Re:What a Newfound Kingdom Means for the Tree of Life
by klodolph on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @10:30AM
(#18716242)
It's clear that you have a very different idea of what I am talking about than I do. The comment about "tabula rasa state of mind" makes no sense to me. First of all, I want to focus on this part of your comment:
> IMO, there is no need to explicitly teach something incorrect only to be able to un-teach the very same thing later. At best you alienate students because they feel either confused, lied to, or patronized.
This is an impossible demand for science education, because every model of the atom we could possibly teach is "incorrect". You could teach students only the most recent, most accurate theories of the world, but at this point in time that means starting with something like relativistic field theory and that approach is obviously wrong.
If there is a scientific gospel, the gospel is "test your theories", and you can accomplish that by teaching students about the Bohr model. "Here is a theory about how atoms work, the theory is useful because it opened the door to quantum mechanics, it explained phenomena like the hydrogen spectra given by Rydberg, but it was known to have certain shortcomings." This gives students a case study for the scientific method. We can put an electric current through hydrogen gas and look at the spectrum with a prism or diffraction grating. We can calculate a formula for the spacing of the spectral lines. Then, we can come up with a model for how the atom works which explains those lines. Finally, this leads to more observations which contradict the model, and the process repeats.
This is the scientific process, and if you are not teaching the scientific process, you are not teaching science.
The reason you might use the Bohr model specifically is because many of the related experiments can be replicated in a school laboratory by students of relatively modest mathematical ability... just algebra is enough.
And to be clear here, we are not teaching the Bohr model as fact. It's not going to be "un-taught" or "un-learned". Other theories you would often teach in a chemistry class include phlogiston theory, again, because the experiments disproving it are easy enough to run in a typical high school chemistry class, not because phlogiston theory is particularly useful.
> IMO, there is no need to explicitly teach something incorrect only to be able to un-teach the very same thing later. At best you alienate students because they feel either confused, lied to, or patronized.
This is an impossible demand for science education, because every model of the atom we could possibly teach is "incorrect". You could teach students only the most recent, most accurate theories of the world, but at this point in time that means starting with something like relativistic field theory and that approach is obviously wrong.
If there is a scientific gospel, the gospel is "test your theories", and you can accomplish that by teaching students about the Bohr model. "Here is a theory about how atoms work, the theory is useful because it opened the door to quantum mechanics, it explained phenomena like the hydrogen spectra given by Rydberg, but it was known to have certain shortcomings." This gives students a case study for the scientific method. We can put an electric current through hydrogen gas and look at the spectrum with a prism or diffraction grating. We can calculate a formula for the spacing of the spectral lines. Then, we can come up with a model for how the atom works which explains those lines. Finally, this leads to more observations which contradict the model, and the process repeats.
This is the scientific process, and if you are not teaching the scientific process, you are not teaching science.
The reason you might use the Bohr model specifically is because many of the related experiments can be replicated in a school laboratory by students of relatively modest mathematical ability... just algebra is enough.
And to be clear here, we are not teaching the Bohr model as fact. It's not going to be "un-taught" or "un-learned". Other theories you would often teach in a chemistry class include phlogiston theory, again, because the experiments disproving it are easy enough to run in a typical high school chemistry class, not because phlogiston theory is particularly useful.