TheBanyanTree: NEVER turn your back!

[peter macinnis]

You know how in monster/thriller movies, when the Evil One is slain, the 
goodies turn their backs, and it springs to life and has to be killed 
all over again?  Yeah, well, I turned my back on 'Australian Backyard 
Earth Scientist' (a book for ages 10 to 14, give or take a few score). 
Done and dusted, game over...

Nope.  Teachers' notes to do!  First up, this isn't a 
designed-for-school book, but marketing say we have to have notes.  No 
probs, I can reel off 45 or so activities...

Snag: the activities have to be keyed to the National Curriculum, which 
I have been battling all the first half of this year. I have a bleeping 
Master's degree in curriculum and assessment, and I assess this alleged 
curriculum as a fail where science is concerned. Trust me in this, I'm a 
bleeping scientist.

Just to take two test words that I applied, the "national curriculum" 
doesn't mention atoms, and it doesn't mention rocks. Instead, it's full 
of sociological aspirations like "Science knowledge helps people to 
understand the effect of their actions".

True, that stuff is important, but this theory business comes after 
there's a corpus of knowledge and understanding. If they get their hands 
dirty, they pick up neat and important ideas like that as they go along. 
If the Olduvai people had worked from that hymn sheet, forget 
osteodontokeratic culture: they would never have made it to banging the 
rocks together.

It's just lucky I spent the first six months of this year subverting the 
National Curriculum, weaseling real science into the interstices for 
microscopy. With that experience I've been quiet (aside from profanity, 
obscenity, blasphemy and blood-curling oaths) and after 70 hours, I have 
10,000 words of subversive, science-packed stuff, all ready to send off.

If the editors were alert, they might notice that any perceived link 
between the sociologists' BS and the fruits of my BSc can only be called 
amazingly tenuous, but given that nobody can read the sociology without 
their eyes glazing over, I reckon I'll get away with it. The teachers 
will leap to the practical stuff.

When I was subjected in a Master's seminar to two hours of hogwash about 
an obscure Dutch philosopher by somebody who had never been in a 
classroom, there was silence at the end, but as I was there, the hush 
didn't last. Those who knew me looked at me, waiting.  Well, I'm a slave 
to duty, and a glutton for punishment, so long as I'm dishing it out.

Draining the last of my dry sherry, I asked in my best sepulchral tones: 
"And what does X (the unmemorable Dutchman) suggest for somebody 
teaching a double period of science to 40 Year 8 boys in the lowest 
stream, some with little English beyond obscenities, some fresh from a 
war zone, most of the rest recently let out of the reformatory, last two 
periods on a hot Friday afternoon?"

I love the sight of rabbits transfixed in the headlights.

Dick the Butcher was wrong. Shakespeare should have had him say "First, 
let's kill all the sociologists!"  We could have kept the lawyers, and 
they would have made the killings a legal, as well as a moral, obligation.

peter