Today, let's talk about the prequisite course. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. R ereading a set of articles in last year's Science magazine has set off all my alarm bells. Educators, concerned over the way American science students have slipped behind, are recommending an integrated curriculum. Let's see what that means.
Most high schools start students out with biology.
Then they teach chemistry and finally physics. That way they go from the course seen as least mathematical and most descriptive to the one regarded as most mathematically and conceptually difficult. The reason we teach biology as a purely descriptive course is that it's really so complex that few teachers can handle its full details. So these courses get taught independently of each other. Chemistry in turn is laced with concepts from the physics course that students haven't yet taken.