When you read the NGSS, it’s like a breath of fresh air. They are steeped in the fundamental tenets of science and have certainly shifted the emphasis away from straight information transfer. They absolutely give space and freedom to do science education right from a variety of angles, and to accompany students in their own authentic search for meaning and understanding within the broad glory of the universe, with your classroom as primary portal. What I see and hear happening in far too many schools, though, is not that.

It seems an unavoidable reality that sets of standards are overloaded. It just must be so friggin’ tempting for the authors to put every morsel of good stuff in there, with the result that even if students ignored the rest of the disciplines and learned just science each year, there still would likely not be enough space to really teach these standards in completeness.

So in many schools today teachers are struggling to “get through” the NGSS. Ouch. Here in Timor-Leste the situation is the same. They call it “chasing the curriculum.” And when you’re just getting through something, it can’t be made meaningful. What’s more, when time is short, the pivotal and gritty process of construction of meaning through personal investigation is the first to be chucked out the window in favor of a list of important-sounding factoids to memorize.

I laid out a strategy for dealing with standards in the first Tinkering book. I suggest that teachers plan first to teach great hands-on activities that they know to be popular and effective and locally relevant, and then bend over backward to make the links to the standards, at whatever grade level. Then tell your boss you’re “teaching to the standards”! In the following table, I’ve given possible links to the three dimensions of the NGSS; there may be others. Several activities integrate bio, chem, and physics all at once—can’t go wrong. The math section is a bit weak on connections; check your math standards!