Raising Boys

A science school without science August 17, 2005

My seven-year-old son Dylan goes to a science school. I had considered it a special public school (this view seems valid if you consider the reasons given by the school for its existence or its vision-mission) until yesterday when I learned that it does not have a science subject (gasp) for the first and second grades.

That seems incongruous — a science school without a Science subject and at very crucial grades in the elementary level. Shouldn’t this be the time when a foundation for science is developed in pupils? By teaching them about the world they live in, the creatures they share their world with, and their world in relation to other worlds?

I talked yesterday to the mother of my son’s classmate because I thought the missing schedule for the Science exam in today’s first periodical tests was an oversight on the teacher’s part. She told me there was really no such exam because Science and English were now one subject in first grade.

I couldn’t think of two subjects so vastly different than these two and what in the world were they thinking when they decided to integrate it into one subject called English. Is there any way that the articles “a, an, the”, letter sounds, sentence structures, synonyms and antonyms can be taught in one subject with the body and its parts, plants and animals, matter and energy, force and motion without pupils getting confused?

The set-up is perplexing to me. I’m also puzzled as to what teaching method is being employed in first grade. I have been hearing reports from the girl who brings my son lunch that all the first graders do in school is copy word for word the content of their books in their notebooks. This, to me, seems odd, too. The teacher does not even take time to explain to the pupils what they are copying. She just asks them to copy.

Every time my son comes home from school, I have asked him if his teacher had explained to him what he was writing in his notebook and not once had he said yes. This would seem exaggerated if not for the fact that Dylan had almost gone through his second 90-leaf notebook in English just two months into the schoolyear. A girl classmate is into her fourth 90-leaf notebook in English.

It gets worse. The integrated English and Science subject may go as far as third grade, too. A mother (she has a son in third grade) of another classmate told me this today. And I was hoping that my son would finally learn the answer to his “what makes the world go ’round” question. I hadn’t gotten to researching the answer to that one; now I think I may have to.

This seems to me now such a bad choice of school, knowing that my son loves the sciences so much. In his kindergarten days, he was five then, his interest was piqued when they went on to discuss the solar system. His teachers were very impressed when he was able to recite the names of all the planets and the facts about each of them. He still can name all the planets.

Dylan told me while I was about to go to work today that it looked like it may rain. Puzzled, I asked why in the world would he think this. He told me it was because the ants were nowhere to be found. He added that the ants, just before it rains, leave their home and move to higher ground.

He is such a precocious boy. It seems such a shame for him to have wasted first grade in STEC.