Mate you really need to put the thesaurus away. Who talks like that seriously?
Thanks Snowman.
Camspeed ,
I talk like that.
Please accept my apology if you found it off-putting. I accept that good communication is about getting the message across, which I failed to do. I shall ensure I use plainer English which shall hopefully solve this issue. OK?
Glad to see you clarified your comments related to the Government. Occasionally governments actually do bite the bullet and do the right thing. The Hawk government banning further uranium mining is just such an example. Shame it didn’t last (thanks to ‘Little Johnny Howard’).
I am also sceptical of the Carbon Tax. If they are serious it
all should go to reafforestation - planting trees where they used to be but have been cut down; regenerating ecologically degraded areas - doing what is necessary to re-establish plants native to the area so as to provide places for the animals native to the area to live and interact as they would have before European settlement; and the like.
I am also pleased to see that I was wrong with my original assessment of your first post. Glad to see you now contributing something.
Blue
Apologies that this so late. I have been distracted of late…
…. to those people that think that everyone who believes that man has accelerated the rate of global warming, just because that is what they were taught in school/their whole life, ie. due to the 'greenhouse' effect.. you are the most ignorant of all.. question what has been 'taught' to you..
... also ponder this.. the biggest greenhouse gas IS NOT CO[SUB]2[/SUB], its humble old H[SUB]2[/SUB]0..
You appear to have a problem with teachers or teaching methodology. Do you have a problem with the greenhouse effect as well?
Teachers train to understand how kids learn and when they are ready for what. When they come into high school, kids are at Piaget’s concrete phase and a majority will be at the abstract phase by the time they finish schooling. So early science teaching involves a lot of “facts” that students are asked to accept. These provide a basis for concept development in the future. Usually there will be an array of “cook book” experiments or demonstrations to illustrate and reinforce what is being taught as well as discussion of common phenomena that are explained by these.
At the same time students also learn about the methodology of science through having to design investigations to answer simple questions. Part of this exercise will be to critically evaluate their design. Over time, the complexity and sophistication of these investigations and their corresponding analyses, increases. This problem based learning is one way in which critical thinking skills are encouraged. In senior courses, exercises involving source materials are incorporated allow much greater depth of research and analysis and further developing critical thinking skills. The limitations here are often due to the amount of content teachers are expected to get through and the reality of content based examinations as a measure of accountability.
I need to emphasis here that the phrase “because the teacher told me” should carry some weight. Secondary teachers will have spent several years studying at university level about the things they teach in a classroom. There are god and bad in all professions and you can be unlucky. However, those teachers who do not measure up tend to cope it from all their classes (let alone admin) and, as generalisation, don’t last too long in the system.
Teachers didn’t invent the greenhouse effect. It came from people who were working in all sorts of specialised fields within the broader categories of biology, chemistry, geography, geology, geophysics and physics. These days the CSIRO even has a category called “climate scientist” – usually a multi-disciplinary area rather than a simple offshoot of meteorology. The teacher and the textbooks are simply a conduit for this information.
You do not need an enquiring mind to say “Why?”, just a set of active vocal cords. Questions should be purposeful and appropriate. Asking, for example, why is a computer able to word process? This is not answerable without an extensive understanding of electronics, binary and memory, computer compilers and programming. Yet it is readily demonstrable. Questions should be tailored to address specific issues you perceive in the information provided, not just a general, all encompassing why or how. That means you have to have thought critically about it first.
Blue