#and he wanted to teach her algebra and mechanical philosophy

[imaginarycircus]

I'm over here banging on my mathematical drum again. I left a comment on the article bc I got overexcited about the Greeks and Newton again.

[xylophonetangerine]

It's actually hilarious how terrible every single aspect of this is. Massive wall of text below the fold.

Philosophy

All of this ancient philosophy. So if you were born after our Lord Jesus Christ the alumni of Thomas Aquinas College will not have heard of you.

Year I is a random jumble of Ancient Greek philosophy that purports to be about logic but obviously fails to include any developments in that field made after the Birth of Christ.

Year II is even more of a joke. Let's spend an entire year learning Aristotle's Physics and De Anima which in a real school would be taught in two weeks. Metaphysics? Never heard of her!

Year III is literally unbelievable. Nikomacheia and Politika would not form one tenth of the material of a real class on Ancient Ethics.

Year IV. Oh here's Metaphysics. And Physics again in case you forgor 💀

Maths

Probably the most incomplete part of the curriculum.

Year I is nothing but Euclid's Elements. You know, something that high schoolers learn in six weeks. Also as someone who has read the Elements I think it's a very bad way to learn geometry. I don't care if it was used to teach it for two millenia (it was), there are better ways to learn it now, you know textbooks written in the second millenium.

Year II is nothing but old astronomy, so more basic geometry. Plato's Timaeus is nonsense, it's just incorrect; doing Almagest, De Revolutionibus, Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae, and Astronomia Nova is redudant, if only someone had summarised all that. Same can be said for Apollonius' and Archimedes' works on conics (a subject that deserves perhaps one chapter in a moden Freshman mathematics textbook).

In Year III we get to ... analytic geometry and calculus? These are also Freshman and Sophomore topics in a real university. Also what happened to algebra and analysis, the basics of modern mathematics? Nowhere to be seen!

Year IV is the absolute grand slam. Let's learn number theory (Freshman or Sophomore subject) from Dedekind. I don't know what to say. And good luck trying to understand relativity without linear algebra or vector calculus!

Natural Sciences

(I don't know if you've heard but there's more than one now.)

Slightly less incomplete than the maths but still extremely bad. I have a lot to say about this and no doubt I'll miss things.

Year I.

Parts of Animals? Are we in Kindergarten? Jokes aside trying to learn anatomy from Ancient Greeks (Aristotle and Galen) is incredibly stupid. You know they thought that men have more teeth than do women, right?

The rest of the biology part is also bad. Entomology? really? That's the only 'modern' (non-ancient) work on animal biology here? Jean-Henri Fabre's work was not bad for the mid-1850s but the most comprehensive work here is on insects?

De Motu Cordis is historically important for advancing physiology by figuring out the basics of circulation and laying down the foundation of cardiology (the shoulders of the giant at the bottom of the stack) but it's outdated! William Harvey defended people accused of withcraft at witch trials! I learned all the stuff he wrote about circulation and more when I was thirteen years old and I spent most of those classes daydreaming!

Systema Naturae is not about biology per se, it's about classifying organisms which is a kind of a specialised subfield. And while Linné's work was incredibly seminal and important taxonomy has undergone massive changes since. Mendel is fine but again genetics has in fact developed since.

DeKoninck was a weird Catholic philosopher and the only summaries of The Lifeless World of Biology I could find were from weird Catholic schools so I can't imagine it's very good.

Pascal and Archimedes? That ought to take care of the 'Freshman Physics' business. Mechanics? anything??

I don't recognise most of the 'Various Authors' but including Goethe's works on natural science makes me think they're probably not very good.

'Measurements Manual' could be anything but how much do you want to bet they use English customary units?

Year II. 'Atomic Theory' ... this is my wheelhouse but where to even begin?

Let's just ignore Aristotle and Aquinas. Their insights into chemistry are worth a margin note.

Lavoisier was incredibly brilliant and basically invented chemistry. And he did that at a time that, even with hindsight, I can't begin to imagine how you'd do figure out how to start doing chemical research. But again, outdated.

Avogardo, Dalton, Gay-Lussac, Pascal? So basically all of the chemistry and physics on this curriculum is about ideal gases? Stuff you learn in highschool?

