Fly Guys

By Jeffrey Weld

When I was a high school student, a physics teacher of mine used to say that if ignorance is bliss, we must be the happiest people on the planet. He was out to enlighten us on the mysteries of momentum, refraction, and the quantum, but his dry and windy lectures chased the bliss right out of us, if not the ignorance.

Twenty years later, I am in the privileged position of training would-be science teachers. When I meet them as college juniors and seniors, or as postbaccalaureates enrolled in their first science-methods courses, many are blissfully ignorant of the chasm between effective teaching and the teaching they are more familiar with as clients of K-12 and collegiate science.

If not for their coursework on learning theory, exceptional children, developmental psychology, and active inquiry, most of them would surely teach as they were taught. The day before presenting a lecture on thermodynamics, they would memorize the appropriate textbook chapter. End-of-chapter questions in their teacher's manual would be assigned. On Thursday, they might lead a lab section where students use a prescribed recipe to complete a data table, then, after some number-crunching, arrive at a figure that with any luck matches the answer in the teacher's manual. On Friday, a quiz;...