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Spring, 2004

NSTA Offers Resources for Teaching Evolution. NSTA supports the position that evolution is a major unifying concept in science and should be included in the K-12 science education frameworks and curricula. The position statement "The Teaching of Evolution," is at www.nsta.org/positionstatement&psid=10. An important new book from NSTA Press® for science teachers of grades 5-12, Evolution in Perspective: The Science Teacher's Compendium, ( $12.75 for NSTA members) is a collection of articles first published in the NSTA member journal The Science Teacher . For listing of several other helpful publications, go to www.nsta.org/evresources

On April 22, science educators nationwide can have their own "teach-in" by celebrating Earth Day with their students. Here's some websites to help you plan it: -EarthDayNetwork www.earthday.net, projects for school, home, and community, -The Wilderness Society's earthday.wilderness.org,
-Earth Day on Your Block, tells kids how to celebrate with a block party with displays on environmental issues. www.allspecies.org/neigh/block.htm
-Kids Domain www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/earthday with online games, downloads, coloring pages, crafts, and songs. Students can learn about wildlife by "adopting" a rainforest animal.
- Earth Dog www.earthdog.com recounts the story of "a junkyard dog.[who], like many humans, didn't pay much attention to the environment.
- Planetpals Greatest Earth Day Pages Ever http://wwwplanetpals.com/earthday.html (From NSTA Reports , Feb/Mar. 2004).

Many more African- American and Hispanic students took physics in the last four years. Please see www.aip.org/statistics/trends/highlite/hs2001/hshigh.htm .

"Benjamin Banneker's Mathematical Puzzles ," by John F. Mahoney in The Mathematics Teacher (pp. 86-91, Feb.'03) displays and discusses several of Banneker's "puzzles of historical Interest, some . may also be used to demon-strate the ways available technology can be used to efficiently explore and solve problems. (Silvio Bedini's 1999 biography of Banneker, an African American, contains a selection of these puzzles). Born a free man in Maryland in 1731, Banneker was known and respected throughout American and Europe for his mathematical skills. Using only a pocket watch as a model, he built the first wooden striking clock in America. It kept accurate time for 53 years." A Banneker Puzzle: " A gentleman sent his servant with £100 (pounds) to buy 100 cattle (livestock), with orders to give £5 for each Bullock, 20 shillings for cows, and one shilling for each Sheep, the question is to know what number of each sort he brought to his master. It's solution is an example of a system of Diophantine equations, in this instance, two equations with three unknowns."