Some of the greatest teachers I ever had were in science (my high school chemistry teacher, in particular, was phenomenal); they promoted not only learning the subject matter but also intellectual curiosity and evidence-based thinking as a matter of course. The flip side is that some of the worst teachers I ever had were also science teachers — my high school physics teacher, for example, was grossly unqualified to teach the subject (she didn’t even know basic calculus). More than any other basic subject, science is about the joy of exploration, testing, and figuring things out for oneself. To build scientific curricula around rote memorization (and bad teachers) rather than discovery, experimentation, and fundamental understanding is a travesty.
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