Every Gift Matters: How Your Passion Can Change the World by Carrie Morgridge & John Perry

Author:Carrie Morgridge & John Perry
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781626341838
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Published: 2015-05-04T14:00:00+00:00

Inviting people to participate in mapping out their future doesn’t always look like you think it will. Our big, interlinked, complicated society overlooks some of its stakeholders in ways we don’t realize right away. In American education, the more affluent students have access to education that prepares them for well-paying jobs. Poor students in a poor educational environment are often stuck on paths that lead to a lifetime of low wages. Closing the achievement gap might be the next biggest social injustice that America faces. Robert Goodman is working to change just that. He is the executive director of the nonprofit New Jersey Center for Teaching and Learning. I met Bob at the Global Education Technology Summit in 2011. His data showed that, given an equal chance, every student could learn physics. In his presentation he explained how physics isn’t offered in most schools, and only the rich have access to physics classes.15

Then Bob showed a graphic that made me laugh out loud. It explained how physics came to be sequenced in the science curriculum. It is taught usually at the end of high school. In 1892 when the basic biology-chemistry-physics sequence was established, the connections between the sciences were unknown. It’d be another decade before quantum physics showed the physical basis for chemistry, and sixty years before the molecular basis of life was revealed, along with its connections to physics and chemistry. In 1892, Algebra I was an advanced course taken by few students and only in the later years of high school. So, botany and zoology were taught, and then chemistry, with few students taking physics (if they first took algebra, which was needed to understand physics). That made sense then.

Now, Algebra I is an essential course for all eighth- or ninth-grade students. Successfully completing Algebra I is the second- best predictor of whether a student will graduate high school and college.16 It is well accepted that physics is the basis for chemistry and that physics and chemistry are the basis of biology. Taught in that sequence, science makes sense. However, schools are locked into a science sequence that is more than a half century out of date. What we know now is that in scientific learning, sequence matters. Schools continue to follow a decision that became obsolete more than half a century ago due to the incredible inertia of our system of education, which is making our country uncompetitive in the world and depriving many of our citizens the chance for rewarding careers.

Why does all this math and science stuff matter? When you create access for every student to study physics, chemistry, and biology, you produce a graduate who is a talented, well-prepared addition to the workforce and who has the skills today’s employers are looking for.

After sitting in on his presentation, I chased Bob down and begged him to come to Colorado. We had technology. The gap we had was that we needed physics teachers. Not only was the New Jersey Center for Teaching and Learning

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