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Florida Citizens for Science |
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Tom DeRosa has long dreamed of opening a “creation science museum.” Once a science teacher in the Broward County public school system, DeRosa found God in 1978 and, ever since, has been doing his best to undermine Darwin’s theory of evolution. A special sore point has been the “secular” science museums, “places of worship for those who deny the creator” and their dubious evolution displays.
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DeRosa’s dream finally becomes reality in May, when the Creation Museum and Science Resource Center will hold its grand opening.
The writer takes a sneak peek tour of the facility, which apparently isn’t high-tech or high quality. The woman in charge of creating the exhibits shows off the works in progress to the writer:
“On that wall,” she says, “you’ll be looking out of a cave onto the Ice Age world.” Then she points to the floor, where the painted tracks of some sort of dinosaur meander from display to display. “That little guy goes everywhere,” she says, laughing. Behind her is a large “dig pit” filled with sand and “fossils” for kids to dig up and photographs of animals interspersed with crosses and placards reading “designed for a purpose.”
“It’s educational as well as fun,” Rabolli says, and indeed, it does seem benign and sciency, like a kindergarten classroom. But then she leads the ‘Pipe [the author] into the passageway depicting Earth before the flood. Dominating the wall is a mural called “Job Beholding the Behemoth,” with Job sitting on a rock placidly watching a brontosaurus munch some greenery while zebras graze in the background.
Out of morbid curiosity, I did some googling to see what else would come up. Here’s the museum vision from Mr. DeRosa (from 1999, if the date on the page is correct):
Our museum is decorated with tropical plants giving a realistic impression of Florida-past a few thousand years ago during the great ice age. You and your family will have a real sense of what Florida must have looked like after the great flood as mentioned in Genesis. Come experience the true Biblical perspective of these creatures from a Creationist viewpoint.
Available for purchase is a great selection of books and videos proclaiming the Creation message.
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… we will have a museum that will consist of the following Sections (Halls): Dinosaurs, Florida and the Ice Age, Creatures of the Sea, Heavens, Biblical History and Human Expression. The exhibits built will be done in excellence and with scientific integrity. The displays will be attractive and interactive.
Also, I’ve posted a few times items mentioning DeRosa:
– Story about debate
– Two good letters
– Creationists say fossils back them up
Want Them To Learn? Add A Keyboard And Special Effects
ORLANDO - Today’s students take to keyboards more easily than to pencils and paper. Their brains seem to come with built-in Web search engines.
The challenge is directing their predisposition to learning instead of mere play.
If they play time-traveling scientists instead of monster-slaughtering dwarves and search for science facts instead of celebrity gossip, they’ll learn, say researchers who are exploring how students’ after-school media use affects their ways of learning in school.
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Dede and his researchers figured a realistic, three-dimensional role-playing game about something worth learning would increase students’ enthusiasm for school. So they created the River City Project, a game in which middle-schoolers explore a 19th century town suffering from a disease outbreak, using their science knowledge to solve the town’s problem.
Published results on the River City Project Web site show students using the simulation improved their biology knowledge by 35 percent. They also showed enthusiasm for the game, giving it rave reviews and even skipping school less often.
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“The price of textbooks is way out of line,” said Mark Bretl, marketing director of Kinetic Books, who was selling his company’s electronic physics textbook, or e-book, for high schools and colleges.
Schools pay between $24.95 and $49.95 per user per year for the electronic text. A typical high school or college physics book costs $120 to $200, Bretl said.
Students access the textbook much as they would a Web page. It uses animations to show concepts such as acceleration and velocity - the things physics teachers demonstrate in class. But in the electronic version, students can repeat the “experiments” and alter the settings to get a different view of physics in action.
Like many digital teaching tools, the physics text also offers interactive homework problems and quizzes, with hints and feedback.
Kids wage inspiring fight on muck
If young people don’t get it about the environment, about the threats and the need for action, the future is bleak.
That’s why it’s so exciting to see Betsy Henry’s science classes at Trafalgar Middle School in Cape Coral dramatically engaged in the fight to protect the Caloosahatchee River and its estuary.
These kids and others like them must be encouraged and listened to.
