Bill Hilton writes: > Having taught biology (and ecology) at traditional high schools and > also at a residential gifted and talented high school, I'm astonished > by Malcolm's questioning the teaching of ecology at that level. It's > an entirely appropriate time to introduce ALL students to the basics > of ecology, and junior high would be even better. > > The problem with most high school biology courses these days is they > are based primarily on a pre-med approach to the subject matter. > Teachers are pretty good at getting across things like cell biology, > Punnett squares, and photosynthesis, but ecology (and evolution and > botany and zoology, etc.) are often in chapters at the back of the > text that are never reached before the course ends.
I've never taught high school, indeed by chance I've never even taught an undergraduate class in biology, but we have several users of our software that do. One of our users, who does have a PhD in mammalogy, who is a former student and who does teach high school zoology, ecology and human biology at a well-regarded Catholic girls' academy, uses Holt, Rinehart & Winston's "Modern Biology." I believe that he is quite satisfied with the book. I've looked at the book in some detail and I too think that it's quite excellent. More importantly, it's not a college textbook. It's designed for an introductory year of biology at the high school level and touches on all aspects of biology, including ecology, evolution and the concepts of organization at multiple levels. By chance, because of his efforts, I have Chapter 1 of the book loaded on one of our servers. Chapter 1 outlines the material to come in the remainder of the text. HR&W supplies additional supplements with the book, including an audio rendering of the text and PDFs of each of its pages. He combined the audio and PDF images using our software. Because he showed me what he was doing, I happen to have Chapter 1 available on-line here: http://67.41.4.238/books/modernbiology/chapter1/chp1.qcshow He did this for the entire book and the book's loaded on his internal server so that it's available to his students, but it's not accessible from the outside. While the material is copyrighted, I consider showing you this chapter a potent advertisement for HR&W's book, which I obviously have no financial interest otherwise. To view the chapter, you will need to download and install our (Windows-only) player: http://www.aics-research.com/qcshow/playerhome.html Quick instructions on using the player occur just below the downloading instructions. Wirt Atmar
