Issues in Earth Science

After missing our spring issue, we have two new stories for Issue 15, each dealing with moral or personal implications of pursuing science. Our teacher resources encourage discussion of how life choices and moral choices play into our science choices.

In A Diet of Worms, Stephen S. Power relates a tale in which humanity may have finally found the secret to human compassion and justice--except there may be a high moral cost.

In The Last Tangerine, Anthony W. Eichenlaub tells of a family commited to saving a species, but sometimes at a cost to family.

Read both stories in Fiction for the Classroom. The accompanying teacher resources provide some seed questions for discussion about some of the human implications of scientific pursuits.

Stories for IES appear in Fiction for the Classroom.  Teacher resources for middle and high school earth science classes are included.

Continued from our last issue, Mary Colson, our co-editor, offers some insights into online science teaching after her school participated in the recent nationwide effort to teach online.  Check out her essay, Two Things I Learned from Online Teaching, Topics for Debate.

Get your copy of Learning to Read the Earth and Sky--a book especially for science teachers or anyone interested in the nature of earth science investigation and the philosophy of investigative education.

Check out the free online course materials for Earth Science Essentials, an advanced refresher course for science teachers or others interested in earth science.

Interested in fun brain puzzles?

Help Alwan Stagor hide from the Empire, and engage in other adventure puzzles, in our Earth Science Challenge. 

This website is dedicated to raising awareness of the science of our world and our place in it.  It provides essays, challenges, a forum for discussion, and fictional stories related to the Earth and Space Sciences along with science activities for the middle and high school classroom.

More than any other science, Earth and Space Science is about what happens around us every day, the sky that we see above, the weather that we experience, the land that we walk on. Yet most American's know less about Earth Science, and have more misconceptions about it, than any other science.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS, 2013) have reaffirmed the importance of Earth and Space Science for all students, as was already affirmed by the NGSS predecessor, The National Science Education Standards (1996). Even so, in the United States, Earth Science is rarely taught at the high school level and remains one of the least understood of all the sciences. Even in science fiction, Earth Science is typically relegated to the backdrop, the deadly volcano that erupts wherever it's convenient, the cave to the Earth's core, the weather that can change into a deadly killer in an instant.

We want to change all that! Join us in exploring the universe around us!