The Yellow Brick Road leads nowhere...

[david baum]

I want to concur with John Grehan that there is a big problem with how we
at the University level teach evolution and that as a result high school
teachers are poorly equiped to educate their students.  I have been working
with high school biology teachers lately and I have found that, while they
generally have the gist of the Darwinian natural selection, they have no
knowledge of the phylogenetic relationships of living organisms, for how we
study those relationships, or for how knowledge of phylogeny helps us study
the origin and maintenance of organismic traits.  This may sound like too
much to expect of high-school teachers and students, but I believe that
even a shallow grasp of phylogenetic thinking provides a valuable
conceptual structure on which students can hang other knowledge.

If you agree with this evaluation - do something about it!   I teach a
one-week workshop for high-school teachers on the tree-of-life and its role
in high-school biology education.  I use a strictly discussion format with
hands on experience of phylogenetic analysis.  The teachers love it and say
it will greatly change the way they teach.  I would be thrilled if other
scientists would do something similar in their local areas (and would be
happy to share course materials).  I believe that if enough of us were to
make this effort we would end up with a better educated population and much
less tendency for paranoid fears over "secular-humaism" to result in
challenges to the teaching of evolution.

David




David Baum
Dept. Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University Herbaria
22 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge MA 02138

Tel: (617)496-6744, -8766
Fax: (617)495-9484
dbaum at oeb.harvard.edu
http://www.herbaria.harvard.edu/~dbaum