General Science

Easy As 1, 2, 3: A Catholic Overview of Science For the Primary Grades

Book cover: 'Easy As 1, 2, 3: A Catholic Overview of Science For the Primary Grades'
Author(s): 
Nancy Nicholson
Number of pages: 
41 pages
Copyright: 
1998
Publisher: 
Catholic Heritage Curricula
Binding: 
Loose-leaf (binder-ready)
Subject(s): 
Grade / Age level: 
Resource Type: 
Review: 
This program provides families who like to use living books with a Catholic framework from which to study science. It is not a textbook but rather is 40 pages, of which approximately half are outlines, that are three hole punched and ready to go into your notebook. The parent that uses this will find the eleven units of science outlined very handy for creating their own program and clearly laid out so that they can tuck personal notes and activities into their notebook using the 40 pages as their point of organizing.
The manual begins with an explanation of how the outline can best be used and includes suggested resources and supplies. Each units focus (animals for example) is broken down by grade and includes a listing of the main headings that should be studied (e.g. Mammals, habitats and others in grade 1, amphibians, migration and others in grade 3). The author also includes a "find out" paragraph that includes special topics that parents should bring out.
Perspective: 
Catholic
Reviewed by: 
First reviewed: 
3-9-01

For the Beauty of the Earth

A Science Supplement for Catholic Elementary Schools
Author(s): 
James Leek et al.
Subject(s): 
Grade / Age level: 
Resource Type: 
Review: 
Like many Catholic Home schooling families, providing a Catholic education was number one on the list of reasons my husband and I wanted to home school. In addition, we wanted a rigorous education, and one that emphasized the beauties of truth and love. Translating these goals into a curriculum is an on-going challenge. Sometimes the books that do a good job presenting a particular subject do it without the light of the Faith. Other times, books that are "solidly Catholic" are also unattractive and uninspiring. We have had to compromise in a lot of areas.

Two that we have not had to compromise in are science and history, and this is largely due to the Catholic school supplements produced by James Leek. These two are among the most excellent resources I have come across in home schooling. They include interesting material for study and careful explanation of an approach to education that is beautifully in keeping with our holy faith. In themselves, these explanations are worth reading and incorporating into your teaching.

In science, for example, Mr. Leek explains the integrating principles for a Catholic science education. Ultimately, our aim is to better know the Creator of everything. Science study also has remote ends: that we develop a respect for God's creation, and learn to contemplate and reflect on it, and that we exercise our minds to improve life and serve our fellow men. At the same time, science has its proximate and immediate ends: to learn how the world works and to take in sensory data of the physical reality around us.

These principles are very well realized in Leek's science supplement. For the Beauty of the Earth includes a textbook with literary selections organized around the common subject matter of science. The lyrics of the beautiful hymn from which this program draws its title provide the organizing system. In addition to "the beauty of the earth" (weather, metals, energy), we have chapters on "the glory of the skies" (stars, the sun), "hill and vale and tree and flower" "the mystic harmony linking sense to sound and sight" (insects, spiders, mammals), and "the joy of human love" (the senses, emotions, the will.)

The corresponding teacher's guide builds on the readings with questions and activities that take the student from considering the text, to observing the natural world, to admiring God's handiwork, and finally, to the religious analogy. An example to illustrate this progression would be the reading of "Phaeton and Apollo." After the selection is read, the student is asked a series of questions on the text: Who was Phaeton? Describe the court of the sun, etc. Next, students are asked to make some observations about the sun: Where does it rise and set? Does it actually move? What makes it appear to move? Then they are asked to consider the sun's role in life on our planet, and finally, to how the sun is like God, how its marvelous working points to the existence of God.

