You can replace chemistry with math in his article (and he sort of mentions this in context near the end). I can't remember once being shown the physical problems that drove progress in math until I reached calculus. I remember being bored to tears in algebra 2, a class which was basically being taught as linear algebra + trigonometry. It wasn't until the following summer that I discovered 3d transforms, and a bunch of other applications of all that matrix manipulation and how all the sin/cos manipulation helped with RF electronics.
Back 25 years ago I was convinced that that entire class could have been taught as an extension of more concrete subjects (electronics, computer graphics, signals, etc) that simply weren't taught in the high school I went to, despite the fact it was what we now call a STEM magnet school. Classes I later wished I could retake, if only to pick up on all the math subtleties I mostly ignored because it all seemed so pointless.
Now that I have kids, I see that nothing has really changed. Sure they get a lot of "word problems", but the problems are so artificial they might just be worded as "what is the result of adding A and B and dividing by C" for all the natural concepts they get across.
Thankfully I had a pretty reasonable chemistry teacher, who did a lot of demos and gave us interresting experiments to keep the class from being a bunch of random facts.
> I can't remember once being shown the physical problems that drove progress in math until I reached calculus.
Progress in math often (or usually) isn’t driven by physical problems, so there’s that. Just like progress in physics often (or usually) isn’t driven by “real world” problems. Discoveries are often made before applications are found.
As a concrete example, number theory is an incredibly profound and fruitful branch of mathematics. It is also largely “useless” to this day (outside of cryptography, which uses only a small subset of number theory, and isn’t really “physical” to begin with).
Another well-known example is non-Euclidean geometry, which came into being due to the purely intellectual pursuit of the Fifth Postulate, and almost magically found its place in the theory of gravitation long afterwards.
It takes a certain kind of personality to enjoy mathematics as is, even if it seems “useless”.
(Theoretical physicist who double majored in math and physics in college here. Definitely possess the “certain kind of personality”.)
> Progress in math often (or usually) isn’t driven by physical problems
This is true at the largest scale, but the math classes that most people take are directly applicable to (and often were developed partly to solve) physical problems. I, too, found the high school presentation of math dry and boring until I took a good physics class, and I was amazed by how much of the math I learned was directly useful for that subject.
Unfortunately, the dry treatment math gets in high schools also usually fails to highlight the beauty and subtlety of pure math. I didn't realize how much I loved pure math until I took my first proof-based analysis class after junior year of college.
I think we're seriously failing both the applied and pure camps of students with the way we currently present math. The fact that it took me till nearly the end of college to really like it, despite my proclivity towards the abstract and technical, really drove this point home for me.
Practical does not mean interesting. A lot of math is based around accounting and taxes.
How big is this field and how do I split it evenly into N pieces. That’s more or less why Geometry was considered foundational for so long. Carpenters are often used as examples, but they generally avoid anything mathematically complicated instead using simple rules.
Yes. Neither its use nor truth. Just a bunch of stuff to learn.
Much less could be covered if driven by applications/problems or from axioms, and the rest of the math ecosystem is built around it. So, hard to change.
The pure mathematician is a relatively recent beast though, and most non-graduate students of math (i.e. almost all of them) study mathematics that almost exclusively was developed to solve a problem in the physical world.
>Progress in math often (or usually) isn’t driven by physical problems, so there’s that. Just like progress in physics often (or usually) isn’t driven by “real world” problems. Discoveries are often made before applications are found.
The use of math however is driven by physical problems for most people; teaching people how to use math (or physics, or chemistry) ought to be the point of most non-grad level courses? Anecdotally, I got more out of my math classes that were through the lens of either a solver e.g. matlab/mathmatica/R or a 'practical' subject like quantum chemistry.
That doesn't work for everyone though. I'm studying pure math and I find most applied math problems very boring. I also like solving puzzles, though. If a problem is little more than knowing which formula to use (with some manipulation) and then punching the values into my calculator then it just feels like I'm doing a computer's job.
So I think if we gear our curriculum too heavily to the applied side of things, we risk alienating some very gifted students who might otherwise go on to become brilliant mathematicians.
I would say 'plug and chug' applied problems don't work for anyone, past the first couple. At risk of anecdote: I like solving puzzles as much as anyone[1] but the purer side wasn't a puzzle to me because there is no purpose, no picture to be pieced together[2].
[1] Back to the original topic, chemistry interestingly inverts its approach with organic chem - a class in puzzle solving that often frustrated premeds trying to memorize their way through.
[2] I don't mean that the problem was open-ended, e.g. research but rather that it didn't exist. Most of my math education hasn't been trying to prove P=NP (or other easier puzzles) but demonstrating specific transformations (e.g. here are the rules for integration, after a trivial treatment of the proof). imo something like an intro to algorithms in highschool or early college would have do more for both the uninterested and the gifted than "integration, but with 1 more dimension!"
