The 1^st of August marked the start of the Professional Association of Teachers conference. Now for a let us forget the motion passed on closing down You Tube; which according to the PAT is nothing more than a website designed to allow pupils to bully staff[1], and let us instead concentrate on a more serious problem; WiFi.

Hot on the heels of mobile phones, MMR and MRSA yet another media scare story has presented itself over the past year in the form of wireless networks, coming to a climax when the BBC broadcasted a Panorama special investigating the dangers associated with WiFi. If you happened to miss this back in May, there is a version on Google Video[2] (you will have to skip through 2 minutes of Eastenders) and a transcript[3]. Personally I prefer Wellington Grey’s brief summary[4].

Now all in all this entire WiFi scare doesn’t surprise me, neither does Panorama producing a program based on evidence provided by Alasdair Philips, the founder of Powerwatch, an anti Mobile phone/WiFi group (www.powerwatch.com) (By the way if you’re interested Alasdair Philips also runs another website called www.EMFields.com which will sell you plenty of gizmos to protect you from “Artificial” Electromagnetic Radiation), after all one cannot expect a journalist to accurately report on subjects they do not have a detailed understanding of (I’m looking at you Denis Campbell[5]). What does surprise me is that an organisation claiming to represent teachers has climbed aboard the media circus and called for a banning of wireless networks in schools[6] based on flawed evidence, media articles[7] and anecdote (a nice summary by Ben Goldacre here[8]) while ignoring the primary scientific evidence[9].

Unfortunately there is a very real risk that the nonsense contained in media scare stories such as the one detailed above will be passed on in the classroom as factual knowledge due to the lack of specialised subject staff.

“Half of physics teachers (in the UK) had not studied the subject to any level at university, with this being most common among younger teachers...Increasing numbers of teachers of physics are qualified in biology, with more aged 21 to 30 holding a degree in biology than in physics".[10]

For those not in the UK , the government’s solution to the lack of specialised teachers was to combine the three disciplines into the category of ‘Science Teacher’; this means that teachers (and graduates) who previously specialised in one discipline (i.e. chemistry) now have to teach all three disciplines.

This is a serious concern given that the new science GCSE’s encourage debate and discussion on media topics such as MMR and GM crops, but lack the detailed scientific knowledge to make an informed argument.

My question is: How, if possible can we encourage physicists and chemists to take up teaching as a career in order to prevent passing on misconceptions instead of knowledge in the classroom?