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“ Peer into Jonathan Bergmann or Aaron Sams’s classes and you will see something exciting happening. What you will observe are students taking responsibility for their own learning. Students conduct experiments, watch video podcasts, work on assignments, interact with the class Moodle site, have one-on-one discussions with their teacher, and get tutored by their peers and cadet teachers. This is mastery learning at work. Students work at their own pace through science curriculum. When they complete a unit they must demonstrate that they have learned the content by taking an exit assessment that includes both a lab and a written component. If students score less than 85% on these exit assessments, they must go back and re-learn those concepts they missed and retake the exam. Grades are no longer determined by a percentage but rather how much content they have mastered. ”

“ Unfortunately, the story of the apple is almost certainly false; Voltaire probably made it up. Even if Newton started thinking about gravity in 1666, it took him years of painstaking work before he understood it. He filled entire vellum notebooks with his scribbles and spent weeks recording the exact movements of a pendulum. (It made, on average, 1,512 ticks per hour.) The discovery of gravity, in other words, wasn’t a flash of insight - it required decades of effort, which is one of the reasons Newton didn’t publish his theory until 1687, in the “Principia. ”

“ Science isn’t about facts that you learn in school, it’s a habit of mind, an approach to dealing with the world. The most important thing in science isn’t an organism you talked about in Mr. Wiley’s biology class, or a reaction from Mr. Mannix’s chemistry class, or a formula from Mr. Peck’s physics class. The most important thing in science is the moment when somebody looks at the world and says “Huh. I wonder why that happened? ”

“ Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will. ”