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It’s gratifying to see these young teens swarming energetically over such a serious topic, bringing to bear on it their native idealism and technological enthusiasm. They could hardly have picked a more important local issue, and their passion should inspire others not just to complain about agencies’ policies, but to change their own personal conduct to protect the environment.
It reminds us of the successful student-driven campaign 30 years ago to save the Six Mile Cypress Slough east of Fort Myers. Those high-schoolers even managed to persuade voters to tax themselves to save a swamp.
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Maybe the kids will inspire us.
D.J. Falk, 12, one of Betsy Henry’s seventh-graders, has been working with other students on the importance of freshwater marshes and wetlands in conserving and filtering water.
“I hope (the brochure) tells homeowners what is happening,” he said. “We should stop polluting the river and marshes and do something to help. Otherwise, the ocean and the Gulf will be all nasty.”
As Henry said, “Sometimes adults can catch a glimpse of a vision through children.”
Here are some letters to the editor excerpts for you to chew up and spit out.
The Discovery Institute recently produced a list of more than 400 scientists of varying faiths — or of no faith at all — including some from Princeton, MIT, and Cornell, who were skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.
If a theory as shaky as Darwin’s is a mandatory subject in the public schools, why shouldn’t public school teachers be allowed to inform their students that many respectable scientists believe something else, including intelligent design, is worthy of come consideration?
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Evolution, as taught in our classrooms, is not a proven theory. If it were, the scientists wouldn’t be looking for the missing link.
The Brevard County school district is on the money taking a big role in the PRISM Project, a 10-year initiative to propel Central Florida schools to leadership in math and science education.
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Employers today demand — and bring industries and dollars — to areas where schools excel at producing workers highly proficient in math, science and technical skills.
On the same day last week that PRISM leaders were meeting in Brevard, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin brought that reality home in Tallahassee.
There, he told state lawmakers to improve schools if they want to keep Florida’s share of the space industry, now that other states are ferociously pursuing new space businesses and jobs.
Curiosity drove her to become ‘Shark Lady’
SARASOTA - Killing time on a Saturday morning while her mother was at work, a grade-school girl wandered through an aquarium in Manhattan. She pressed her face into the glass and thought she had never seen anything so fascinating and mysterious as the sharks and other fish gliding through murky green water.
At 83, Eugenie Clark has not changed her mind. She is set to return this weekend from a research dive trip in the Solomon Islands, where was studying foot-long, eel-shaped convict fish. In January she came home to Sarasota with a newly discovered mollusk from Papua New Guinea that she calls “the blob.”
Few were encouraging young women to go into science when Clark grew up in the 1930s and ’40s. But she received a doctorate in zoology from New York University, became founding director of what is now the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, and taught marine science at the University of Maryland for more than 20 years.
She has hitched rides on the backs of whale sharks, dived to the depths in tiny submarines and learned to recognize the distinctive smell of coral spawning. She has written popular memoirs, a dozen National Geographic articles and numerous scientific papers. Her career earned her the nickname “the Shark Lady.”
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School campus a haven for owls
Science class was conducted outdoors at Pioneer Middle School recently, and John Maresca was ready to roll up his sleeves.
The seventh-grader was one of dozens of students helping to dig a butterfly garden at the Cooper City school at 5350 SW 90th Ave.
”We are taking the time and money to make something that animals can come to,” John said.
The garden was but one part of an environmental honor handed to the school on March 10. The campus was officially declared a certified schoolyard habitat by a representative of the National Wildlife Federation, a conservation group based in Reston, Va.
What drew the group is a pair of burrowing owls that have taken up residence in the school’s front yard. The habitat is just feet from the school’s driveway.
Scientist talks education at FSU
Nobel laureate warns U.S. being left behind
Americans have a dangerous lack of scientific literacy, Leon Lederman says, and if it doesn’t improve, the United States could wind up a Third World nation.
That was the forceful message the Nobel laureate delivered to 200 scientists, professors and students at Florida State on Thursday.
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Q: Why do you call the lack of U.S. scientific literacy “dangerous”?
