Episode 9: Science education starts with science concepts
In this episode, we’re talking about why a conceptual science focus can make a huge difference in your homeschool science curriculum.
[00:00:01] Amy: Hi, and welcome to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy, brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life. I’m Amy.
[00:00:09] Blair: And I’m Blair. And we’re talking about a topic that is near and dear to Amy’s and my heart, and it really came about because of a lot of conversations that I’ve been getting tagged into in SEA, and I showed up at the last recording, and I was still talking about it, and Amy thought this would be a great episode to help you as you choose science for your late middle schooler and high school age students.
Children are — homeschooling them — there’s two sort of camps that people will look at. They’ll look at the science that is very conceptual, and they’ll look at science that is pretty standard, the similar approach to what’s used in public schools, only with more experiments. They’re very strongly attached to that. There’s some problems with getting super attached to that for all the rest of the kids Do you want to define those a bit, Amy, the two?
[00:01:07] Amy: So Blair and I actually even had a hard time coming up with what to call these two schools of science, but on one side you have what I guess we could call science for non science majors, which lets you focus on the concepts, the basic principles of science. How does science work? What are the key terms? What are the processes? What is the big picture thinking around this?
And then there is what I think we could call science for science majors. Which we started out calling highly academic science, and I think that is because it is science that steers people towards academic science. And this ends up being applied math for physical sciences. And for biological science, it ends up being really specific biochemical engineering, which most people, the average everyday person, including me, I have to say, though I have a physics degree, are never going to use in real life. I don’t do biochemistry every week, Blair.
[00:02:14] Blair: Or take engineering out, and put processes in there as well. I can remember looking at a high school biology textbook, and when they started talking about the different, evolutionary, like phylogenetic, and how you classify organisms, they went to the molecular level — great, but then kids were actually asked to identify some of the molecules. I was like, this is ridiculous.
I would have done a simpler treatment when I was teaching human heredity in college, just because I would have known I would have lost most of my students. It’s that type of science.
Get into our middle school, the SEA middle school/high school group, and you will see people arguing in favor of this sort of treatment. Ultra rigorous science, and we’re not saying that’s not worth understanding. Every physical science course does not need to be treated like an applied math class, which is done. It just drives me nuts. And there are other scientists that agree with me because I’ve talked to them, and that every student majoring in biology is going into the biotech industry — that focus leaves a lot of kids without the basic understanding of the natural and physical world.
[00:03:34] Amy: Yeah, because it’s like it takes all these scientific ideas and it puts them into a funnel, and then the funnel only has room to drip out problems to be solved, like very specific math problems biology problems, and so the science becomes solving for a series of solutions instead of investigating, inquiring, engaging, which are honestly the fun parts of science.
[00:04:02] Blair: Okay, so I’m going to tell everyone a secret. Amy knows this secret, but it’s not something I talk about a lot. I don’t love physics. My physics classes were my least favorite science classes. I had the top grade in every physics class, college course I took — how I did I wouldn’t do it today, but on tests, I figured out that if you just looked at the unit. So if you look into a Newton and you break it down by units, you know exactly how you need to set up the problem to solve for it. If you can get an A plus in physics in college by using math skills. I think that’s a problem.
[00:04:50] Amy: I think that people who don’t like physics got taught math. They didn’t get taught physics. They were sitting there solving math problems == because I will be honest. I have a degree in physics, but I did not love physics in high school because it was all math. I just sat there and worked math problems over and over again. And when I got to college and my physics professor was like no, but what if, I was like, Oh! And it was amazing.
[00:05:18] Blair: So speaking of math, I went looking for the statistics. So we could share with you why this is so important. The source of these statistics was a report from pewresearch.org. And they published it two years ago on April 12 of 2022.
The number of high school graduates is — these are all U.S.-centric — the number of high school graduates who go to college, 66 percent. That means that 34 percent of kids, if they did not get conceptual science, do not have a firm understanding of how the natural and physical world works. Of the Americans who do go to college, half of them, or it’s not half —37. 9 percent of Americans — have bachelor degrees. So 30 percent of the Americans who go to college don’t end up with a degree. That is so all of those Americans would have been better served with a conceptual science class, if you ask me. Business is the most commonly held bachelor’s degree, followed by health professions. Now, those you might be thinking doctor, but really, I’ve taught chemistry. Most of the people in your class are nurses, vets, EMTs, who are in a college chemistry class. And many of them are really mis-served by the way chemistry is taught as an applied math class because they could actually use some of the more foundational conceptual principles.