Questions and activities are broken into grade levels so that this program can be used throughout the elementary years. My first reaction when I looked at For the Beauty of the Earth was to think that this was a liberal arts soft-pedaling of the hard subject of science. But after I carefully read the author's introduction, I decided it could be so much more than that, and it more than met those expectations. We used it alternately with our regular science text, allowing the literary selections and projects to set the tone for our textbook's coverage. Along with enjoying some good stories, memorizing poems and scriptures, doing some fun projects (like building a humane mousetrap), I found that the sense of wonder created through the program carried into the rest of our textbook consideration of each topic. The course is cross-referenced with many of the most popular school science text series from the time it was published (early 1980s).

Reviewed by: 
First reviewed: 
3-10-2000

Incredible Comparisons

Book cover: 'Incredible Comparisons'
Author(s): 
Russell Ash
Number of pages: 
64 pages
Copyright: 
1996
Publisher: 
Dorling Kindersley
Binding: 
Sewn Hardcover
Grade / Age level: 
Resource Type: 
Review: 
This picture book designed for "big kids" gives side-by-side comparisons according to length, height, area, life-span, speed, etc. of all kinds of things - animals, mountains, countries, modes of transportation, man-made structures and much more.

Segments of the book include: "On the Surface" (compares land-size of various countries, islands, different uses of land), "Into the Earth" (canyon depths, cave lengths and depths, etc.), "Going into Space" (compares power and speeds of rockets vs. airplanes, comet tail size comparison with various planets, etc.), "The Solar System" (compares planet sizes and distances, etc.), "Great Lengths" (compares lenghts of airplanes, highways, major rivers, telecommunications cables, etc.). Other chapters cover animal speeds, ladn and water speeds, human population etc. Does include some environmental and politically correct content. The segment on human population was much better than I expected. To give a sampling.... "A population explosion has seen the number of people in the world more than triple since 1900 - from less than 2,000,000,000 to close to 6,000,000,000. Each day, enough people to fill the largest stadium in the modern world are added to the total. Thankfully, the world is a very big place. All the people in the world today could actually fit, standing shoulder to shoulder, on the small Indonesian island of Bali."

Reviewed by: 
First reviewed: 
4-4-01

Old Mother West Wind and other stories

Author(s): 
Thornton Burgess
Subject(s): 
Grade / Age level: 
Resource Type: 
Review: 
You are probably already familiar with the animal stories written by Thornton Burgess in the early 1900s. These go by titles such as "The Adventures of Johnny Chuck" and "Old Mother West Wind" and are sold by Dover Press for only $1. Each book tells about the life and adventures of various animals in such a way that the child easily learns about animal habitat and woodland lessons. In "Old Mother West Wind" the book starts off telling about her children, "The Merry Breezes" who carry scents of animals as they fly along ruffling (tickling) the fur of different animals. Later in the book we read about a bird who, one night, almost looses her eggs to a skunk without a strip. Now we have an idea of why God gave skunks stripes. My daughter silently reads a chapter from these books each day and narrates them at dinner. These are written at the second grade level.
Reviewed by: 
First reviewed: 
1999

The Story of Science

Newton at the Center
Author(s): 
Joy Hakim
Number of pages: 
256 pages
Copyright: 
2005
Publisher: 
Smithsonian Books
Binding: 
Sewn Hardcover
Review: 

Hakim's The Story of Science is an attractive but frustrating piece. Her comprehensive portrayal of the history of physics is extensively researched and beautifully illustrated, but marred by a steady stream of errors of science and history and an irritating political and philosophical drumbeat about things like population control and the proper separation (only now known to man) between religion and science.

The history of science is ambitious topic, requiring both an insight into science and a knowledge of history. It was perhaps wise to exclude almost completely the life sciences – biology, medicine, anthropology, and paleontology -- as well as the earth sciences of geology and meteorology. No controversy about Darwin here! Nevertheless, having made that decision, it might have been well to rename the book, indicating that it would be primarily "the story of physics", with substantial segments on chemistry and astronomy (which could hardly be left out of the history of physics) and no more than a passing mention of other topics.

