I have joined the long list of teachers who do not wish to be involved in teaching ‘senior’ science courses anymore.

After almost 40 years as a successful teacher of senior Physics I quit the subject a couple of years ago.

The lunatics are in charge of the asylum. Like many physics teachers I did it for the love of the ‘problem solving’ and the beauty of the mathematics that permeated most of the course. The range of content has been driven down but the problem is not confined to the senior school.

I have seen the hours devoted to science teaching cut back to a bare minimum, the amount of content has been halved so students ‘know” far less than they used to.

I know it is not fashionable to talk about kids learning content as opposed to gaining skills in process areas, Analysing etc… But, we are asking them to do this from a very narrow base now and many natural phenomena that science used to ‘explain’; tides and eclipses, basic geology, gravity, etc… are glossed over or left out completely, and forget about the ‘harder’ stuff like balancing equations, solving basic force and energy problems etc…

This generation is being short-changed. Even the young teachers we are getting now do not have these basic skills.

Once upon a time, you did several senior sciences, then first year uni was a fairly broad re-cap of the elements of physics, chemistry and biology that was covered. I have seen young teachers who have arrived on the scene now with no physics done since Year 8. Nothing in the way of astronomy, or geology as a background but did some biology and then are asked to teach a supposedly broad based junior science course.

How is the New National science curriculum going to match up with what we do in Qld? We will cover about a half of the material.

I have no real objection about ‘research assignments’ and EEI’s per se but many of the students we are asking to do these are light years away from being able to do justice to these things. The analytical skills we are asking for are beyond them at this point. Many of these kids are still at just ‘concrete’ levels of operation and are just not ready for this work. They are dominating good teaching time. We spend ages doing ‘in-text’ referencing and other stuff when kids could be doing science. The numbers in the senior school sciences are dropping as the message is getting out there. I will be pleased to announce that I am getting out as soon as possible.