The least common bachelor degrees in 2019 to 2020, military technologies and applied sciences.
[00:07:11] Amy: I mean, I think that is that is where we run into the problem, right? Because for this very small handful of kids who know that they want to pursue a very specific applied science, this can be helpful, but even for those kids — like me in my physics class, right? My high school physics class. If you can balance all the chemical equations in the world, but you don’t understand how electrons transfer between atoms, you don’t really understand chemistry.
[00:07:46] Blair: I will say that once you, if you major in these sciences — I have a bachelor’s in biology and a bachelor’s in chemistry and a master’s in chemistry. Once you get past the freshman level courses in college, it becomes more conceptual. And every once in a while you get a professor who is conceptual from the very beginning. I actually have a chemistry degree. I was inspired to get a chemistry degree one quarter when I was one quarter shy of having my bio degree by a professor I had in organic chemistry. It was just —He really turned me on to the — I became fascinated with the behavior of electrons, this energy particle nexus. It’s just absolutely fascinating. It sounds crazy, but when I put a leaf, when I hold a leaf between my fingers, I find it absolutely fascinating that despite the structure of atoms and these electrons being outside of the nucleus that the leaf doesn’t become part finger and your fingers don’t become part leaf. I just find it fascinating.
[00:09:03] Amy: Because it is fascinating and that is when we fall in love with science. That’s what we fall in love with. Not many people fall in love with an equation for, I don’t know, the redshift, right? Nobody is Ooh, the redshift, doing some math, that changes my life. But people fall in love with the idea of the paradoxes of relativity. That’s exciting and interesting. And then when you’re in love, the math, the problems that you’re solving, are like the language of that love, where you’re like fine tuning something that you’re already excited about. But if you start with, I think, that very narrow, specific kind of stuff, I think you lose people who could very well fall in love with science.
[00:09:50] Blair: Again we are not saying that type of science course does not have a solid place and an important reason for existing We are really advocating for people to be thinking about where their child is going to go, because science is really important to learn. Think climate change, think your own personal health. Think just how the beauty of the natural and physical world and how it’s working. That is incredibly important to understand. It’s incredibly useful. And the most commonly held degree, if you have a child that wants to go into nursing or that wants to become a vet, trust me, as a chemistry professor in college, your children would be much better served with a conceptual class, and all the kids in the class that are just taking it because you have to as a part of a liberal arts education would be much better served with a conceptual class
[00:10:58] Amy: Well, and Blair knows that I talk about this all the time, but one of the things that drives me crazy about the way that we teach science, especially in high school, is that we teach kids to look for answers instead of asking questions.
And that makes it seem like science is this finished thing. It’s done, it’s in a neat package, you go through the package, you find the answers, you put it away, you never have to use it again. But science is a process, and it is happening all the time. Right now, Blair is always — Blair is such a good friend, she’s always sending me cool articles about scientific discoveries. And you’re just like, they’re mind blowing! It’s like everything that we know about this tiny little slice of science is about to change because of one discovery. It’s great.
And so science is not some cold, static, finished and done thing. It is this living, changing, exciting process that you and your kid can be a part of when you homeschool science.
[00:12:01] Blair: As Amy knows, because we were talking about before, when we got on, I fell down a rabbit hole of how changing climates has affected human evolution, homo evolution, including homo sapiens, and the migrations of humans, and one of the things that I find fascinating, and I think many of you will as well, is that, during cold periods you have lots of glaciers, lots of ice sheets, and water gets taken from the ocean, and the level of the water of oceans drop. The migrations to Australia and to the Polynesian islands, they happened during these cold periods where there was less ocean to navigate.
[00:12:52] Amy: That is the thing is that this is the stuff that you get excited about and you talk about, and you talk about while you’re driving your child to their guitar lessons and their skate rallies and all of the places that you take your children. These are the things that you talk about at the dinner table.
These are the things that, I’m just going to say it, that make you feel like a good homeschool parent, because you’re having these big conversations about big ideas and it feels like your kid is connecting with the subject in a meaningful way — because they are because just like Blair, they’re like, this is so interesting.
And if you’re not ever running into those things that are so interesting, I feel like you’re missing out on a big part of what science actually is and not just what classroom science is, right? Because classroom science, you have a poster on the wall and a multiple choice test and a sharp pencil and you’re doing it. You’re solving the problem, right?
