Textbooks for real kids

My favorite textbook in my elementary school years was fourth-grade history. Rather than tell of how Columbus discovered the New World and people migrated to America and all that stuff, it told the story of the United States as a series of biographies. One chapter told the life story of George Washington, one of Abe Lincoln, and so on.

Years later, after decades of being told I had no chance of really understanding science, I happened across a copy of "Coming of Age in the Milky Way" by Timothy Ferris, on our book review table. I picked it up, took it home and read amazing stories of the people who made the discoveries that gave us the science we have today. Ferris related the true story of why religious authorities censured Galileo, the tragic story of Johannes Kepler (my favorite, for some reason) and the odd case of Isaac Newton.

In 1990, my wife enrolled in a physics course at Marshall based on the CalTech science show "The Mechanical Universe," which told the stories of great physicists and used computer graphics moving numbers around on calculus equations. I didn't understand all of the math, but I learned a lot from watching the shows we taped off the air. I can even explain a few of the basics of Newtonian mechanics and Einsteinian relativity now.

So why not introduce schoolchildren to science through the stories of the great scientists? Now, someone has written a series of middle school textbooks that does just that.

The story about the series is in the Washington Post. Here are excerpts from that story:

To middle school teacher Chad Pavlekovich, most science textbooks are dull and lack the context students need to understand scientific principles. That's why he is exposing students in the town of Salisbury on Maryland's Eastern Shore to three new textbooks that are unorthodox in concept, appearance and substance.

The "Story of Science" series by Joy Hakim tells the history of science with wit, narrative depth and research, all vetted by specialists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first book is "Aristotle Leads the Way," the second is "Newton at the Center" and the third is "Einstein Adds a New Dimension." The series, which has drawn acclaim, chronicles not only great discoveries but also the scientists who made them.

"These books humanize science," Pavlekovich said.

"We teach students this equation and this theory or this topic and that idea, but we never discuss the scientist behind it or how that scientist made the discovery," he said. "It helps students to understand how they struggled and overcame great obstacles to do what they did." ...

Scientists and educators say that there are many ways to teach science but that Hakim's approach makes sense.

"If you talk to any first-rate scientist about a particular development, you will very quickly hear a narrative, because the way good scientists think about developments in their field is in terms of stories," science writer Timothy Ferris said. "Telling a story reminds you of how you got to your present state of knowledge," he said, and scientists constantly test whether those steps were reliable.

I will try to get a review copy of one of those texts. It sounds like the best way to introduce children to what science really is. Too many kids think science is memorizing a lot of knowledge that has been gained. It's not. Science is the process of gaining that knowledge.

Too many texts that I have seen kill curiosity and wonder. Perhaps the books described in the Post article will kindle, not kill, the love of learning.