Original scientific papers are a very bad way to learn the basics of science. They often have weird archaic notation and always lack further insights.

Year III. So now we get basic mechanics. It's Descartes, Galileo and Newton so get ready for obscure terminology and outdated notation. The Freshman Mechanics class I mostly spent looking at my phone gave me a better understanding of physics than this will give to students who didn't have Freshman and Sophomore classes on calculus. (Before you come at me my grade from Mehcanics I was 3/5 so pretty good.)

Year IV—the trifecta! Like someone on Twitter put it 'Can't talk right now, I need to go to my magnets and evolution class.'

Newton and Huygens did important work on optics but it's outdated.

Come one, Jack, don't try to learn electromagnetism from a book from 1600. I know I sound like a broken record but there's only so many ways I can express this sentiment.

I'd like to see how they teach Faraday and Maxwell to their completely mathematically illiterate students.

The evolution reading list ... oh my God. So it's On the Origin of Species by Darwin and Ernst Mayr's One Long Argument which I haven't read but based on reviews is seems like a good semi-popular synoptic work on evolutionary biology ... and then a bunch of shit desperately trying to convince you they're wrong. Jenkin, and Mivart were outright anti-Darwinists, and while Polanyi and Kass were not (I'm not sure about Kass) the essays seem to be selected to be able to be taught like the Devil would teach the Bible. A bit bad-faith here but I'll indulge myself. And to top it all off there's a bunch of Genesis hodgepodge from the Middle Ages.

Schrödinger's What is Life? was written before DNA was discovered. And while he had an interesting inkling as to how heritable traits are passed onto offspring why not pick a text from after they figured DNA out?! Oh but they added the Watson & Crick paper so it's fine!

The following works are repeated from before: Newton's Principia, Aristotle's Metaphysics, Mendel's 'Experiments in Plant Hybridisation'.

They don't include anything about earth science or modern astronomy (you know, stuff that isn't just about looking at the sky with your bare eyes).

One might also note that et alii would be more correct Latin than et alia since you know all of the people they're etaling are men. I thought such a classics focussed school would care about getting basic Latin right but apparently not.

Language

I don't know about John Nesfield so I'll limit my comments but based on his Wikipedia article he seems to have been against the Indian caste system ... but for the reason that the castes were not sufficiently pure and distinct races to him so make of that whatever thou wilt.

I don't think the Latin readings are very interesting to be quite honest. A few paltry 'selections' from Horace and Cicero form the classical part and a grammar manual and a mass the mediaeval part. Pretty sure my high school classmates who took Latin read more works that were more challenging. And I don't know if New Latin or Contemporary Latin (such as the texts dealing with mundane present-day news written for Nuntii Latini) are generally touched upon while teaching Latin in real schools but you know they're not doing it here.

Music

This is so, so bad as well. The theory is a bunch of crap. If you wanted to learn the basics of music theory from a Great Book of the Western World I would recommend Harmony and Counterpoint (and maybe even Orchestration) by Walter Piston or Harmonielehre by Arnold Schoenberg which are used in real schools as well. I guess even though Harmonielehre concerns itself only with traditional, tonal harmony Schoenberg is anathema is at Thomas Aquinas. You know they have shit takes on 20th century music.

And the music that they've chose, the single set of pieces they're going to study, are the Godforsaken Mozart sonatas. Mozart' least interesting, least innovative, least not-boring, least good works. I'm actually fuming. No interesting melodies, harmonies, rhythms, orchestration, anything at all, just the endless, bland, major-key tinkling of Mozart's potboilers. If you really, really wanted to teach a single set of keyboard pieces, you should have picked the Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach.

Theology

Even though this is a Christian college the theology curriculum is still total ass!

Year I. The Bible, just the read The Bible. That's not how you learn theology.

Year II. Some stuff that'd be covered in four weeks in a Freshman class in a real university.

Years III & IV. Summa Theologiae. Yep, two years on this one work. Now, it is a big boy, old Summa, but college students can learn faster than that.

I don't even care about theology and this is so crap it makes me mad.

Seminar

Last but very unfortunately not least: 'Seminar'. I'm not going to comment on everything because I've already spent too long writing this. Let me just say: this is the most pretentious, wanky, cringe reading list ever. It's just too much.

