Teaching science at a Christian school.

Years ago I taught the science classes at a Christian junior high school. Just for a year. Mainly ’cause the other teachers in our program didn’t wanna, and I had two classes free in my schedule. So those classes became Science 6, and Science 7/8.

I’m not a scientist. My field is the social sciences—history, civics, economics. I also have a degree in theology, so of course I can teach bible. I find science interesting, but I’m no expert. But since I had the summer recess to prepare, I had to get familiar with what I’d be teaching. So first I read through the California state standards. Then I got hold of our textbooks.

Great horny toads.

I’m not talking about their physical condition, although that was quite bad. If you’re running a school: Never, ever, EVER buy paperback textbooks for the children. I don’t care how much money you saved. In the long run, you cost yourself way more. We had these books maybe five years. They were thrashed. I had just enough sixth-grade textbooks, but nowhere near enough seventh-grade books. (I wasn’t gonna bother with the eighth-grade books. Our eighth graders still needed to go through the seventh-grade material. The previous year’s science teacher barely taught science, and spent more time preaching at the kids. So they knew nothing anyway.)

I am in fact speaking of the books’ content. The books came from Abeka, a popular Christian textbook publishing house in Florida. I don’t know whether they matched Florida’s state standards (and that’s a whole other rant) for intermediate school science. They didn’t match California’s, and I realized I was gonna have to pull in quite a lot of supplemental stuff.

The other part of the problem: The books weren’t about actual science anyway. They were about nature trivia and astronomy trivia. Nothing about how to prove your hypothesis through experimentation. Y’know, actual science.

In fact a full sixth of the books were all about young-earth creationism, and why good Christians weren’t allowed to believe in anything else. According to the books, ancient and medieval scientists were all good Christians, but godless atheists like Charles Darwin had convinced scientists to become anti-bible. ’Cause the bible clearly teaches God made the universe in a literal week.

It actually doesn’t, which is why I’m an old-earth creationist. But even if the books taught my view, I still wouldn’t wanna utterly waste two months of the school year bashing science… in the science class.

Mixed in with all this anti-science were whole paragraphs and pages which consisted of odes to God: Nature is great, and so is God for creating nature. Lots of bible verses, used as pull quotes, which the authors figured were appropriate to the subject at hand. But most of ’em were entirely out of context.

The books weren’t completely useless, but pretty close. So I went to the vice principal to inform him on the situation, and what I was gonna do about it. He was a little surprised, because none of the previous teachers had voiced any of my concerns. Years before (when the books were new), he himself had taught from the eighth-grade book. He didn’t see the problem.

I didn’t even bother to get into the anti-science worldview; I stuck to an issue he’d care about. “It’s the California standards,” I said. Previous science teachers didn’t know them, nor care; they only followed the teacher’s manuals. But not teaching to the state standards was why our kids kept failing the science section of the STAR tests every year—to the bewilderment of our principals, many of whom figured the public schools must’ve taught so much about evolution, it skewed the results.

I wasn’t asking him to buy new books; I was simply making him aware of the problem. I knew I’d have to come up with other resources, and work around the books.

“Okay,” he shrugged, “work with what you got.”

So I did. I took a few things from the books, but the bulk of what I taught in my classes came from my encyclopedias, various science websites, and me. I stuck to the state standards, and I taught science. Real science: Hypotheses and experiments.

Invariably problems arose.