Shirley Dang
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
Amid the whir of an overhead projector, Concord High School biology teacher Ellen Fasman sketched out the long, chubby legs of an X-shaped chromosome with her erasable marker.
“What do you remember from seventh grade about mitosis?” she asked the class.
Her question on cell division met with blank stares. From underneath his baseball cap in the back of the room, sophomore Vincent Thomas muttered in confusion.
“Wait, I don’t get this,” Thomas said. “We learned this in seventh grade?”
Even in her college prep biology class, students come less and less prepared each year, Fasman said.
“They’re every bit as bright as they’ve ever been,” said Fasman, who has taught for 16 years. However, they increasingly come hampered by smaller vocabularies, lacking knowledge of basic cell biology and unable to deal with fractions, she said.
“Their math skills are rather poor,” Fasman said. “When we do the metric system at the beginning of the year, it’s a killer for them. When we get into genetics, sometimes it’s hard for them, understanding ratios.”
American students — particularly those in California — come up short in math and science.