What is Fascinating Education All About?
Audiovisual Instruction
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), as of 2024, students from 8th grade through high school are learning less math and science than in previous years. Much of this deterioration is likely attributable to students’ reliance on the iphone and computers to find and explain the answer.
What makes audiovisual instruction so effective is that the brain evolved to learn by seeing and hearing, long before the alphabet was ever invented. Audiovisual instruction allows the brain to see and hear what’s being taught and then store that information in readily accessible visual and auditory areas of the brain.
Lesson Structure
Learning science, like many other subjects, is a stepwise process, each step building on the previous step. So halfway through each science lesson I stop and review what’s been taught, and at the end of each lesson is a summary of the lesson, followed by review questions that remind students of what’s been taught.
Students lose interest in a subject when they fail to see themselves ever using it, so I try to make science relevant by explaining how what they’re learning explains things in their own lives, things they may never have thought to question. Students need to understand that success in science not about what you know — it’s about what you do with what you know. In short, I want students to use science, not memorize it.
Chemistry Before Biology
Chemistry should be taught before biology because so much of biology is chemistry of the cell. What makes chemistry easy to understand is that it’s organized around a central core of knowledge, which is the 4 ways atoms bond to each other to make molecules. Each of the 4 bonds creates molecules with characteristic properties that explain everyday phenomena and make biology so much easier to understand.