Astrology is good enough for Me.

Principals are not really held accountable for science scores in their schools. It sort of counts, but not as much as math and English. If they personally don't think much of science then basically the science department is screwed. The only thing that saves it is the state mandates. I received a call from one of my old science teachers who is no longer at my old school. She seemed very dissatisfied because her principal had eliminated labs and gone to a 5 day a week science schedule. This is of course borderline illegal.

I think science pisses off principals for a number of reasons. 1)It costs money for supplies, some of the supplies are even icky. 2)Science teachers laugh at people throwing around terms such as "reptilian behavior" that have almost no basis in research. 3)Science students often fail because they do not have enough lab minutes and are therefore banned from the Regents. 4)Science is perceived as being hard. 5)High school science meets 6 times a week, this messes up the nice neat boxes that make principals and programmers happy.

The part of all of this that I find the most disturbing is the elimination of lab periods. The state says that all students need 1200 minutes of labs before they take the regents. The separate lab period provided our students with more than 1200 minutes. Those students who were absent on a few lab days could still pass lab. The motivation for eliminating these labs is programming. The idea that programs should fit into these nice square boxes is the product of people who are not good with numbers or patterns. Exactly the same people who were probably never good at science. Decisions about programs are made for administrative purposes and not student needs. This is sad.

The other thing about labs is that science needs to be hands on. Teaching theory without doing experiments short changes students. In my last school we had 43 minute lab periods. Most of the time the labs were far away from the class, the students were often not the same as those in the class. This was devastating to the science program. Teachers often did cookbook labs, not discovery labs. The past few years it was hard to get anyone to listen to my complaints about this. Bad scheduling changed from being the exception to being the norm.

When you think of it, the idea that knowledge can be divided into little discreet units of 43 or 45 minutes is absurd. The idea that if teaching math five days a week is a good idea than teaching Spanish five days a week must also be a good idea is equally as absurd. Some principals just want the programming to be easy so they can concentrate on instruction. This is a bad idea. Programming often defines instruction. To think otherwise is wrong. You can not ignore programming in a high school.

Good teachers are always number one, but they are followed by good programming. Programming is the way you support teachers and students.