T.C. Roekle is a highly respected educator who has solid leadership experience with a focus on innovative strategies to raise student and staff performance at the building and district level. T.C. is a member of the National Speakers Association; she has addressed thousands of educators at State and National Education Conferences, Technology Conferences and school communities.
"At the end of class they didn't get up when the bell rang. They still had their hands in the air," says Duke University pharmacology professor Rochelle Schwartz-Bloom, in an article entitled 'Rusting' Also Describes How Methamphetamine Harms The Body, published in September 28th issue of the research journal Science.
Schwartz-Bloom recalls how her own high school teacher taught her about oxidation by describing how iron and oxygen combine to create rust, "I'm not going to talk about rust," Schwartz-Bloom told the high school students. "I'm going to tell you how methamphetamines kill neurons. It's through oxidation, and it's the same reaction."
These lessons sound interesting to me, as I believe they were to the students and it didn’t stop there. Schwartz-Bloom and her team taught high school teachers how to incorporate drug-related topics into biology and chemistry classes in a national experiment. Their research shows how they increased 7,210 students' science scores by 16% by incorporating drug-related topics into high school biology and chemistry classes, according to the study.
Schwartz-Bloom describes another lesson this way. "I talked about the different formulations of cocaine if it's smoked or if it's snorted, Of course they were already street-savvy about the fact that you can get addicted more easily if you smoke crack. So I asked them, how can that be? It's the same chemical. We talked the whole hour about that.”
"I call it 'stealth learning,'" said Schwartz-Bloom, who is a science-education expert. "The students are having fun picking up facts about things they're interested in. But at the same time they're actually learning basic principles about science."
Read about the 11-year-old project funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), in which Schwartz-Bloom's group has developed a Pharmacology Education Partnership (PEP) involving Duke faculty and high school science teachers from around the United States. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070927154841.h
Ask Yourself:
Would my students be more interested in science if it related to their life or interests?
Could I do a better job of connecting content to the social context of my students life in every lesson?
Related Reading:
Posted on Science Daily site: Lessons About Drugs, Nerve Gas Teach Students Biology And Chemistry More Effectively, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/10/031028055905.htm
Check out the book review of: Wasted : A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher on the Science Daily site.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/reviews/0060930934/
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