The spelling thing goes back a long way, before Ebonics (remember that)? The underlying idea is that many children are turned off reading and writing by having their creativity stifled by being constantly brought up short by an arbitrary spelling system. I don’t agree, but I’m not designing English curricula and my education in education (ha) didn’t include methods of teaching English.

Gotta run, we’re leaving for the airport a bit earlier than I expected.

I’m in full agree,emt = put it out on schools and let it take its chances. Do a comparison. Take some data, show how evolution treats it, then show how ID treats it and let students draw their own conclusions.

Now I’ll change topic!

The link by VDH has a lot about California. (He lives and teaches there.) One of my e-mail friends grew up in California. She now teaches History in a orivate school in Mobile, Alabama. I asked her about the VDH article and here is her reply.
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CA has been stymied by its own laws protecting the environment and people’s feelings to the point that they can’t sustain themselves in regards to power, food, or anything else. There is a unique attitude of entitlement the citizens of the state seem to have — it’s like they think if they just spend all their time worrying about political
correctness and peace, the necessities of life will come to them naturally. So instead of working hard, they sue each other over breaches of etiquette, and they pass laws that continue to do away with CA’s
ability to sustain itself. Case in point? Recent initiative to — I kid you not — provide illegal immigrants with driver’s licenses because it was “unfair” not to, and alter Engish education to have “relative” spelling rules (i.e. it is culturally insensitive to inner-city youths
to insist that the word “ask” because spelled that way instead of “axe”).
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> I was raised in CA from the time I was 6 until I was 15. During that time, I was called into a parent conference for “insulting” my teacher by insisting on calling her ma’am as I was taught at home. My parents also had to opt me out of a program in school designed to teach that there was no actual right and wrong — just relative values depending on
the situation. Who the hell thinks that’s a good thing to teach to 5th graders? “Cheating isn’t wrong unless you fail to justify it?”
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Given what Jane has said about her students and given the situation this woman describes, I think its a waste of time and effort to worry about ID. There are problems with the US schools that are much more important and more serious.

It doesn’t usually bother me particularly if someone I generally agree with holds an opinion I entirely disagree with. I think I’m generally with John on the astonishing reaction to ID – it’s just another theory, put it out in the public arena (or school, although here I think John might disagree) and let it take its chances. I’ve been told often enough by Americans that I really don’t understand that ID is an attempt by the religious right to subvert the entire American way of life and pervert the education of American youth (or something to that effect), but I still don’t agree. It’s proposed as a theory of the origin of life? Fine, treat it as such. I think it’s a very silly theory with little or nothing to recommend it, but I don’t have any problem with having it out there, and its supporters, er, supporting it.

And I think that the near-hysteria of the attempts to have it declared non-science and a non-theory and a non-idea do a grave disservice to science.

I was trained in Physics and know very little of biology. I do accept Darwin and do not believe in Intelligent Design but I have a problem with
the public attacks on ID. I say public as meaning the mass media since I don’t know what is happening in the Biology departments or the professional journals.

Physics students are taught about the “old Quantum Mechanics.” Back in the 1890s, theorists were having problems with what is called “Black body
radiation”. Max Planck came up with the idea of energy being quantized rather than continuous and had a very nice fit between his theory and
experiment. BUT his theory was intellectual garbage. He took equations from Classical Physics which were derived on the basis of continuous energy, made the ad hoc assumption of discontinuous energy (quantized) and stuck the quantums into the equations. The whole thing makes no mathematical sense but the result was correct.

A mathematically consistent form of Quantum Mechanics was not developed until about 1925. The present theory of black body radiation is completely different from Planck’s but gives the same equation. He got the right answer for the wrong reason!

Looking at biology, I recall reading a popular science book by an expert in Evolution (Ernst Meyer?) who commented that the discovery of DNA was a
complete surprise. Everyone was expecting that proteins would be the basic materials of genetics.

My impression is that every major advance in science has been made by people looking for problems in the accepted theory and proposing radical
revisions. Thomas Kuhn calls them “paradigm shifts.”

I think the ID people are wrong but the public reaction of “How dare they question Darwin” horrifies me! The so called defense of science strikes me as drastically anti-scientific. The claim that it should be illegal to even mention the words “intelligent design” in high school makes me want to vomit.

I don’t consider myself an intellectual but that describes what happened to me!

I do have some thoughts on ID and Darwin but I’m not sure they belong here. I’ll write Jane and ask her if I should post.