Theoretical science, you’re like, whoa does that mean what about this? And I think that is just the coolest part of science. Not to say that being able to solve the problems doesn’t matter.
[00:14:05] Blair: It does. And so what we’re really we’re really getting back to is something that Amy and I believe very strongly, no curriculum, no one curriculum is right for everybody. No one approach is right for everybody. And I think that the issue with science is we tend to treat it like a mono approach. Once kids get into high school, there’s a real mono approach. And I don’t even know that we do that with math anymore. I think it might be the only course of study, the only discipline that we still do that with.
[00:14:44] Amy: I think definitely there’s some of it in math, though it’s probably better in math than in high school sciences. I do. I think that high school science teachers lean really heavily into what I would call textbook science, where you read a chapter and you solve a set of problems, you answer a set of questions, right?
You answer a set of questions and then you move on to the next chapter. And the next set of questions, and you might do an experiment here or there, or watch an experiment on YouTube, but you’re not really engaging with any ideas.
[00:15:21] Blair: I just read The Knowledge Gap last month, and she actually talks about science, and I have volunteered as a judge at several science fairs. when I do that, I talk to a lot of high school science teachers. And there’s a real problem for high school science teachers, because they’re not teaching, The Knowledge Gap discusses it, it’s a well known phenomenon. They’re not doing a good job of teaching science until kids get to high school, and all of a sudden these high school teachers have these freshmen that — there’s all these metrics and standards and topical areas that they need to get kids through by the end of the year, and you will have some kids who have solid science foundation, but most of the kids in the class don’t.
And anytime you have a lot of standards that have to be met and you’ve got a big range in the knowledge base of kids, you’re going to have teachers go to —they’ve just got to stuff these facts in. When my son was in high school, he’s always had a lot of friends that went to public schools near where we lived, and I ended up tutoring three kids through chemistry and one of them through biology, and in high school, and that is where I really started taking a hard look at how science was being approached. And then as a teacher in California at the community college level in sciences, you get a lot of people in your science classes that don’t know science.
[00:17:04] Amy: And so this is why I think that we cannot overstate the importance of making sure that even your STEMiest kid understands conceptual science, understands the way that systems work. So I would say, when you have a middle schooler and you’re trying to figure out what should we do for middle school science?
What I would say is think about what would be the most helpful knowledge for your kid to go to high school with. If you’re teaching chemistry, general understanding of the periodic table and the parts of an atom is gonna serve you really well in high school chemistry. Even if you don’t get to anything else.
Understanding those things, how they work, having questions about them. That’s going to point you towards high school chemistry and biology. You’ve got to know the parts of a cell and classification. How do you classify living things? Really think about the fundamental ideas that kids need to know for high school science.
And then you don’t worry so much about the formulas they need to know because they can learn those. You can always learn the formulas. The ideas are what help the formulas make sense. Do you think that’s fair, Blair?
[00:18:19] Blair: I think that’s really fair. In fact, I wrote some notes here. So what I would, so if you’ve got a STEM kid, conceptual in middle school, and then go to a traditional approach in high school, but based on the statistics, most of you have children who are not going to be science majors. For those students, a conceptual course in middle school and a conceptual course in high school, where you’re building on the foundational principles. And in high school. whether you like labs or not, and whether your kids like labs or not, what colleges really want to see are lab sciences. And from my own experience and from what I’ve heard from many other homeschoolers whose kids have gotten into very good colleges, the labs are what the colleges are going to look at. They want to know what your kids did for lab science.
[00:19:19] Amy: Absolutely. I think, too, it can feel it can feel intimidating — how do I teach conceptual science if I’m not a scientist, right?
It’s very easy for Blair to talk about, teaching conceptual biology, evolutionary biology, because she has a degree in evolutionary biology. But that is where great science literature comes in, and I’m thinking about two kinds of great science literature here. One is nonfiction books, like The Mind of the Raven, like The Disappearing Spoon. You read these books with your kids, you get excited about the ideas, you talk about the ideas. These books are all about the ideas.
And the other thing that I think is really fun, and I think, Blair, I think you talk a lot about this when you talk about homeschooling high school science, is to look at the questions that people are asking in scientific journals, like what’s getting published? And what’s the question behind it, right? What’s the big idea? Because it’s really fascinating the work that people are doing on the ground that we can see reported in scientific journals. And yeah, the journal article is probably going to have a lot of like math and formulas and specific discrete little containers of information. But the big question that they’re asking, that is fascinating. Don’t discount scientific literature that’s being published in journals because you think it’s too complicated because the questions are awesome.
