Information for educators or anyone wanting to teach

Page contents:

• Introduction

The plural of anecdote
is not data.

Education in Madrawar, Afghanistan. 2006.

Late one February night, more than a dozen masked gun carrying Taliban burst into the 10-room girls' school in Nooria's village, Madrawar about 100 miles east of Kabul. They tied up and beat the night watchman, soaked the principal's office and the library with gasoline, set it on fire and escaped into the darkness.

The townspeople, who doused the blaze before it could spread, later found written messages from the gunmen promising to cut off the nose and ears of any teacher or student who dared to return.

The threats didn't work. Within days, most of the school's 650 pupils were back to their studies. Classes were held under a grove of trees in the courtyard for several weeks, despite the winter chill, until repairs inside the one-story structure were complete. Nearby schools replaced some of the library's books.

But the hate mail kept coming, with threats to shave the teacher's heads as well as mutilate their faces.

When, NEWSWEEK visited and talked to students and faculty on the last day of classes. Nooria, who dreams of becoming a teacher herself, expressed her determination to finish school.

"I'm not afraid of getting my nose and ears cut off," she said, all dressed up in a long purple dress and head scarf.

"I want to keep studying."
Newsweek June 26, 2006

A Love of Discovery: Science Education-The Second Career of Robert Karplus. Edited by Robert Fuller 2002.

Robert Fuller, compiled a collection of documents along with a narration that describes the positive impacts Robert Karplus had on science in elementary schools in the closing years of the twentieth century. Information that continues to shape elementary science education in positive ways.

Robert Karplus was a physicist who was asked to teach a science lesson in an elementary classroom. Inspired by how difficult it was to teach children, he began to research how to teach elementary students. He discovered Piaget's constructivist learning theory and discovered it helped to frame how student's learn, how they reasoned, how learning is comparable to doing science, and how these ideas could inform instruction. His background, as a physicist, helped him to research and understand how to apply new ideas through a process of curriculum development to implement continuous change. He demonstrate how a curriculum could be created and implemented in a manner which could be used that was developmentally appropriate, research based, facilitated science literacy along with a love of discovery, and develop reasoning and logic necessary to become critically thinking citizens. A very inciteful, interesting, and enjoyable book that can inform all science educators.