(5/2004) - It’s a very old question as to what is the appropriate order of teaching science disciplines. As recently as the late 19^th century, as science became part of the public school curriculum, biology lay outside of the standard sequence of courses. A basic science education was an education in the physical sciences. Biology entered the curriculum as an additional science class, generally following whatever physical science was offered, and as a consequence it reached fewer students than the physical science classes did.

In the early 20^th century, the concept that biology was essential gained acceptance and there was a need to move it up to an earlier position in the science sequence to make it available to more students. By this time, the current idea that physical science classes, particularly physics, should be deferred until students had reached a certain level of mathematical proficiency had taken hold, at least in the United States. Biology at that time was taught as a descriptive science, organized through the categorization of organisms, rather than from the perspective of fundamental principles. As such, it was not unreasonable to teach biology before physics or chemistry.

With time, high school science evolved to a required biology course with physics and chemistry becoming options. There was a significant shift in relative enrollments with many more high school students completing a biology course than a physics course, the opposite of what had been true only a generation or so earlier.

Recently, the biology curriculum has changed significantly. By the mid-20th century, it was apparent that understanding biology meant understanding the workings of cells and the chemistry within them. Naming and organizing critters into related groups were no longer enough. This place greater conceptual demands on students. Students were expected to know something of molecular chemistry and energy processes before they could grapple successfully with the complexities of biological mechanisms. Biology teachers found it increasingly difficult to prepare students, with limited backgrounds in the physical sciences, to obtain a level adequate to understand what the curriculum expected them to learn. Because of this development, physics and chemistry became more important as prerequisites for biology.

The push to invert the science curriculum to follow a conceptually logical path was led largely by physicists. Chief among these was Leon Lederman, the director of Fermilab. The idea was a good one - the real value of the physics first approach would be to improve learning in all sciences.

An idea occurred to me: why not teach physics first in the eighth grade? We had to work out problems with integrating current students in the new sequence and with students transferring in after eighth grade. And while the sequence allows our students to take AP science courses in the junior and senior years, we also saw a need to construct choices for those who wanted more science, but not at that level. Science electives have been introduced to address that problem.

The frequently expressed objection is that younger students are not prepared in mathematics to profit from a physics course. On the face of it, this is a strange objection. Physics, as we now think of it, dates from the 17^th century. From Newton on, it has been obvious that, as a mathematical science, physics is completely dependent on calculus. To get around this inconvenient truth, high school physics had evolved into an extension of algebra. Memorize the formulas, plug in the numbers, and do the math. It isn’t surprising that students everywhere tend to use the word "formula," while physicists use the word "equation" to describe the same thing. The former emphasizes a procedure to be performed, while the later emphasizes a relationship that nature has revealed to us.

New texts have sought to teach physics at the conceptual level phenomena with the language tools that students already have physics more rewarding to teach and more accessible to students. Physics taught this way introduces algebra after the ideas are established and actually helps students learn algebra by giving it something useful to do.

The Allendale Columbia student takes what is essentially an earth science course in sixth grade, a life science course in seventh grade, and a conceptual physics course in eighth grade. We do not track in middle school through tenth grade; all students take all science courses. Successful completion of the eighth grade physics course gives a student one year’s credit toward completion of the Upper School three lab science course requirement. Chemistry is taught in ninth grade, biology in tenth grade, and AP courses , biology and two courses in physics - are offered by recommendation in grades eleven and twelve

For the student who wants less-intensive science offerings, a number of electives are available. Astronomy, Earth History, Animal Behavior, and Comparative Anatomy have been offered to date, but we expect science offerings to continue to expand and develop. A student transferring here in ninth grade will have to pick up physics later. If someone transfers in tenth grade, we will usually give a science credit for any ninth grade science class. Often this is biology; rarely is it chemistry, so tenth grade transfers are usually placed in chemistry as well.

We began our "Physics First" curriculum in the fall of 1999, so we have now seen the first group of students to pass through the entire sequence. It’s clear that students are much better prepared for biology having taken physics first, and that’s very important. However, while total science enrollment has remained steady, one trend which is notable is that of specialization. Our AP science enrollment is up, largely because more students are taking more than one AP science class, but the number of eleventh and twelfth graders not enrolled in any science class for any given semester is also up. As we added science electives, we also added electives in mathematics, English, and art. We’re seeing students who take lots of science courses and students who take lots of arts courses, but not as many students who take some of each.