If you learn history from Ancient historians you're just learning straight up incorrect information.

The classic works of fiction are just so basic.

Why did you put all philosophy after 100 BCE in here?

It's too much.

Funny details:

They included the US Articles of Confederation, Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Just ell oh ell.

The One Single book by a woman is Emma by Jane Austen.

I don't know why but it's extremely funny that the last thing is Marx. Right below Huckleberry Finn as well. Just imagining how they teach Marx is making me go crazy. Also imagine an asshole rich kid going through this clown college before he takes over his dad's job as the CEO of the racism factory encountering Marx for the first time and becoming a communist. Wouldn't that be hilarious? Marx also holds the distinction of being the newest philosopher on the list.

It's just so bad. It's so stupid, I feel dumber just for having read this list.

This is the most deeply unserious shit I have ever seen in my life. $40k/year clown college

[bisoroblog]

How Do We Get Middle School Students Excited About Science? Make It Hands-On

Eighth-grader Liam Bayne has always liked math and science — that’s one reason his family sent him to The Alternative School For Math and Science (ASMS). But he was surprised and excited when his sixth-grade science class started each new topic with experimentation, not lecture or textbook learning.

“I was really excited because the first thing we did was experiments and hands-on stuff, which is my favorite part,” Liam said. At ASMS the teaching philosophy centers around giving students experiences that pique their interest to know more. Their science curriculum is based on a program called Full Option Science System (FOSS), but has changed over time as teachers bring new ideas to the curriculum and focus on meeting the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

“It’s really based on the idea that students learn science by doing science,” said Kim Frock, co-founder of ASMS. Kids ask questions, make observations, manipulate data, analyze, “and really through that process develop deep conceptual understanding of what they’re doing.”

This style of learning can feel foreign to many ASMS students at first, whether they come from a private or public elementary school, but with time and support they often come to see its value. Kids talk with one another, and ASMS kids know this isn’t how a lot of friends at other area middle schools are learning.

“We’re learning similar things in science except they have the facts memorized, but they don’t really know them,” said Carolyn Heckle, an ASMS eighth-grader. “Here if you have something in your brain, it’s because you did something that made it a memory.”

For example, Carolyn clearly remembers an earth science unit about how different sedimentary rocks form, in which she and her partner, Liam, made sedimentary layers of shale, limestone and sandstone. They recreated the geological processes using sand, a sodium silicate solution, clay, plaster of Paris, oyster shells and water, slowly building up sedimentary layers and discussing their structures along the way. Heckle said watching rock formations form crystallized her learning about geology.

Both Liam and Carolyn admit group work was one of the hardest things to get used to at this school. But now, three years in, they can see just how much they’ve learned from peers. Liam described a sixth-grade engineering challenge that required student teams to design a spaceship that could pick up items and drop them off at a predetermined distance. No one in his group knew how to start. Liam asked a shy person in the group if they had an idea.

“They came up with an idea that we stuck with the whole time,” Liam said. “ I thought, wow, I could actually learn from them. That was the first time I started to ask other people for their opinion rather than asking for help for my opinion.” THE TEACHING PHILOSOPHY AT ASMS

The Alternative School for Math and Science started 15 years ago when co-founder Kim Frock was startled at data showing only about half of eighth-grade students in her region, near Corning, New York, were meeting standards in math and English. In contrast, almost all the fifth-grade students were on track, “so it was pretty clear where the system was starting to break down,” she said.

The science curriculum at ASMS encourages students to work collaboratively to solve the roadblocks that real scientists face when developing experiments. (Courtesy of The Alternative School for Math and Science)

The data prompted Frock to start the independent school in a space made available by Corning Incorporated, a global company responsible for inventing products like Pyrex, the gorilla glass on smartphones and the ceramic in a catalytic converter. Corning is a small, rural community with a median income of about $50,000, but Corning Inc. draws many highly educated scientists who want good local schools.

Corning donates to its local public schools, but ASMS has a special relationship, getting free facility space and annual funding for financial aid. While the school is private, Frock said it doesn’t use academics to determine admissions and every child’s education is heavily subsidized, although some receive more than others. She also said the school has more kids with special needs than the public schools and draws students from over 10 local districts.