A: It’s dangerous because most of our policymakers, our public intellectuals and the media who shape public opinion are ignorant about science. Yet this is a scientific age. Galloping technology is changing our lives. There are questions the public ought to be involved in - from genetic modification to the food we eat to glacial melting to our defense arsenal to cell phones - and they’re not. I’d be the last one to say “trust the scientists.” You need a popular consensus.
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Q: What needs to be done?
A: “We need more science education pre-K through about age 16. We need better teachers. We need teachers who are paid well. We need teachers who are inspired to be teachers. Teaching has lost its social status. You ask any parent what their children need and they say, “Better teachers.” But if you ask them if they want their children to be teachers, they say, “Oh, no, they can do better than that.”
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Q: Why do you object to teaching creationism?
A: We live in a rational world, which operates on scientific principles. Successful societies are scientific; the others are pre-scientific. Countries where there is constant poverty, terrorism, warfare and religious fundamentalism never do science. If (the effort to teach creationism) continues, we’ll have kids who don’t know biology, don’t know science, don’t know evolution, and we’ll be a Third World country.
Paramount Takes on Intelligent Design
According to Variety, the studio just hired Ronald Harwood to write a screenplay based on last year’s court decision ruling that a Pennsylvania school board didn’t have the right to force teachers to teach intelligent design. (Interestingly, the film’s producer was thinking “movie” from the very start, so much so that she actually sent someone to watch and take notes on the trial - does that show clever foresight or a disturbing tendency to turn every major news story into tomorrow’s blockbuster? Both?) In Harwood’s eyes, his benchmark is Inherit the Wind the play and film that told the story of the famous Scopes trial, which allowed evolution into (Tennessee) classrooms in the first place. “Our aspiration is to make a film that powerful…We have a highly emotional case that divided a town right down the middle, and a judge whose summary was spectacular.”
Those darn liberal, evil Hollywood types! Who should they cast in the Intelligent Design advocates’ roles?
No, this is not about me. 
If only it was, though.
The Science Olympiad teams at the Gulf Breeze middle and high schools aren’t fooling around as they prepare to win another state championship on April 1.
While others might be relaxing during spring break, these students are practicing for the Florida State Science Olympiad in Orlando.
Both schools took first place in their divisions last year. The middle school has won seven consecutive state titles. The high school has won five titles, the past three consecutively.
“The success has been because of hard work,” said Sharon Schaeffner, a parent-coach for the middle school team. “We set high expectations for our kids, and the kids meet those expectations.”
Setting high expectation … something we need a lot more of!
Florida Citizens for Science was under a time crunch to get a letter out to the Brevard County school board about science textbook selections. The letter could have benefitted from another round or two of rewrites, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do to get the letter out in time.
There are five letters to the editor here. As can be expected, some are good and some are wide of the mark. Here are a couple of excerpts from the bad ones:
To teach the theory of evolution as fact, and not even address the possibility of intelligent design or other theories, is another attempt by the liberals in the media to impose their agenda on the American people and our children.
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The short two-paragraph reference to life forming under a guiding intelligence only acknowledged the fact that many cultures and world religions hold this belief to be true.
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Having these few paragraphs included in the text is not pushing religion on any student studying science.
It is an introduction to a widely held theory that can then be further discussed in social-study classrooms teaching world religions, cultures and philosophies.
Each of those excerpts can be slapped down by pointing out one glaring problem. From a previous post here:
But the issue has crossed into the district, because publishers like Holt have changed textbooks over the years while under pressure from such groups as the Discovery Institute.
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Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, a nonprofit agency that has monitored the Texas textbook adoption process for a decade, said Holt kowtowed to conservatives with its Florida biology book.
And here’s a post I compiled a while ago that has a lot of real good information about the whole textbook deal.
A South Florida Sun-Sentinel review of both textbook finalists — Glencoe’s book and Holt’s Holt Biology — found that the publishers had edited explanations of Darwin’s evolution theory under pressure from Christian conservatives.
The publisher caved in to pressure! This is not some “innocuous” cultural reference. This is not a nod of acknowledgement for some new scientific theory bursting onto the scene. Those two paragraphs were “wedged” in there by a group with an agenda. It’s not the liberals trying to impose anything; it’s just the opposite!
I’m wishing that mentioning this fact about the textbook’s history had made it into our letter to the school board. Maybe next time …
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