The Fine Art of Teaching Science : Education: Summer school for teachers helps them show elementary and secondary students the interesting side of science and mathematics.

Physicist Roger Nanes was frustrated. Year after year, freshmen entering his Cal State Fullerton classes showed less and less knowledge of fundamental science and mathematical concepts that are supposed to be taught in high school.

UC Irvine chemist Mare Taagepera saw similar flaws in her students. After a little digging, both concluded that many secondary and elementary school science programs were being taught by teachers with little or no science background.

Now, they are at the forefront of a growing movement aimed at teaching teachers to teach science and mathematics at a time when the number of students seeking college degrees in the sciences has declined dramatically.

“It’s got to start in the elementary grades,” said Nanes, who for the last two summers has run a workshop for Southern California high school physics teachers with Cal Poly Pomona physics Professor John W. Jewett Jr.

“The training of teachers at the elementary level has woefully neglected their science background,” said Nanes, who still recalls the inspiration he got from an eighth-grade science teacher in his native Brooklyn, N.Y. “A lot of the science they are teaching is watching a seed grow. That’s fine, but there are so many more things happening in science that teachers cannot convey if they have never been schooled . . . themselves.”

Taagepera helped start UCI’s Summer Science Institute for teachers in the early 1980s because she felt “it was too late by the time (the students) got to us.”

In the days before the National Science Foundation, Congress and the California Department of Education reached the same conclusion and set aside funds to address the problem, Taagepera went hat in hand to such high-tech corporations as Fluor, Rockwell, Hughes and Ford Aerospace for money to support the program.

“I used to say that what we need is a Little League of the sciences,” she recalled. “Can you imagine what our professional baseball teams would be like if we didn’t have a Little League?”

Nearly a decade later, she and others in UCI’s Science Education Programs office now coordinate a plethora of projects for teachers at all grade levels, for gifted students and young children. There is the California Science Project run with Cal State Fullerton, the California Math Project, and the Outstanding High School Science Student Program, which brings the best young brains to attend lectures by top UCI researchers.

And now, UCI is also a Southern California base of operations for the California Science Implementation Network, a statewide summer program aimed at revolutionizing the way elementary and junior high school instructors teach science.

Kim Wildey, 24, is one of the foot soldiers in the effort to turn science and math courses into hands-on experiences that prod discovery and questioning instead of memorizing.

On Friday, she posed this question to her fifth-graders at Glenview Elementary School in Anaheim: “Were humans and dinosaurs on the Earth at the same time?”

A showing of hands had 26 “yes” votes and eight “nos.”

Then, the children were asked to unfurl accounting machine tape and begin marking a geologic time-line, with points for man’s emergence on the planet 3 million years ago, the extinction of dinosaurs 70 million years ago, and the formation of the Earth itself 4.5 billion years ago.

Before 30 minutes had elapsed, many of the youngsters wanted to change their votes.

“One of the things they learn is that ‘The Flintstones’ are a big myth because dinosaurs and humans weren’t on the Earth at the same time,” said Wildey, who is in her second year of teaching in the Placentia Unified School District and took the science network course at UCI last summer.

“I didn’t really like science in school,” she confessed. “This has really turned me on.” .

In California, school districts are grappling with new state guidelines for teaching science and math that call for emphasizing The Big Idea, such as how a dynamic Earth has changed over eons.

“No longer do we ask kids to just memorize things, such as when dinosaurs lived,” said Carol Neistein, a resource specialist at Glenview and a science mentor teacher for Placentia Unified’s 20 elementary schools. “The way education is going is to help kids be better thinkers.”

Each school district is tackling science and math a little differently.

At Placentia Unified, one elementary teacher from each of its 20 schools was sent to the summer science network.

At Irvine Unified, where a heavy emphasis on science has produced awarding-winning students for years, 17 elementary-level science specialists visit each campus.

The district’s 4,800 elementary school children get two 50-minute science classes each week, said Dorothy Terman, Irvine Unified’s curriculum coordinator for mathematics and science instruction.

“The kids love it. They get all areas of science: chemistry, geology, biology, ecology, astronomy,” Terman said. “There is a lot of emphasis on measuring, observing, classifying and hypothesizing. These are the kind of . . . skills they need to continue in science.”

In the Santa Ana Unified School District, a handful of teachers have received specialized training over the years. In turn, they train other teachers. There is also a district science coordinator who gives enrichment sessions in subjects such as astronomy, geology and ocean-ography. There are even weekend field trips.

“There was really relatively little emphasis on science when I started teaching, but it has been slowly building up,” said Betsey Helie, who teaches science to fifth-graders at Taft Elementary School in Santa Ana.

Helie began exploring her own curiosity about “the way things work” several years ago at Taagepera’s summer institute. She now uses class-made gumdrops to illustrate how atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon bond, and she helps other teachers over their fear of science.

It’s imperative, she said, if their students are to be encouraged rather than intimidated by science.

“If kids are not hooked when they are in elementary school, then our chances of interesting them later on are decreased immensely,” Helie said. “Science needs to be fun for children. If we don’t catch their interest, it becomes drudgery.”

Even at the high school level, where there are specialists in the sciences, many instructors are not as current in their fields as they might be. Still more are asked to teach beyond their areas of expertise.

That’s why the Southern California Area Modern Physics Institute came into being.

Nanes and Jewett run SCAMPI, a two-year summer school institute for 50 high school physics teachers and about 60 students from four Southern California counties. Intensive summer classes are held for several weeks at Fullerton, then there are six refresher conferences held throughout the academic year at the Cal Poly Pomona campus.

One SCAMPI alumni at Colton High School in San Bernardino County wrote Nanes that with what she learned, she was able to help her students build a satellite receiver, something she never would have tackled before the program.

“One of my proudest moments came when one of my students told me he enjoyed taking physics more than any of his other subjects because I knew so much physics,” wrote Roberta Wold, who was trained in chemistry but was also assigned to teach physics.

Inspiring students is what it’s all about for these new-wave science teachers.

“You see sheer joy, smiles from ear to ear when they discover something,” said Santa Ana Unified’s Helie. “I’ve had children come back and tell me they were so excited by my science class that they couldn’t wait to sign up for chemistry in high school.

“That was very rewarding.”

SCIENCE PROJECT

Nationwide campaign aims to revolutionize learning. A1