“If you want to bring physicists and scientists to the area you have to have a top-notch education,” said Jenna Chervenic, an eighth-grade science teacher at ASMS who used to work at Corning  Inc. as a fiber optics mechanical engineer. She left that job to become a high school math teacher, but later joined the ASMS staff.

“What I love about this job is I get to do both,” Chervenic said. “I put a lot of engineering tasks into the science curriculum.”

When they started the school, Frock knew they needed to teach science differently. She didn’t think the “canned experiments” many schools do, where students walk through a step-by-step process and get a predetermined result, was a good representation of what real scientists do. It’s too controlled, and doesn’t have enough room for the types of failures and setbacks that professional scientists face everyday.

“That’s not learning and it’s not engaging for kids,” Frock said. “Here, instead, we have inquiries for them to do and general guidelines, but they’re really asking their own questions and discovering their own knowledge.”

At each grade level students do three big units focusing on Life Science, Earth and Space Science, and Physical Science. At the end of each unit they do an engineering challenge designed to fill gaps in the curriculum and to get students applying what they’ve learned throughout the unit.

“It’s very few tests until they get to eighth grade,” Chervenic said. “There’s just a lot of authentic evaluation and looking to see what students have learned, and if they didn’t get it we don’t just keep moving on. We figure out how to put it back in our teaching so we make sure every kid has a level of proficiency and that they have felt success.”

Teaching this way requires small class sizes and teachers with a deep grasp of their subject matter. The teachers have to be comfortable with students pursuing their own areas of inquiry and guiding them to continue asking questions, iterating, researching and experimenting until they’ve come up with some conclusions.

This process was frustrating for Liam and Carolyn at first. Liam was worried people would think he wasn’t smart if he “failed” at something.

“Even just the word failure gives a negative connotation,” he said. “I remember I failed at something and then my teacher said, ‘Now we know one way not to do it.’ ”

He’s gradually become comfortable with the idea that when he hits a roadblock in a project, that’s a chance to re-evaluate and try something else. It’s led him to always be asking “why” in everything he learns, whether that’s social studies, earth sciences or chemistry.

In addition to science class at each grade level, students are required to complete an independent project or compete in a national science competition. All sixth-graders do a controlled experiment answering a question they’ve designed. Questions range: Does putting food coloring in a muffin change the taste? If I drop different sized balls off a bridge, will the crater size change? It’s a science experiment, but done at school without parental help. And even if students come up with questions the teacher knows they won’t be able to prove, educators let kids pursue the idea anyway. It’s part of the learning process.

“If you can create that safe environment where kids are willing to take a risk, they can present a whole experiment, even if they didn’t get an answer or didn’t get the answer they were looking for,” Chervenic said.

When students get to seventh and eighth grade they have more options to meet their science requirements. They can do another controlled experiment if they want or they can participate in six different national science competitions: First Lego League robotics, Rube Goldberg machines, eCybermission, Exploravision, Future Cities and 3M Young Scientist.

“We want kids to be doing the work independently and we want them to be doing the work here,” Frock said. The expectations are high, but teachers want students working through their own problems in a place where they can get just the right support from a teacher. Work on science competitions is almost always collaborative, so staying at school is logistically easier for kids whose homes are spread out across the region. Teachers also encourage students to attend study hall and homework club after school so they can get work done at school before heading home to rest.

“We’ve created an environment where they come in expecting to work hard, but there’s that internal reward,” Chervenic said. “It creates that environment where they’re excited to get into class everyday, and what the day is going to hold, so you don’t have to do a lot of redirecting and stuff like that.”

The collaboration teachers work hard to promote throughout their students’ learning is evident in the adult work at ASMS as well. Teachers regularly visit one another’s classrooms to make sure, for example, that they’re using the same language to talk about an algebraic concept in science as they are in math class. If the English teacher notices students are weak on their writing, then in science class they may also spend extra time writing strong conclusions. Teachers here recognize that without all school disciplines working together, students won’t become well-rounded or see how big questions in life are interconnected.

