Teaching science equals a higher quality of life

Let’s just assume we have all completed a high school education, and you are having normal day-to-day life experiences. Are there basic science items about which you have an insufficient knowledge?

Let me make myself perfectly clear.

Do you know the difference between dirt and rock, other than hard and soft? Do you know the proper names of the various clouds other than dark, fluffy and rain? Or maybe, do you know the difference in the variety of trees more than pine and oak, or how trees function on earth besides giving shade?

In other words, why should we be concerned about the destruction of the Amazon Rain Forest? Or why should you care about coal burning plants or walking out of a grocery store with a shopping cart with 15 plastic sacks?

These are subjects we live with on a daily basis, and the lack of knowledge of any of them reduces our quality of life. Very simply, understanding these elementary basic sciences subjects give us a better and more complete view of our physical surroundings, and I want our schools to increase the focus on teaching the science of everyday life.

Let’s for a moment consider how knowing and understanding the physical world around us can make our life more fulfilling.

Yes, the understanding of our natural world makes a drive by a rocky road cut more meaningful. If you knew the composition of, say, shale (that black rock), wouldn’t that be worth something?

But while that sounds simple, let’s multiply that bit of knowledge by 1,000, or 10,000. The more bits and pieces you understand about the natural world, the more meaningful your life becomes.

Before we go any further, let me comment on our teachers as a group: You are underpaid and underappreciated. I’m on your side 100%.

Now, before our teachers get their feathers ruffled, let me acknowledge that they already teach the subjects I have listed below, but since I’m a bachelor’s and master’s geology graduate who has spent years in a basic science profession, I don’t think you can teach too much of the basic science topics below, and if you are an English or math teacher, you probably feel the same way about your profession.

First, the physical world, broadly called geology: I’m talking about entry level geology courses, which are taught in college. The two first year subjects are physical geology and historical geology. These are very informative and interesting courses, and they are not difficult. The basic premises that these courses cover are relatively simple.

Wouldn’t it be nice to view a road cut in the Boston Mountains, and have a clue of about the rocks that were exposed, and know how those mountains were formed? Or maybe you have taken a trip to the Grand Canyon and wanted to say more than “Wow.” Or your knowledge of dinosaurs is regulated to the movie “Jurassic Park.”

We live on the planet Earth, and very simply, we will enhance our life by understanding the physical makeup and historical background of the world we live on. The studies that reveal the steady evolution of life on our planet give a person an understanding of the historical age of life on the planet and an understanding of how the Earth has evolved through the geology over several billion years.

Now, I’m not writing about a full blown college level course, but a cursory, introductory overview that could easily fit in to the overall biology, chemistry or other science classes. These two subjects are the simplest of the possible introductory geology courses, and the teaching level is much less than a full-blown chemistry or math course.

Naturally, the after-graduation benefit level, when compared with most other science courses, is superior because of the every day experiences the former students have. Yes, I may be prejudiced because I am a geologist, and even though both physical and historical geology course are electives in college, not all of our citizens go to college, and of the percentage who graduate from college, not all of them take the geology courses as an elective.

Now let’s review anothEvery

er course which we are involved with daily and one that gets more conversation than almost any other: Meteorology. That is the study of the earth’s atmosphere.

It’s the Weather Channel!

I took Meteorology in college, and checked it off as one of the easiest electives I took, but also one of the most useful. We all are amateur weather men or women and daily we forecast the weather.

Wouldn’t you like to understand the way a cold front is formed or how a hurricane suddenly appears in the Gulf of Mexico, and why it moves in a certain direction; or why did Arctic blast froze all the way down to South Louisiana? Of course you would benefit and that’s why an education is beneficial.

Meteorology is a big word, but it’s an easy course to add to a person’s education. An overview of meteorology as part of a school’s science package would be an easy add and extremely useful.

The next course I would like to see added to the high school curriculum concerns our environment. Today, the dangers to our quality of life here on Earth is evident, even to the non-science observers, and the newspapers are full of environment problems every day.

Several recent papers contained long articles about rising sea-levels and how the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and the corresponding melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice-pack is going to increase the Gulf of Mexico’s water level.

Of course, our environmental knowledge is critical to maintaining and increasing our quality of life on our planet. Global warming, which causes climate change, is no longer a theory. It is fact, and over the past decade, as the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed, wildfires raged, hurricanes became more powerful and droughts became commonplace in various areas of the world, and global warming is more and more becoming an absolute fact.

An addition to the curriculum would give high school students a better understanding of what is causing Earth’s atmosphere to become warmer, and that understanding is critical to controlling the ever increasing temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere.

The basics of understanding why coal fired electricity generating plants and the automobile are responsible for a huge amount of the problem should be relevant to all our citizens.

As I think back on my education experience, I realize that by majoring in a basic science such as geology, I accumulated a better understanding of the science of living on this planet than a non-science major.

I really believe several of the basic science courses I took in college could easily be integrated into the curriculum of our high school students, and it would give those high school graduates a better understanding of some of the basic physical makeup of our planet and make their lives more fulfilling.