Daily Kos: Teaching Evolution - How I stopped worrying and learned to love the Jesus

Last edited Fri May 16, 2014, 12:37 PM - Edit history (1)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/14/1299422/-Teaching-Evolution-How-I-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-Jesus?detail=email
As usual a long post, but you have a chance to learn some cool science!

I'm a middle school Science teacher. I teach 6-8th grade Science, namely Earth Science, Biology, and Physical Science in that order. Part of the Biology curriculum is evolution. This is no surprise: modern Biology makes no sense whatsoever without Darwin's Theory of Evolution and Natural Selection. Literally, it would all be a gigantic illogical nightmare if evolution is left out of the equation. How would you classify animals? How would we be able to explain interactions between species in their natural environment? How could we make sense of the inner workings of our bodies and compare that to other animals? If species just popped into and out of existence, we can just hang up our coats and go home.

Of course every biology teacher has to face off against Creationists. What surprised me in this case was how many Creationists I would have to spar with. One of my very own colleagues was a creationist! First off, I do not back off from scientific fact. There is no "It's not my place to present information that challenges people's beliefs." That's not science. My job is to teach science, as it is, and to teach kids that they can cultivate within themselves a scientific mindset that is valuable for their everyday lives. Knowing things about science is just plain beneficial.

My style is more confrontational than other teachers might be used to, but you cannot back down from what you know to be true. The children come first, and if they do not learn to question what they think, you're only helping to bring about a generation of sheep. So, here's what happened, I know you're dying to find out.

I was discussing evolution in my 7th grade biology class after our unit on DNA. My science class is probably more technical than most. I did this fun lab where I had the kids use LEGO pieces to decode an RNA strand to figure out what amino acids it would code for. For those not in the know, the way DNA works is that it is a series of letters, a code of sorts. Each letter corresponds to one of four chemicals: Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, and Thymine, aka base pairs. In RNA, Thymine is replaced by Uracil (a much less stable version of a nearly identical molecule, must be too much reality TV). Your DNA splits in half, and an RNA strand comes along and is formed based on the original DNA strand. This is called "messenger RNA." The RNA leaves the nucleus of your cell and heads to a nearby ribosome. Think of ribosomes like scanners you feed paper through. The mRNA is fed into the ribosome. Transfer RNA (tRNA) links up to one end of the ribosome. Transfer RNA has two parts: one side is an amino acid and the other side is one of the four chemicals we talked about earlier: Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, and Uracil.


-Snip-

So, we started talking about human evolution and natural selection. I showed the standard pictures of Austrolopethicus Afarensis, Lucy, Homo Habilis, etc. etc. and explained human ancestry. One of the creationists in my class looked a a photo I was showing, and then gleefully raised his hand to say that there was a "missing link" between the forms. My diagram was purposefully incomplete because I didn't want to include every single transitional form. Remember, 7th graders, not people with the greatest attention spans. I let him go to the front of the class, handed him my marker, and let him happily point to where he thought there was a gap. "If this is a monkey and this is a monkey, then where's the link between this and a human?" I then asked him a question...

"What gap?"

"This one, this one right here! You need something here."

"No I don't."

"Yes you do, you need something here."

"Why?"

"Because if you don't have it then this doesn't make sense."

The kid was dumbfounded by the fact I just wasn't impressed. He laughed and was excited. His father is a pastor, so I know that his father passed this idiocy onto him, and he was making dad proud. It was kind of sick in a way. I then rolled up the overhead projector, and did a quick sketch of a jigsaw puzzle.


Class, let me ask you a question. Is there a puzzle here?"
"Uhh..yes...?"

"Well, according to the logic of our classmate here, there is no puzzle."

"Wait, there's a puzzle right there..."

"But we're missing pieces! And because we're missing pieces, there is clearly is no puzzle."

One bright young girl raised her hand and said "Well we can figure out what pieces should be there because we know the shape 'n stuff."

"Exactly."

Much more at link.