It would be still clearer to say that Hakim is here presenting the stories of the physicists, in chronological order, with brief and mostly modern explanations of the insights they were working through. This is enough subject matter to be very challenging, very interesting, and certainly more useful than long explanations of old and erroneous ideas. We see the faces of the physicists, their equipment, and the geography of their homes and travels. Sidebars on the scientific or mathematical principles they were investigating are mostly well done but make it difficult to sort out what was actually known at a particular time, and are so numerous as to distract from the flow of her present-tense narrative.

Hakim's errors of science range from minor failures of clarity and information to real confusions indicating that she does not understand her material. The book cannot be used as a stand-alone science course; it must be checked.

  • In a minor misstatement, she reports (p. 51) that Tycho Brahe "guesses that the stars are at least 700 times further than Saturn. He is wrong about that; the nearest star is more than 20,000 times farther…" Well, if his guess was "at least," he was right of course. What is important here is to note what a stretch was required of the 17th century imagination. The difficulty of accepting a sun-centered cosmos was not just traditionalism, but the radical expansion of our imagination regarding knowable space.
  • More problematic is her boxed discussion of Tycho's supernova. First, (p 50 blue print in the green box) she says that "[I]n a split second, a massive star runs out of fuel… gravity collapses the core." Well, the collapse is sudden, and it happens after the star runs out of fuel, but the running out of fuel is not particularly abrupt, and it is the cooling after that depletion that brings about sudden collapse. And actually, Tycho's supernova worked a little differently, because it was not a core-collapse supernova. So it gets worse…
  • (In the same box, black print,) Hakim says that "a supernova explosion destroys the original star. A nova explosion happens on the surface of a white dwarf…" On page 51, (still in the green box), she offers an image of "what's left of Tycho's 1572 supernova… There's no trace of a stellar core which suggests that the original star was a white dwarf in a binary system rather than a red giant. If a core does survive, it can become a neutron star or a black hole." So does a supernova destroy a star, or can it leave a core? And was this a nova – as suggested by the mention of its being a white dwarf -- or a supernova? An attentive student must run through several sources to find the answers. An ordinary reader may shrug – astronomy is too difficult for me!
  • On page 85, there is a discussion of Galilean relativity. This is an unusual term, likely to confuse her readers as it certainly confused Hakim herself. She states that Galileo merely reported the visual difference between the appearance of a vertical path when a ball dropped from a mast and viewed by the moving ship's passengers -- and the curved appearance of the same ball's path as viewed from shore against a stationary background such as quiet clouds – my addition; there should be clouds in the picture – or something clearly stationary. Hakim says that "Albert Einstein, in the twentieth century, will help with the explaining." We don't need Einstein for this one; Newton works. A cloud will do it, and an artist who knows what he is illustrating. Einstein's topic was far more subtle.
  • Hakim reports (p. 289) that "Hydrogen molecules (H2 with only two protons and electrons) are small and light. Most other molecules are heavier." Well, if molecules are composed of two or more atoms, all other molecules are heavier; this is her definition in two places. But, without commenting on the discrepancy, she alternates this with a definition which allows for single atoms -- such as those of the noble gases and the metals of coinage -- to be considered molecules. This is very confusing, and one wonders what she herself intended to convey.
  • In discussing Avogadro's insight into gases, Hakim reports that: "His idea only makes sense if the particles in a gas are far apart, with space between them (which is the case – even for liquids and solids.)" No, no! This is only about gases. Adding the liquids and solids means Hakim didn't get the picture. Will her readers? (also p. 289)
  • Hakim says, "An ellipse is not just any old oval; it has a precise curve." It would be best to say nothing about ovals, which are wider at one end, like an egg, but which do have a "precise" mathematical definition. (While the two foci of an ellipse are points, an oval has a circle at one focus.) Comparing the mathematical and astronomical term "ellipse" with the colloquial (not mathematical) term oval is too bad. (p. 358) Besides, she discussed the drawing of ellipses on pages 129-131. Since this is a history of sorts, it would have made sense to mention in this drawing lesson that the conic section was from Apollonius of Perga in 200 B.C. and the pin drawing was James Clerk Maxwell's idea in 1845.
  • Hakim reports that metals "mostly have high melting and boiling points (except for mercury, which is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature) ." Yes, well, mercury has a very low melting point, but gallium melts in your hand, so that's a pretty low melting point too. (p. 296)

As I said, a range of errors of many types.