HIGH SCHOOL

After three years at ASMS, most students have gotten good at solving their problems independently and collaborating in groups. Many have discovered a deep love for science and a desire to know much more about why the world works the way it does. And then most go off to the public high school where class sizes are bigger, some teachers are more traditional, and they take regular tests and receive grades. It’s very different from ASMS and it can be a shock.

“The feedback we got was that they weren’t prepared to take tests and do notetaking all year long,” Frock said. These insights came out of a survey Frock conducted with early graduates. To rectify those holes, eighth-graders now spend the last trimester learning some basics about how other schools work. They practice opening a locker, discuss how to advocate for themselves to teachers, and take practice tests. They even read class syllabi together and play around with a mock gradebook to understand how grades are weighted and what scores on different items on the syllabus could do to a final grade.

“The transition wasn’t that bad,” said Gracie Speicher a ninth-grader at Corning Painted Post High School. “I really like my classes. I have really good teachers.”

She says grades and tests are different from her learning experience at ASMS but not necessarily bad, and the transition class helped her know what to expect. She says she knows who she is as a student now, and feels comfortable asking for what she needs. On some assignments she’ll stick to the rubric, but on others, when she’s passionate about something, she goes above and beyond. She recently built a scale model of the Globe Theatre, an idea her teacher was skeptical she could complete in time, instead of presenting a slideshow about Shakespeare like many of her classmates.

“The project work that was very interesting and engaging helped me in the long run because it got me engaged in middle school so enjoying learning in high school is easier,” Gracie said about the transition from ASMS to high school. And she learned valuable lessons about collaboration there, something that was hard for her, since she often prefers to work individually.

Kim Frock, co-founder of ASMS, is proud that over 70 percent of kids who went to ASMS have gone on to pursue college degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) degrees. And, she says, that’s not because they are screening for 10-year-olds who already know they want to be scientists or mathematicians. In fact, many students come in hating the sciences, but they leave excited about them. To her, that’s proof that the learning experience students get in middle school at ASMS is sticking with them, making an impact well beyond the three years students spend in her building.

She knows that a private school like ASMS, with financial support from Corning Inc., gives her freedom to offer exactly the kind of education she believes all kids need, and to do so for families from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. But she also thinks middle school is such a crucial time to get students excited as learners that other schools can learn from the success they’ve had.

“We’ve known how to do education right for probably 40 years, but there are very few schools that have been able to implement it,” Frock said.

For her, it starts with hiring teachers that share a particular education philosophy.

“In order to teach here, our teachers really have to believe that every kid can be successful,” Frock said. “And I would say that’s not the attitude I’ve seen from every public school educator.”

How Do We Get Middle School Students Excited About Science? Make It Hands-On published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

[perfectzablog]

How Do We Get Middle School Students Excited About Science? Make It Hands-On

Eighth-grader Liam Bayne has always liked math and science — that’s one reason his family sent him to The Alternative School For Math and Science (ASMS). But he was surprised and excited when his sixth-grade science class started each new topic with experimentation, not lecture or textbook learning.

“I was really excited because the first thing we did was experiments and hands-on stuff, which is my favorite part,” Liam said. At ASMS the teaching philosophy centers around giving students experiences that pique their interest to know more. Their science curriculum is based on a program called Full Option Science System (FOSS), but has changed over time as teachers bring new ideas to the curriculum and focus on meeting the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

“It’s really based on the idea that students learn science by doing science,” said Kim Frock, co-founder of ASMS. Kids ask questions, make observations, manipulate data, analyze, “and really through that process develop deep conceptual understanding of what they’re doing.”

This style of learning can feel foreign to many ASMS students at first, whether they come from a private or public elementary school, but with time and support they often come to see its value. Kids talk with one another, and ASMS kids know this isn’t how a lot of friends at other area middle schools are learning.

“We’re learning similar things in science except they have the facts memorized, but they don’t really know them,” said Carolyn Heckle, an ASMS eighth-grader. “Here if you have something in your brain, it’s because you did something that made it a memory.”

For example, Carolyn clearly remembers an earth science unit about how different sedimentary rocks form, in which she and her partner, Liam, made sedimentary layers of shale, limestone and sandstone. They recreated the geological processes using sand, a sodium silicate solution, clay, plaster of Paris, oyster shells and water, slowly building up sedimentary layers and discussing their structures along the way. Heckle said watching rock formations form crystallized her learning about geology.

