indiscipline. Removing breaks so that teachers cannot keep a pupil back after class, the removal of the option to have a pupil removed with instance notice, large class sizes (unlike CDT where 25 is the mandated maximum) and the requirement to include at all costs leave many teachers no option but to cancel any activity which involves pupils getting out of their seats. For example – an alkali solution squirted into someones eye causes instant damage but because the teacher cannot guarantee pupils in his/her class won’t emulate the pupil who has just squirted a clear liquid at another pupil because senior management in the school refused to remove said pupil when this occured, the authoriity of the teacher being thus reduced to zero, will result in the experiment being instantly cancelled. This should be a situation where the teacher has recognised sanctions to deal with the issue, but because many in senior roles taught subjects where the pupils stayed in their seats for the entire lesson and because of the downward implemented policy decisions discussed above, it is not. The overall result is that a minor transgression not dealt with leads to an escalation of problems, with the majority suffering the consequences.