Her sense of history as a setting for the story of science is worse.

The first two paragraphs in the first chapter takes us right to the heart of the matter – the first one is about population growth leading to deforestation, starting in the Middle Ages. The next is a rather poorly considered piece on St. Joan of Arc, not a personality who needed to be included – rather carelessly -- in a history of science, merely to provide some color for the years before 1453, Hakim's starting date for this volume. As is often the case throughout this work, this loaded "setting" story is simply off-topic.

Continuing the topic of deforestation, we find, on pages 2-3, a full spread with images and text explaining how deforestation began in the Middle Ages, and continues with the destruction of the rainforest. "Big question: Will the forests continue to be threatened by population growth?"

This gratuitous tree politics with its eugenic bias raises all sorts of political and philosophical questions, not to mention that the very progress she lauds really depended on the plow because you can't do science until farming gets easy enough to leave time for other things. Anyway, a book in which the Big question is overpopulation is opposed to the Catholic attitude towards the miracle of human life. Big red flag right there on page 2, and it goes on.

Of course most of the history errors are the usual ones having to do with the stupid old middle ages, the foot-dragging Church, and the wonderful Greek and modern thinkers.

For example, Copernicus (p. 31) is about to make discoveries that "will challenge everyone's ideas about the heavens and the Earth," says Hakim, winding up to his sun-centered universe. But when we get there, we find (p. 38) that Aristarchus has been there. So now are we to suppose that Copernicus was the first guy to read Aristarchus since 200 B.C.? Nor is she correct in asserting that "the Aristotle/Ptolemy model has worked well enough for centuries." It was precisely because it didn't work well enough that Copernicus was asked to correct it. Of course it is only too well known that some people were irritated by the work of Copernicus, but by no means "everyone", for the Church which requested Copernicus' research set about using his work and had the new calendar in 40 years.

In philosophy, Hakim shows the colors of her consultants when she states (p. 19) that "The act of observing the [subatomic] particles changes their behavior." This is part of the thinking of many, but by no means all 20th century physicists, not of Einstein for example. Philosophically, it is called positivism; it is going out of favor, and it has arguably hobbled physics for half a century. In any case, it is not an established scientific fact, and it is opposed to Catholic philosophy, for it leads directly to the question whether anything can be known at all, as she puts it: "Is there really any certainty in science?"

Then, at the end of her book, Hakim raises the question why the western world has been the leader in scientific thought. Her answer, admittedly personal, is that we have the Greek heritage of freedom plus the Renaissance insight of tying mathematics to physics. Perhaps she does not even know that Father Stanley Jaki (20th century physicist and theologian with a specialization in the history of science) has argued for a very different answer – a conviction of order that only came with Christianity. This is not the place to argue with her, but only to say that she hasn't read the basic alternative arguments, (either Jaki or the more accessible Thomas Woods) on this topic and her answer is merely an uninformed and irritating opinion, oblivious of the Catholic contribution, and not seriously related to the actual history of science.

One last complaint would be hilarious if it were not meant seriously. On page 97, Hakim is talking about the end of our sun and wondering where we'll be when it goes: – "maybe in another solar system or another galaxy or another universe."

Hmmm. Another solar system is not such an easy matter.

Another galaxy? Clueless. As ignorant of the meaning of distance as Brahe was about the distance to the stars.

Another universe? Such words seemed to have a meaning when we thought other galaxies were other universes; now they are just noise. It's heaven or nothing, folks.

Perspective: 
Secular
Reviewed by: 
First reviewed: 
1-10-2008