What Should We Cut From the Science Curriculum? What a Science Teacher Actually Thinks
It was a Tuesday, the kind where the photocopier had jammed twice and half the class had drifted off during a video on cell division. I’d paused the playback to check for understanding when a hand shot up near the windows. Not a hand that usually goes up.
“Miss,” the student said, “why do we actually need to know this? I mean, I get that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. It’s a meme. But when am I ever going to use this?”
It wasn’t a rude question. It was an honest one. And it sat in the room for a second longer than I expected. I gave some answer about scientific literacy and how cells explain life, but I heard myself saying it and I wasn’t even convinced. The bell rang, the kids filed out, and I stood by my desk surrounded by open textbooks and half-finished lab reports, thinking about how much of what we teach is just … old.
That moment has stuck with me. Not because I have a perfect answer—I don’t. But because it makes me ask a different question than the one we usually hear. The debate about the science curriculum always gets framed as “the kids need more STEM” or “we need tougher standards.” But if you actually stand in front of thirty students in a worn-out classroom, the real question is more specific: What should we stop pretending matters, and what should we make room for instead?
For me, the first thing I’d cut is the endless parade of disconnected terminology.
Every year, the curriculum requires me to teach students words like “endothermic,” “osmosis,” “allele,” and “trophic cascade.” Many of these are fine words. They matter in the right context. But we spend weeks making sure kids can define them correctly on a multiple-choice test, and then we move on. A student can tell you that osmosis is the movement of water across a membrane, but they have no idea what happens when they water a plant with salt water. They can recite the definition but not predict anything.
That’s the problem. We’ve built a curriculum that rewards memorization over sense-making. We test kids on the vocabulary before they’ve ever felt the confusion that makes the word useful.
The other thing I’d cut, if I had the power, is the sheer amount of abstract content that has no anchor in a student’s life. I love chemistry, but teaching moles and atomic orbitals to a group of fourteen-year-olds who have never thought about what elements are in their drinking water is a waste of everyone’s time. They don’t have the conceptual scaffold. It’s like trying to teach someone to read sheet music before they’ve ever heard a song.
Now, I’m not saying we should throw out the fundamentals. There are core ideas you cannot skip. But the curriculum treats every topic with the same weight, and that doesn’t work in a real classroom. Some things need to be touched on quickly, some need to be gone, and some need to be taught slowly and deeply, even if it means covering less overall.
So what should actually make the cut? In my experience, the most valuable science education happens when students are given something real to wonder about.
A few weeks ago, I threw out my planned lesson. There had been a millipede invasion in the school garden, and the kids were obsessed. They wanted to know why they were all clustered near the compost bin, why they curled up when touched, and whether they could bite. I let them investigate. We spent three days making observations, drawing what we saw, coming up with questions, and sorting what we could test from what we couldn’t. No one asked why this mattered. It just did.
That kind of teaching doesn’t require a perfect curriculum document. It requires time, and it requires permission to go off-script. But it does point me toward three things I think should be included.
First, local ecology and environmental observations. Kids need to know the names of the trees on their street, why certain birds disappear in winter, what happens to their own food scraps in a compost bin. This grounds scientific thinking in place and memory. It also builds the habit of paying attention, which is the most underrated scientific skill.
Second, data literacy and skepticism. We live in a world where everyone has a chart and a narrative. Students get taught how to calculate averages, but almost never how to ask where the data came from, how it was collected, or who made the graph. I’ve started spending more time on simple activities that don’t look like traditional science at all. We compare a headline, the actual study, and the tweet that went viral about it. We ask why a sample size of fifty might not say anything about five million people. We talk about the difference between a correlation and a cause, using examples like ice cream sales and shark attacks. It’s messy, but the kids leave that room more skeptical, not less. And skepticism, when taught well, isn’t cynicism. It’s a firewall.
Third, I would include the history of science as a messy, human process. Right now, most students think science is a straight line from fact to fact. Thomas Edison just invented the lightbulb. Darwin just figured out evolution. No one talks about the dead ends, the personal rivalries, the stubborn beliefs that blocked progress. When I tell students about how we only discovered the spiral shape of DNA after years of wrong models, or how doctors used to think washing hands was silly, they lean in. That’s not an extra topic. That’s the core. Because the greatest lie in science education is that science is about certainty. It’s actually about managing uncertainty, and that’s a far more useful skill for life.
The tricky part is that changing the curriculum means giving up something else. Teachers feel this pressure all the time. We have an end-of-year test, and parents expect to see a thick folder of completed work. But some of the best scientific learning I’ve ever seen came from a single rotting pumpkin on a classroom windowsill. The kids watched it mold, argued about where the mold came from, and designed a small experiment with damp bread. It took four days. We didn’t cover the planned unit on microbe classification. The substitute teacher who came in the following week thought we were behind. But those kids had asked better questions than I’d ever heard during a textbook chapter, and they’ll remember the experience for years.
I don’t have a tidy list of exactly which topics to cut and which to keep. I could tell you to delete “the human excretory system” from seventh grade, and someone would rightly say that’s important. But I do know this: the curriculum should be smaller, wider, and weirder. Smaller in terms of list of facts. Wider in terms of kinds of questions we allow. And weird enough that a classroom can sometimes follow a millipede trail without feeling like we’re wasting time.
The student who asked about the mitochondria still doesn’t love biology. But a few weeks later, he came in one morning holding a plastic bag with a dead mouse he’d found on his porch. “I was wondering why ants are all over it but flies aren’t,” he said. He wanted to know if he could put it under the microscope. That’s not in my curriculum. It’s not in the standards. But it’s exactly what I’m hoping for. I just don’t know yet how to make that fit into a schedule. Maybe that’s okay—for now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Should We Cut From the Science Curriculum