Both Liam and Carolyn admit group work was one of the hardest things to get used to at this school. But now, three years in, they can see just how much they’ve learned from peers. Liam described a sixth-grade engineering challenge that required student teams to design a spaceship that could pick up items and drop them off at a predetermined distance. No one in his group knew how to start. Liam asked a shy person in the group if they had an idea.

“They came up with an idea that we stuck with the whole time,” Liam said. “ I thought, wow, I could actually learn from them. That was the first time I started to ask other people for their opinion rather than asking for help for my opinion.” THE TEACHING PHILOSOPHY AT ASMS

The Alternative School for Math and Science started 15 years ago when co-founder Kim Frock was startled at data showing only about half of eighth-grade students in her region, near Corning, New York, were meeting standards in math and English. In contrast, almost all the fifth-grade students were on track, “so it was pretty clear where the system was starting to break down,” she said.

The science curriculum at ASMS encourages students to work collaboratively to solve the roadblocks that real scientists face when developing experiments. (Courtesy of The Alternative School for Math and Science)

The data prompted Frock to start the independent school in a space made available by Corning Incorporated, a global company responsible for inventing products like Pyrex, the gorilla glass on smartphones and the ceramic in a catalytic converter. Corning is a small, rural community with a median income of about $50,000, but Corning Inc. draws many highly educated scientists who want good local schools.

Corning donates to its local public schools, but ASMS has a special relationship, getting free facility space and annual funding for financial aid. While the school is private, Frock said it doesn’t use academics to determine admissions and every child’s education is heavily subsidized, although some receive more than others. She also said the school has more kids with special needs than the public schools and draws students from over 10 local districts.

“If you want to bring physicists and scientists to the area you have to have a top-notch education,” said Jenna Chervenic, an eighth-grade science teacher at ASMS who used to work at Corning  Inc. as a fiber optics mechanical engineer. She left that job to become a high school math teacher, but later joined the ASMS staff.

“What I love about this job is I get to do both,” Chervenic said. “I put a lot of engineering tasks into the science curriculum.”

When they started the school, Frock knew they needed to teach science differently. She didn’t think the “canned experiments” many schools do, where students walk through a step-by-step process and get a predetermined result, was a good representation of what real scientists do. It’s too controlled, and doesn’t have enough room for the types of failures and setbacks that professional scientists face everyday.

“That’s not learning and it’s not engaging for kids,” Frock said. “Here, instead, we have inquiries for them to do and general guidelines, but they’re really asking their own questions and discovering their own knowledge.”

At each grade level students do three big units focusing on Life Science, Earth and Space Science, and Physical Science. At the end of each unit they do an engineering challenge designed to fill gaps in the curriculum and to get students applying what they’ve learned throughout the unit.

“It’s very few tests until they get to eighth grade,” Chervenic said. “There’s just a lot of authentic evaluation and looking to see what students have learned, and if they didn’t get it we don’t just keep moving on. We figure out how to put it back in our teaching so we make sure every kid has a level of proficiency and that they have felt success.”

Teaching this way requires small class sizes and teachers with a deep grasp of their subject matter. The teachers have to be comfortable with students pursuing their own areas of inquiry and guiding them to continue asking questions, iterating, researching and experimenting until they’ve come up with some conclusions.

This process was frustrating for Liam and Carolyn at first. Liam was worried people would think he wasn’t smart if he “failed” at something.

“Even just the word failure gives a negative connotation,” he said. “I remember I failed at something and then my teacher said, ‘Now we know one way not to do it.’ ”

He’s gradually become comfortable with the idea that when he hits a roadblock in a project, that’s a chance to re-evaluate and try something else. It’s led him to always be asking “why” in everything he learns, whether that’s social studies, earth sciences or chemistry.

In addition to science class at each grade level, students are required to complete an independent project or compete in a national science competition. All sixth-graders do a controlled experiment answering a question they’ve designed. Questions range: Does putting food coloring in a muffin change the taste? If I drop different sized balls off a bridge, will the crater size change? It’s a science experiment, but done at school without parental help. And even if students come up with questions the teacher knows they won’t be able to prove, educators let kids pursue the idea anyway. It’s part of the learning process.