[00:20:48] Blair: We are really advocating for people to make sure that kids are getting the concepts In both high school and middle school.
[00:21:02] Amy: Yeah, because if you’re not, if your kid is not enjoying what they’re learning, I feel like as homeschoolers, that is the thing that we can pick. We can, we get, science is fun and cool and interesting. And if it’s not feeling that way, I think it’s really helpful to look at why it’s not.
All right. And to try to bring some of that excitement and energy back. I think so often science and math are the two subjects, I think, where we’re just like trying to check the box and move on to the next thing. And neither of those subjects is boring. They’re both full of cool questions and things that you can experience.
And so I think that we just, we really need to like, make sure that when we’re doing science, we’re not just checking off a long list of things and being bored, because that’s not science that our kids are going to remember. That’s not going to serve them well in the next stages of their learning life either.
[00:22:06] Blair: I like that you mentioned the literature, Amy, both nonfiction and fiction. You did mention fiction, didn’t you?
[00:22:14] Amy: If I didn’t, I should have, because there is great science ha, science fiction, which is different from science-fiction.
[00:22:21] Blair: I love that. I can’t think of the name of the book that won the Pulitzer a year or two ago. And it is science, fictionalized science. The Understory.
[00:22:32] Amy: Yes, The Understory. That is an amazing book. And also fiction like The Martian. Oh yeah. It’s just so captivating and interesting that you want to go find out like is that true?
Does that, would that really work? Could you really live on Mars for that long? Could you grow potatoes there? And I feel like things like that really inspire us to want to learn more about subjects.
[00:23:01] Blair: The Martian is a fantastic example, and the author followed it up with another book that was also really interesting. Have you read it?
[00:23:10] Amy: Is it Hail Mary?
[00:23:12] Blair: Yes.
[00:23:13] Amy: Yes.
[00:23:14] Blair: So interesting. What would happen if you were traveling the universe and you met someone and language was a real problem, and the conditions that the two different organisms had evolved in were so different that you couldn’t be in the room together without all sorts of contractions. It’s absolutely fascinating.
[00:23:35] Amy: I mean, books like — I’m going to just shout out The Space Between Worlds, which is such a, it’s an amazing book. It is about parallel universes. But what’s interesting about it is that people can only travel to parallel universes where they don’t have a living counterpart.
So marginalized people from communities where you’re more likely to die in childhood, or die because you can’t get healthcare, or die because of violence, are better able to travel between worlds because there are fewer iterations of them. Which is a fascinating look at all kinds of scientific ideas.
Yeah, don’t discount fiction.
[00:24:19] Blair: Amy comes back to something that I think is really important, and it is one of her points where she’s talking about people dying in childbirth. Why should we care about, not people dying in childbirth, not that. But why should we care about science?
If you do not care about your children learning it for any other reason, then it should be because it helps us understand health issues. Issues about health for ourselves, for other people, because the solutions to more equitable birth rates in all communities. That’s science. That’s where those answers are going to be found. The math is important, but it can’t be the centerpiece.
[00:25:10] Amy: We live in the world, and so understanding the world that we live in and our space in it, that is maybe it’s a little bit dramatic to say, but I feel like that is a fundamental part of what it means to be a human is to be a part of this world, and so understanding this world is really important.
[00:25:29] Blair: You know what? I just realized that I’ve never actually thought before. So scientific models, when you are taking a chemistry class or a physics class that is basically an applied math class, they are distilling every single important concept down to a math model. Not to a more conceptual model, and that more than anything is what we’re taking issue with. And in biology, it is this hyper focus on the molecular mechanism that is driving biological functions.
The processes are important, but it’s also important that we are able to pull back and see the beauty and actually understand the reasons for even learning this. I think a lot of kids get out of high school science and feel like they wasted their time.
[00:26:21] Amy: Yeah, because it is it is like asking kids to memorize all the elements on the periodic table instead of teaching them how to understand how the periodic table works, why it’s cool, what its crazy patterns are. I would much rather have a kid not know what element number 37 is, but understand, the way that the periodic table trends toward this or that, than to have a kid who can name every single element but doesn’t understand how the periodic table works.
[00:26:52] Blair: Okay, periodic trends are seriously interesting. All right, have we, do we have anything more to add to this?