That’s disappointing. My math education so far has included the usual calculus and the basics of analysis up to and including multi-variable calculus as well as linear algebra on abstract vector spaces, inner product spaces, and complex vector spaces. Additionally, I’ve delved into combinatorics with enumeration, combinatorial proofs, and generating functions as well as graph theory, abstract algebra including group theory and ring theory, and mathematical logic.
I plan to take Euclidean geometry, real and complex analysis, fields and Galois theory, and eventually measure theory as well as differential geometry and maybe commutative algebra and representation theory.
The problems I’ve studied in all of these courses have been varied, interesting, and highly challenging. Far more entertaining than any problem I encountered in high school. But not all of the material was too complex for a high school student to understand. I could definitely teach a high school class in graph theory and I bet the students would have a lot of fun with it. Despite it being a beautiful and sometimes very abstract field, it can be applied to computer science as well as games and puzzles of all sorts. Yeah, it’s not useful to any of the hard engineering disciplines but it’s far more entertaining than grinding integrals all day.
Gerry Sussman has a really good talk touching on [2]. It was surprising to me that his real interests are in classical mechanics but he uses computation as a tool to convey the ideas.
I studied physics in undergrad many years ago, and it's been a long time since I used higher level math on a regular basis. I just picked up Mathematics: Its Content, Methods, and Meaning, on the recommendation of someone here. It's over 1000 pages, so it's going to be a lifetime reading project for me, but it's been wonderful to start reading. The first part of the book traces the earliest origins of math, and everything was grounded in real-world physical problems.
I've been a high school math teacher for most of my life, and I have deep frustrations with how removed from meaning math is presented to most students. Just because the teacher knows and states the possible relevance doesn't mean students should be expected to take the relevance at face value.
I was mostly focused on teaching algebra 1 classes, which is why I didn't use higher math all that often. But my understanding of higher math grounded my teaching of lower level concepts all the time, and I often spoke of higher level concepts with my students to help demystify math. My 8yo son loves math for now, and the moment school makes math meaningless to him I am planning to find some way to intervene.
In my view, math suffers from getting pulled in multiple directions all at once. It is:
* A tool for solving practical problems.
* A sorting hat for the more lucrative college majors.
* An introduction to formal thinking and abstraction.
* A score in a tournament called high school.
* A source of entertainment, mystery, and beauty.
It's hard to convey all of these things at once, and there may be social or political pressures to prioritize certain aspects over others. I was a math / physics double major, and then went to gradual school in physics. I was propelled by different aspects of math at different times, perhaps as I passed from one mentor to the next, or was swayed by my many side interests (programming, electronics, music).
I've tried explaining to my kids that the curriculum du jour, whatever it is, will give them practice with the mechanics of math, so that they're not bogged down in it when they're ready to meet math on their own terms.
Being much older now, it's very apparent to me that whatever aptitudes I had as a younger student were driven by whatever good teachers I was fortunate to have at the time. In my case I had the good fortune of wonderful math teachers. As a younger student my Physics teachers did not engage me. It is only in my 30's that I appreciate Physics (largely due to personal effort, exposure to important historical problems, and understanding that my own learning style involves needing to empathize with the motivating problem)
I played with a lot of circuits from Radio Shack as a kid. I did not understand much of the math behind it till I got to college and took the electrical engineering courses. But I agree with you, it would have much more interesting to use electronics and computers to teach some of the math subjects.
As a counter point, I am put off by practical applications to mathematics and even avoid such physics based exercises in math books. I prefer pure mathematics. I find it interesting because of its abstract beauty and that motives me to want to learn more.
Boring is subjective. Many people find ”practical applications” boring but pure math fun. They would find your proposed curriculum deeply uninteresting.
If a teacher takes the practical applications angle, you can always ignore that part and just do the math.
The reverse is more difficult. My linear algebra teacher didn't ground the work in anything and as student I had no idea that the vectors and matrices could be used for, say, computer graphics.
you can always ignore that part and just do the math
No, not really at all. Most of applied math is raw calculations. A student interested in pure math is going to be bored to tears by that. They need challenging problems and proofs to work on.
It’s like putting a gifted programmer in a data entry class and telling them to “just focus on the typing” as though people like programming for the keyboard work.
For example, in linear algebra, I found Gaussian elimination boring as well. I was far more interested in learning how to prove things about vector spaces, subspaces, the fundamental theorem of linear algebra, the spectral theorems, and so on.
I would guess students that are more interested in pure math are a minority though. I definitely don't think this group should be ignored, but perhaps the core classes could be more "practical" while still offering advanced pure math electives (potentially through a magnet type school that services multiple "regular" school districts). I believe it is already pretty common for universities to have multiple offerings of the same general math subject to this end, although this might be limited to schools with larger STEM programs.
