Why do biology courses build their content around themes and major concepts?

Question

its why do they not what do they

Answer 1

Life and maybe enviroment sciences.  It depends on what school you are going to and what they base their curriculum on.    

Answer 2

They do it that way because otherwise you're just memorizing a bunch of facts without making sense of them. If you organize the info, it fits together and you can understand it and even use it.

My high school biology teacher didn't do this. We had to learn the body parts and functions of a hundred animals. So we'd learn them all for a crayfish and then for a shark, and there was no connection.

College biology taught it in terms of evolution and the hierarchy of genus, species, phylum (I probably have those in the wrong order), and what a difference it made! You understood that the crayfish has the parts it does to fit into its ecological niche, etc. You realized that animals that were on the same evolutionary branches usually had many of the same parts, and then you could focus on the variations.

Organizing by concepts helps to teach the concept across species. Sometimes it takes a bit of work to grasp a concept, such as semi-permeable membranes and osmosis. (Bleah, but once you understand it, you can work with it.)