Chattanooga Center for Creative Arts ninth-grade students Ronnie Hanson, left, and Casey Haynes study during Jack Pickett’s physical world concepts class.Educators are starting to turn the way they teach high school science in Hamilton County upside down.
Rather than starting off in ninth and 10th grades with biology and chemistry, they are going to begin teaching physics first. The idea is to teach physics — normally a course for later grades — to freshmen in an effort to get them familiar with scientific concepts.
Teachers then will help students apply those concepts as they teach chemistry and biology.
“The physics is really the underlying science for biology and chemistry,” said Robert Marlowe, a professor of physics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, who is helping secure grant money from the National Science Foundation to certify more local teachers in physics and chemistry.
“The benefit for students is they will see how strongly physics is tied into biology and chemistry,” he said. “They will get a sense for how it is not the case that physics lies down one path and chemistry is behind a different door and biology is behind a different door. That’s nuts! It’s never been that way.”