Greg Laden's Blog

Good morning! I have important news, and COOKIES!

First, the cookies:

These are serious cookies. These are Ana cookies. If you want one, you better hurry, because they are NOT going to last long.

Now on to the important news: Melanie Reap has dropped something in my inbox indicating that the Rochester meeting to discuss the science standards went pretty well, and that this bit about biology being part of Middle School and not High School is not real. We are to read the standards thusly: If you see a "9" read it as "9-12." The coding system they used requires a single number in that place.

Now, I know you are going to think I'm crazy, but I've been dealing with creationists since Job was young and it simply is not the case that we can let these little things slide by. If the final version of the standards MEANS 9-12, they absolutely need to SAY 9-12. The fact that the draft standards went out with this strange formatting does not mean with certainty that a simple goof was made. This is how government agencies as well as corporations float ideas. Honestly. You put it out there in such a way that it can be retracted as an error later, but that lets you see what kind of reaction you are going to get. So we have to keep an eye on this.

Apparently there were no creationists in Rochester and virtually no talk of Evolution.

The main concern seems to be the difference between the distribution of subjects across grades in relation to licensure. That always happens, of course, and we are still reeling from the effects of the (utterly appropriate, in my view) elevation of Earth Science to a requirement.

Thursday night is the big meeting, of course. Check here for more details and discussions.

OK, back to the cookies. ... NOM NOM NOM ...