How religious is Apologia chemistry?

[klmama]

My dc wants a group lab class for science, and the only one I've found uses Apologia. I just want a heads-up regarding religious content, especially if it appears on exams. The table of contents I found online doesn't help much.

[happygrrl]

There is a new edition coming out; you might want to clarify which edition your group will be using. I am not sure if any one has seen inside the new one yet.

[EndOfOrdinary]

The text alone has a sentence here or there in about every other chapter. Sometimes it is as simple as merely using the word "He" and and action verb implying Creation. Sometimes it is larger where it is negating Climate Change because of God's creation. We have found it easy to bypass the short paragraph which often appears at the very end "sum it all up" part of a chapter if it is a larger instance. The Climate Change stuff is the only part I have found that really shifts any actual science into opinion territory. There are no chapter and verse issues. The content is pretty much exactly the same as the other chemistry books I have seen. It does not appear on the tests which come with the book. It is vastly different than the amount which appears in the Biology book, for instance. (We will not use Apologia for Biology.)

 

The big one would be how the teacher handles it. If he is taking a class, then you have an actual person extrapolating on the materials in the book. That could get mighty religious mighty fast. They could create their own tests too. We pair the Apologia with Georgia Public Broadcasting chemistry so the majority of the time it is secular and that definitely shifts the entire tone.

 

I would have a conversation with the teacher and see how they handle it. The book could honestly go either way. I do not know if that helps at all. I was heavily worried about using a non-secular text until a friend let me look at her copy. They are also very cheap in Amazon. I think we got ours for about 12 dollars. You could always try to find a copy to glance through.

[klmama]

Thanks. I didn't know there was going to be a new edition. I'll ask about that.

 

Thanks, Endofordinary. Very helpful. I'm curious about how you paired it with GPB. Which one drove the order of topics, the text or the videos?

[EndOfOrdinary]

GPB is very straight forward, so it lead the way. Ds would watch the video, then read the corresponding chapter in Apologia. In general, there was one video per chapter. Occasional Apologia would expand on a topic far more than GPB, so there would be two chapters per video.

 

He did all the worksheets and note taking with the GPB as well. The math really allowed for more practice. Apologia has good math, but not much of it. So the extra was really helpful.

 

Using the table of contents and the titles/worksheets with GPB, they were fairly easy to correlate. It only took the ahead time from me to print all the GPB stuff out and look it over to see what lined up the best. DS used the Apologia tests, as they are stronger and I felt really reflected better the bulk of the information he was learning.

[klmama]

Thank you!

[Mom22ns]

I don't think I had to remove any test questions from Apologia Chemistry, as compared with Bob Jones science where I don't think I have ever given a test without removing test questions that were religious only and had nothing to do with science.  I think EndOfOrdinary described it well. Mostly, in Chemistry, God is regularly referenced for the cool way He created stuff. That is about it. If you don't believe God created stuff, it is probably frequent enough to get pretty annoying. However, it doesn't really intrude on the science much like some Christian texts would.

 

Just stay away from Biology :).