I like stories about science.  I’ve enjoyed biographies about Copernicus and Einstein.  Recently, I’ve liked reading about 19^th century female scholars in science in Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things about a character who studies mosses and corresponds with Darwin and Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered about a real biologist who corresponded with Darwin. 

In Kingsolver’s novel there is a character who is a science teacher—Thatcher Greenwood.  Though born in poverty without a mother and an alcoholic, abusive father, he helps doctors in the Civil War and one of them sends him to Harvard afterwards.  He ends up leaving Boston to a small town that is run by “moralists.”  He wants to take his students—mostly girls—into the fields and woods for data collection but is not allowed to.  He shares the history of science, introducing Darwin’s “descent with modification.”  Eventually, he is forced to speak at a public debate called “Darwin vs. Decency.”  The local media is all over it.  Though he carefully and patiently debates the principal, he loses and eventually loses his job.

Dana Goldstein starts The Teacher Wars:  A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession with the claim that public school teaching has become the most scrutinized profession.  I think it is good for us to remember the very old debates about “content” and also about “pedagogy.”  So courageous.

Here’s a couple of great lines:

“Thatcher himself in daily contest with the baby Jesus as he tried to hold their attention to the so-called imponderables of physics:  light, heat, magnetism, conservation of energy.  He was losing, to the more ponderable Virgin birth.  His fellow teachers advised against trying.”  (254-255)