[00:27:03] Amy: I think just don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you have to be a scientist to teach scientific concepts. If you’re doing a curriculum with your kid, and it feels like you are doing — I mean I wouldn’t say busy work, right? If it feels like more busy work than thinking, maybe it’s time to shake things up a little bit. You do not have to be a scientist to make that call.
[00:27:26] Blair: It just makes me really sad because I think a lot of the problems that we’re dealing with right now that people aren’t learning more conceptual science because I’ve talked about the importance of critical thinking and how definitely in a critical thinking crisis right now, but there’s a science crisis going on as well.
The whole anti vax situation is spurred by people not having solid foundation in science. The lack of agency around working toward solutions that make sense for climate crisis. Just all the doubting of science. I really think that science is partly to blame, and I think a big part of it is the way we teach science.
Again, we’re not talking about the small section of really STEMy kids who will go on to upper division science in college and will get this. We’re talking about all of the other people who that’s not the situation for and for them to never get a good conceptual solid basis in science. We are exacerbating the issues around solving some of these issues, understanding a lot of these issues. As a science educator, it’s frustrating.
[00:28:54] Amy: We make kids, I think that you’ve said this a few other times, we’ve talked about science, and it really, has stayed with me. We make kids vulnerable to these ridiculous conspiracy theories because they don’t understand the problems with the arguments. They don’t understand the fallacies because they don’t understand the scientific principles involved. And for no other reason than that, we should be wanting to instill our kids with a basic understanding of science and how science works.
So that they can confidently say, Oh, you know what? Pretty sure the Earth is not flat. You have a nice day.
[00:29:29] Blair: I wrote The Science of Climate Change. I call it my protest book. So when we elected a denier, I said, this is so ridiculous because the science of climate change is not a complicated science. It is not complicated at all. There is this chemical reaction, this combustion reaction, you burn stuff, carbon dioxide, methane, some other things come off of it. They trap, very effectively, trap and transfer radiation, and it’s warming the planet and hey, 71 percent of the planets covered in water. What happens when you warm water? It changes the weather, changes the climate. To have so many people treat that as if, A, it’s not happening, and B, it’s complicated to understand. That is, in my opinion, the absolute best example, or it was the best example until the anti vax movement came along. People just don’t even understand.
When you have a large cohort of adults who don’t understand those sorts of things. you have to go back and look at how good of a job you’re doing educating in those areas. You have to look critically and say, wow, if we were doing a good job, we wouldn’t be having this problem. Doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have other problems, but we wouldn’t be having this problem.
[00:31:07] Amy: I think you’re right. I think conceptual science makes kids feel like science is something they can understand. And unless you are that really STEM focused kid, a lot of the ways that we teach science make kids feel like science is hard to understand.
And I think you just nailed that. Because science is not hard to understand. Some problems around science are hard to solve, but science is what’s happening in the world and if you pay attention you can understand it, and I think conceptual science is really empowering for kids in a way that I’ve never thought about before.
I love that you said that.
[00:31:44] Blair: My grandson, who’s in second grade, was over two days ago, and he said one of the words, spelling words for the week was scientist, and I was teasing him. I said I certainly hope you can spell scientist. And he said, I learned that one right away, Grandma. He said, we’ve been studying science in school this week.
And I said what are you studying? He said. We’re learning about plants. I said, are you learning about photosynthesis? And he said, yeah. I said, come on, let’s go. We went outside and found a tree. I said, I want you to breathe in. He goes, yeah, I just breathed in carbon dioxide. I said you’re breathing in oxygen, the tree is taking in carbon dioxide. I said but you breathe out carbon dioxide, and I had him put a leaf to his lips, and breathe into the leaf, I said, that leaf just took some of your carbon dioxide, I wonder if one of the oranges that grows this year will have carbon dioxide that came out of you.
And so he turned to me when we did that. He goes I think I’m going to be a scientist when I grow up, Grandma. That is what happens when you teach conceptual science. You have kids become, and that’s just a single example, but there’s loads of examples, and to watch — a second grader and his parents then came over and he was going to baseball practice and his mom said, Oh, you’re getting so good. I wonder if you’re going to play baseball. He goes, I’m going to be a scientist, mom. And whether that happens or not, you want kids turned on by what they’re learning, whether they are in second grade or 12th grade or college. You can turn somebody off, but you can’t turn somebody on if you were teaching at a level where they really just can’t even digest what you’re trying to teach them. And I think that science is often done that way.
