I do believe in evolution, especially microevolution.

Do you think there’s some limit of “microevolution” beyond which organisms cannot go, as if they’re forever bound to some distant ancestor by a phenotypical bungee cord?

But the picture on the cellular level is more complicated then Darwin thought.

Of course it is.  Darwin didn’t even know about Mendelian inheritance; his key insight was natural selection among heritable variations.  That insight is still valid even though the particulars of his original theory have long since been supplanted by better and more detailed work.  The point is, if he was wrong, later discoveries would have contradicted him.  Instead, what do we have:Discovery of chromosomes:  consistent with natural selection.
Discovery of DNA:  consistent with natural selection.
Discovery of double-helix structure:  consistent.
Discovery of point, insertion, deletion and translocation mutations:  consistent.
Discovery of plasmid exchange, endosymbiosis, reverse transcription…. all consistent.
In science (as opposed to e.g. philosophy), theories which are seriously wrong in the concept (like phlogiston) don’t hold up to new data and do not retain adherents.  Even fringe theories rapidly gain currency if evidence supports them; plate tectonics and quantum chromodynamics are examples which have arisen since you were born.  If evolution was wrong in any essentials, it wouldn’t be around.

I just see a great many questions as unanswered.

I think you’ll find that there are a lot more answers than you ever knew existed.

Did evolution happen step-by-genetic step, or might it have happened suddenly, as by chromosome folding, splitting and reattaching in a different configuration?

Evolution on the molecular level occurs largely by recombination, but mutations go on at every level from individual DNA bases to duplication of entire genomes (which happens both naturally and artifically in plants).  The major difference between humans and the other great apes is a fusion of two ape chromosomes to form the human chromosome 2, which has two centromeres and telomere sequences in the middle just as you’d expect from two chromosomes pasted end-to-end.

I don’t know how to do experimental evolution. Does anybody?

Scientists have been running evolutionary experiments in the laboratory on everything from bacteria to replicating RNA fragments to computer simulations of organisms.  Some of the latter have been written up in layman’s journals like Scientific American; I would not be surprised if application software is available for your PC as part of some university undergrad course.  Heck, genetic algorithms have found their way into all kinds of engineering, to optimize things in ways that mere humans (blinded by preconceptions) would never think to do.  That’s the value of randomness; it will explore avenues that no systematic approach less than exhaustive search would get to.

This is just stuff off the top of my head.  There’s vastly more proof out there that I have never heard of because I’m not a biologist and don’t read the literature.  Suffice it to say that giving your grandkids the impression that there’s something wrong with evolution (and by extention the entire practice of biological research) you’re doing them no favors.

I want to teach how to think, not what to think.

Along the way you probably ought to look at the reasons why biologists are such vehement advocates of evolution.  They’re good thinkers, and the peer-review process of science is extremely good at weeding out errors; if your granddaughters understand the evidence and logic behind the conclusions, they’ll be head-and-shoulders above 99% of their peers.

(I’m not sure if the bullet lists are going to display properly, but I’m not going to edit out the code for them.)

I recall–back in biology in hs, that fruitflies are generally used for genetic experimentation since they have multiple generations so quickly. I don’t believe that even this allows you to observe evolution–a very SLOW process, but it does allow for setting up conditions that are favorable for natural selection.

I’m teaching science as a disciplined way of thinking: observation, hypothesis, testing, more hypotheses and theories, and more experimentation. I will teach Popper’s standard of falsification and the criticism of it.

I don’t know how to do experimental evolution. Does anybody? Of course the girls are going to read about evolution. I’m not going to give them an answer on this as I don’t have one myself. I want to teach how to think, not what to think.

Evolution is the single unifying principle of biology, and a great deal of it (principles, not specific developments) can be and has been demonstrated in the lab.  If you omit it because of the objections of an organization whose members sign a statement of adherence to narrow theological principles, you’re doing your grandchildren a grave disservice.

Once students with high schools diplomas realize that they are worthy without federal validation, the students and the parents will insist on improvements.

The states and local school districts do nothing in most cases but make the matters of better quality education worse. There are some districts that truly try and excel. Which ones are they? How do they do it and how can those successes be replicated? Makes good sense to me –

Public education is broken and has succeeded in its mission — dumbling down the public — duh!

–enjoying this thread, hope others are too.

From what I have heard, Massachussetts is a leader in the standards/assessment arena in the US. Generally they stack up well in comparison to NAEP and international assessments.

I don’t know if any state leads in curriculum development. Most of the states that I am aware of leave that in the hands of locals–which allows them to sidestep some of the controversies. Until very recently (the advent of standards), this was further devolved to the classroom level. Textbook manufacturers have had a huge influence on curriculum–and again many states leave textbook selection to individual districts (and then teachers got to pick and choose what they wanted to teach). California is more prescriptive–which is why many textbook companies align with California.

The evolution question has been pretty ugly in many states, including my own. I would suggest, however, that eliminating evolution (even at the elementary level) really pulls the legs out from under anything related to biology. It’s pretty foundational.