My wife and I were team teachers in elementary school for 33 years and as one who loved to teach science, the missing key is IMAGINATION. Early on I realized the educational system did not embrace imagination. The teachers themselved did not have it or foster it at all. Yes, there are exceptions and I hope we all had at least one. The directive ruling the classrom was to be learn all the curriculum now and you can do your imagination when you have reached your goal and have a good job. Art, science, drama and public speaking were fluff and not to be done unless all other work had been completed.
Many teachers at my school did not "do" (bad word here) science because they never understood it during their training. The common statement was "What do I do if the experiment does not work?" I told them to say that is SCIENCE! Science is 90 percent failure and 10 percent success if that much.
The misconception here is that we "do" science. To simplify things I told them science was a system of asking questions, forming theories and them trying to prove them. Science came in the interplay of questions and thought and the interdiciplinary approach to understanding the world around us. The children in our classes when asked why they were in school would state "to learn to think!" They understood all knowledge had some value and you never knew when something might be useful to you in solving a problem or making a discovery.
That is where imagination came in. Einstein stated it well, "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."
I got strange looks many times when our classes would go out on the playground to see some weather phenomenon or fly kites in the wind or watch water evaporate on a HOT playground and study first hand the water cycle. On those rare days when it would rain briefly on the hot playground and make a sea of fog about 3 feet high, we had a ball playing hide and go seek or fog tag. The children understood what was going on, why it was happening and they remembered it. I often did exercises, mostly outside, on observing. I would place the students as far apart as possible , have them look at the area they were standing in, observe (they had hand lenses) and after say five minutes blow a whistle and have them return to me. Everyone had to state something they observed that they did not know about before the exercise. It did not matter if it might be common knowledge to some. The classic responce from one student who was next to a tree was that the bark was rough. I was surprized, not by the statement, but the awed response of many of the students. We expect children to know what we know and seldom help them explore and learn for themselves. Our students always did well on the year-end science test.
Education is not a race but a journey. Imagination is all we can pass on to our students. Imagination is what will create the jobs our young children will be applying for in the future, but have not even been thought of today.
I miss the kids, the challenge of stimulating young minds in spite of the Educational System that has no imagination.
Bob in Woodland Hills.