This book just reminded me of why I always hated science class. It's just incredibly boring. I don't just mean to read, I mean the lessons it describes. It's basically identical to the science lessons we had when I was in school 20+ years ago. There's no reason for the kids to care about any of it, and most of the time they're doing very little of interest. As an adult I can see that the teacher is actually putting in a lot of effort to do this, but the result is going to be boring and instantly forgotten by the students.

They claim this is an inquiry-based approach, but it doesn't seem to be to me. It's the same "do this then write it down" approach I remember. There's no big question to answer, no big project to complete. They kind of pretend there is, but it's just writing the same shit down in the final lesson that they've already written down at the end of the preceding lessons. The "mess scene investigation" they're supposedly doing is a decent idea, it's incredibly half-arsed. Rather than having the kids actually investigate it they're just spoon-fed the solutions and then made to write them down. And they're given no reason to care about any of it.

And that's not even getting into the problems with the book itself. It's super long and boring. So many words used to say so little. So really, the same problem as with the actual lessons. Someone put a lot of effort in, but for very little return. And it's organised very badly as well - you have to basically read the entire thing through in order to fully understand the first bits. Nothing is explained where you need it because it's laid out like a reference rather than sequential instructions. It's fine if you know the content and you're just refreshing yourself on bits of it, but if you're approaching it fresh then you're going to be confused and frustrated by it. It reminds me of game rulebooks in that way - you know the way they tell you each player needs four whatever tokens and that the buying phase goes before the selling phase or whatever but the explanation of what those tokens are for and what you do in those phases comes much later so you can't make sense of anything until you've read everything.

And I almost forgot to mention that lesson two involves giving the kids chocolate to experiment with which they are absolutely not allowed to eat. I think this book was written by a psychopath. Basically, I hate everything about it.