[00:33:43] Amy: When you turn that light on, it illuminates the way for them. So when they, if they want to learn the more applied stuff, they absolutely can. And they’re excited to you because they know what it’s about. No, I love that story about the leaf. That’s like my new favorite story. That’s a great story.
[00:34:01] Blair: Then he explains it to his mom, and he said, Nobody else can eat oranges off that tree. I need to eat the orange that has part of me in it.
[00:34:11] Amy: That is what science is, our connection to the world that we live in, and I think that it’s so easy to forget that. It’s so easy to forget that. That even if we’re not sitting there working science problems, science is happening all around us, and we’re part of it, and that is so cool and amazing, and that is what we want to give our kids, is that understanding of how we’re connected to the natural and physical world.
[00:34:36] Blair: Absolutely. I want to reiterate — got a STEMy kid? want the math and the science? Fantastic. This podcaster is really geared toward the rest of the population
[00:34:49] Amy: Even STEMy kids benefit from understanding conceptual science.
It’s just hand in hand. That’s the best kind of applied science is when you’re working with concepts that you’re comfortable with and excited about. So I guess that is what Blair and I really want you to take away from this is that science — it’s not hard to understand that if you want to sit down with the big ideas of science and your kid, you are totally capable of doing that.
And if you feel like, oh I can’t do this complicated physics. You actually don’t have to, especially not early on. The ideas are where it all starts. The ideas are where science starts.
So Blair, is there anything else about — you are our science expert, is there anything else about homeschooling science that you want to make sure that we cover before we say goodbye?
[00:35:45] Blair: Make sure that you are choosing a science materials that your child is able to understand to get some mastery over. If you have any questions or comments, you know where to get Amy and I, we are more than happy to help you figure this out.
Don’t let people beat you up online if you want your child in high school to have a conceptual science course, and people get on those threads, and they behave as if, It’s not rigorous enough. You’re doing your child a disservice. That is their opinion, and they’re entitled to it. But recognize that’s just their opinion. And that a lot of scientists, besides Amy and I, disagree with them.
[00:36:32] Amy: That would actually be a great slogan just for homeschooling. Don’t let people online give you a hard time homeschooling
[00:36:38] Blair: Okay, are you reading anything, Amy?
[00:36:41] Amy: I am reading this very, speaking of weird science literature, I’m reading this very strange book called Rouge by Mona. I can’t remember her last name, but she also wrote Bunny. And it is about a woman who finds out after her mother passes away that she’s part of this eternal youth cult that involves jellyfish. It’s really weird and really fascinating. Suzanne recommended it to me and she was like, it’s weird, but and she was right.
It’s weird, but it is amazing. I’m really into it.
[00:37:18] Blair: Many of you probably want to know the book that I read. And I don’t have the title. Unfortunately, I don’t have my Kindle.
If you look at climate, if you look at the climate, oh, so these are climate change in human history. And the climate connection. Those are the two that I picked up. Found it fascinating, absolutely fascinating. Homo sapiens during time of climate change. And they walk away from that without explaining the evolutionary theory. It’s just a factoid that they throw out there and that’s part of what happens with these pop science books, but really fascinating
[00:38:03] Amy: I’ll have to check that out. I’m interested in especially that movement of groups of humans because of climate change in the early stages of history.
[00:38:14] Blair: One of the things they don’t touch, the deforestation of planet Earth happened way before now. And when once humans discovered fire, it began to happen And so that happened really early in human history. A lot of people and a lot of the literature talks about the deforestation that happened by Romans at the height of the Roman Empire when they were going out and conquering other groups.
Oh, one of the fascinating factoids that I learned, though, that humans left the British Isles, they left the British Isles when glaciers covered them, and they didn’t move back there until 12,000 years ago. That is what the evidence says. I thought that was really fascinating. People were in Australia 60,000 years ago.
[00:39:11] Amy: That is why science is so cool. Because you always learn something new. Every time you study science, I think you learn something new.
I guess that is a wrap for this episode of Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life. Blair said, we absolutely love to hear from you. Email us at podcast at homeschool life now. We’d love it if you leave us a rating and a comment wherever you listen to this podcast, that would be great for us.
Share it with a friend, if you like it. We’d love to get the word out now that we have a great routine going. I feel like we know we’re doing a little bit. So if you have suggestions for future episodes, questions, recommendations, again, we’d love to hear from you. So talk to you soon.