“If you can create that safe environment where kids are willing to take a risk, they can present a whole experiment, even if they didn’t get an answer or didn’t get the answer they were looking for,” Chervenic said.

When students get to seventh and eighth grade they have more options to meet their science requirements. They can do another controlled experiment if they want or they can participate in six different national science competitions: First Lego League robotics, Rube Goldberg machines, eCybermission, Exploravision, Future Cities and 3M Young Scientist.

“We want kids to be doing the work independently and we want them to be doing the work here,” Frock said. The expectations are high, but teachers want students working through their own problems in a place where they can get just the right support from a teacher. Work on science competitions is almost always collaborative, so staying at school is logistically easier for kids whose homes are spread out across the region. Teachers also encourage students to attend study hall and homework club after school so they can get work done at school before heading home to rest.

“We’ve created an environment where they come in expecting to work hard, but there’s that internal reward,” Chervenic said. “It creates that environment where they’re excited to get into class everyday, and what the day is going to hold, so you don’t have to do a lot of redirecting and stuff like that.”

The collaboration teachers work hard to promote throughout their students’ learning is evident in the adult work at ASMS as well. Teachers regularly visit one another’s classrooms to make sure, for example, that they’re using the same language to talk about an algebraic concept in science as they are in math class. If the English teacher notices students are weak on their writing, then in science class they may also spend extra time writing strong conclusions. Teachers here recognize that without all school disciplines working together, students won’t become well-rounded or see how big questions in life are interconnected.

HIGH SCHOOL

After three years at ASMS, most students have gotten good at solving their problems independently and collaborating in groups. Many have discovered a deep love for science and a desire to know much more about why the world works the way it does. And then most go off to the public high school where class sizes are bigger, some teachers are more traditional, and they take regular tests and receive grades. It’s very different from ASMS and it can be a shock.

“The feedback we got was that they weren’t prepared to take tests and do notetaking all year long,” Frock said. These insights came out of a survey Frock conducted with early graduates. To rectify those holes, eighth-graders now spend the last trimester learning some basics about how other schools work. They practice opening a locker, discuss how to advocate for themselves to teachers, and take practice tests. They even read class syllabi together and play around with a mock gradebook to understand how grades are weighted and what scores on different items on the syllabus could do to a final grade.

“The transition wasn’t that bad,” said Gracie Speicher a ninth-grader at Corning Painted Post High School. “I really like my classes. I have really good teachers.”

She says grades and tests are different from her learning experience at ASMS but not necessarily bad, and the transition class helped her know what to expect. She says she knows who she is as a student now, and feels comfortable asking for what she needs. On some assignments she’ll stick to the rubric, but on others, when she’s passionate about something, she goes above and beyond. She recently built a scale model of the Globe Theatre, an idea her teacher was skeptical she could complete in time, instead of presenting a slideshow about Shakespeare like many of her classmates.

“The project work that was very interesting and engaging helped me in the long run because it got me engaged in middle school so enjoying learning in high school is easier,” Gracie said about the transition from ASMS to high school. And she learned valuable lessons about collaboration there, something that was hard for her, since she often prefers to work individually.

Kim Frock, co-founder of ASMS, is proud that over 70 percent of kids who went to ASMS have gone on to pursue college degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) degrees. And, she says, that’s not because they are screening for 10-year-olds who already know they want to be scientists or mathematicians. In fact, many students come in hating the sciences, but they leave excited about them. To her, that’s proof that the learning experience students get in middle school at ASMS is sticking with them, making an impact well beyond the three years students spend in her building.

She knows that a private school like ASMS, with financial support from Corning Inc., gives her freedom to offer exactly the kind of education she believes all kids need, and to do so for families from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. But she also thinks middle school is such a crucial time to get students excited as learners that other schools can learn from the success they’ve had.

“We’ve known how to do education right for probably 40 years, but there are very few schools that have been able to implement it,” Frock said.

For her, it starts with hiring teachers that share a particular education philosophy.

“In order to teach here, our teachers really have to believe that every kid can be successful,” Frock said. “And I would say that’s not the attitude I’ve seen from every public school educator.”

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