How should the curriculum fork into science in junior high?
It should fork away from the focus on symbolic or numeric solution methods (the internal mechanics of computingalgorithms) to emphasize application modeling. Simultaneous equations are the simplest from of holistic systems in naturemulti-dimensional formulas relating multiple unknown variables, and are quite easy to model because each equation expresses a single fact in relationship to all of the other facts of the word problem. Understanding what such systems are, and how they represent scientific phenomena is much more important than how these systems are solved. Understanding solution methods is no more necessary to science than understanding internal combustion is to learning how to drive an automobile.
