Like I said, half joking. There was a reason I chose middle school, though it applies more to elementary schools than middle schools. Obviously high school students branch out, but they're woefully underprepared for most science courses thanks to the "teach to the test" mentality they dealt with in lower grades. And that mentality is pretty rampant, especially in inner-city schools. I have a friend, a first-grade teacher, who literally has been told she can't teach anything other than reading and math due to her school's performance.
Students coming into my ninth-grade science classroom had low math skills and mediocre reading skills. Learning science was worse than simply difficult for them; not only had their previous science experiences been useless, their math and reading skills were low, both thanks to the teaching to the test mentality. It's a vicious cycle, and it now stretches all the way into college classes, where my freshmen also have started coming in unprepared.
I am really just quoting this because I am pleased the topic shifted.
It always seems to me that lower grades are really just about daycare and learning social skills. My kids aren't quite in the system yet though.
Alas, in days gone by, which is to say before the mid-1990s, elementary students did all sorts of things other than just spelling, math, and day care. I'm sure you remember this, of course.
I hope that your kids end up in a better-than-average school system.
Relevant - I wrote this:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11AA0-Vwd_ufhcghfgA8tBUaAsDUvCUDUTtkMkBkNfy0/edit
"Only the most advanced high school students take calculus and physics, and that during their final year."
"We need to push math forward to the point where calculus will be taught across the board in at least the sophomore year of high school, though freshman year would be better."
"The second year of physics would cover nuclear physics, quantum mechanics and relativity."
.... um. So. Um. Yeah. Where to begin?
I'm thrilled at your idealism. Really. And I hope you go on to become a physicist/EE/programmer/what-have-you. But I can tell you haven't considered developmental psychology as a career.
It's an understatement to say that most students are not equipped to handle calculus at 15 years old, or nuclear physics and QM at 17. These are classes that only about--respectively--10% and 0.1% of college students take. Those are, again, people who are
already in college. (For reference, my second year of college physics, i.e., QM, atomic and nuclear mechanics, had 12 students at a school of 20000.)
To make this less of an understatement: I hate to say it, but
most people aren't equipped to handle calculus at any age. And most people won't need to, ever. (Hell, after four semesters of calculus and differential equations, I haven't used most of it since undergrad, and all my jobs have been scientific or academic in nature.)
One doesn't need to understand QM to program a computer, nor does one need to know how to program a computer in order to use a computer. One need not understand general relativity to use GPS. In fact, I know academics for whom GPS and computer analysis is a vital part of their work who, nonetheless, could likely not explain to you why GPS satellites have to account for relativity, nor how QM makes modern computers possible (or even explain how a transistor works), nor program their own computer software. I'll leave it to you to figure out what academic and practical disciplines this applies to; I can think of three from the top of my head, I'm sure there's more.
When Newton and Galileo were working, those who did science were able to know everything there was to know in the scientific literature. That's how little we knew. This is no longer the case; we now teach top high school students about the same body of knowledge that Galileo would have had. College students, obviously, go beyond that. But the average high school student doesn't need all of it.
What they
do need--what we need to be teaching to all high school students, and no longer do--is critical thinking. Now, this can be introduced in the form of problems related to the disciplines we spend so much time teaching them, and that's good, but it doesn't go far enough.
But at the high school level, the students I was teaching were expected to be able to demonstrate knowledge X, Y, and Z on a standardized multiple-choice exam. There was no time to spend two months developing critical thinking skills because we focused on the very lowest levels of Bloom's taxonomy.
That is the travesty of education in the US. Not that we don't teach enough [science|history|math|literature], but that we teach
too much at the knowledge and comprehension levels and very little at even the application level, much less higher levels. Teachers are expected to make sure the students can regurgitate information onto a standardized test, when what's important for society is not whether a student knows (as an example) the quantum mechanical properties of the hydrogen atom, but whether a student, given the bulk physical and chemical properties of hydrogen, can explain what happened to the LZ Hindenburg.
And now I've gone off on another rant about education. Back to work, I have a three-hour lecture on gas laws to give on Thursday.