IME K-12 math wasn't taught in a very engaging way regardless of whether one was interested in theory or applications. The people I knew that were into math all did after school and/or summer courses, although I don't know whether the interest came before or after their parents enrolled them in these supplements. Personally I did not think math was interesting until undergraduate, where I first gained an appreciation of the applied work and subsequently found myself interested in some pure math areas as well. I wish I had realized how cool math can be earlier on in my education- I do recall enjoying very early math, but I think by 5th grade I was unfortunately jaded.
I guess I ultimately wish high schools had a bit more diversity in classes. I don't know if this is feasible, but I feel by grades 11 and 12 it would be greatly beneficial if students had more choice between a number of focused electives. Even at my high school which was generally considered high quality, the upper level courses were largely the standard AP curricula, which at least in the case of biology was still very much a survey course. I don't think this helped students decide what they wanted to pursue enough, and it seems that freshman year of college for most people was largely a repeat. Why not let students get some sense of a couple subfields before they have to actually commit to something?
Online courses can maybe help but I feel they will have to be grounded somehow in the high schools to be fully effective. Anyways this got a bit off topic, but if anyone has any related information/thoughts I'd love to hear it- I am certainly interested in education but don't have much practical knowledge/experience outside of my own bubble at this time.
I told my kid that math might be boring perhaps through the end of high school because the time was taken up learning the “alphabet” of math, and see what the boring process learning the actual alphabet resulted in? I guess he believed me as he became a math major.
I concur. I hated math until calc, when it explained physics. Now I love math. But most folks never get there - it’s taught too removed from both the application and the beauty. Looking at my children’s teachers, some make it come alive, some struggle with large classes, and some just don’t know the material well themselves.
My interest in math and all things STEMy stemmed from computer games. Then I realized basic solutions could be generalized, and that got me interested in more abstract aspects of mathematics.
I think a curriculum based around game programming could provide a concrete context for many STEM disciplines.
Then you get into the story, consistent gameworld, art and sound side of computer games and you can introduce humanities subjects such as the classics, philosophy, art, and music.
So, in short, we could base an entire Uni curriculum, spanning the sciences and arts, all centered around creating a computer game.
And best of all, the student's capstone will be something any person can play, instead of dragging themselves through pages and pages of hard to read writing.
One of the challenges with curricula generally is that there are a lot of dependencies and you sort of have to use a certain amount of rote memorization to jumpstart things. Organic chemistry in particular, which I did not get along well with, I recall as requiring a lot of memorization because at that level you just don't have the tools to figure out how reactions will progress from first principles.
Even physics, if you haven't had calculus yet, you end up having to memorize a lot of formulas because you don't know how to derive them.
Totally agree. The idea that chemistry is separate from physics is pretty dumb anyway. I'm kinda talking out of my blowhole here, but it seems the reason chemistry and biology are distinguished from physics is that there are a lot of emergent phenomenon that we didn't and in many cases still can't predict from the fundamental physics. But, it's still there. Maybe chemistry should be called molecular dynamics or something like that. Jazz it up a bit.
Also, more explosions and experiments with fart gas.
But some sciences really do require a lot of memorization, and even if we could understand the entire world from first principles, biology would still remain a separate science from physics, especially in the area of anatomy and ecology. Perhaps one day we will be able to account for each biological process starting from physics, but that still won't help us find new species of orchids and which bees pollinate them.
Even for chemistry, sure, you can use quantum mechanics to predict what combining hydrochloric acid with caustic soda produce, but that is far, far more difficult than remembering some valence for the few common elements.
> The idea that chemistry is separate from physics is pretty dumb anyway.
Applying reduction to say "everyone young person should know everything" is hubris.
It's a practical division, at multiple levels. eg Specialization, profession, etc. Renaming (Molecular Dynamics) is just adding to the soup. Yes there is some overlap, but it's not worth trying to jam into the minds of students who dont have the drive or aptitude. re: Trying to teach everyone software development or CS
An example of reductionism in CS: one of the great minds of the field[0] adamantly believed that compiled programming languages were literally a waste of time, since the machine code they spit out was not as optimal as handwritten assembly and the compiler used extra computer time to build it. Can you imagine the state of CS today if that view had prevailed?
Chemistry is a useful abstraction over physics in the same way. Hell, so is Newtonian mechanics over quantum mechanics, for that matter. The difference between these and my CS example is of course that the amount of stuff in physics itself is much more vast and undiscovered. The same is certainly true for biology, psychology, and sociology; and the exploration of their respective spaces are only hampered by focusing too much on the fields they rest upon.
[0] I wish I could find the reference. I think it was Von Neumann.
In high school chemistry, we had to memorize the periodic table in the sense of symbol <=> name. I hated memorizing stuff, but I found a way to make it enjoyable - I wrote an adaptive flashcard program to use.
My highschool chemistry class required us to memorize that stuff, but they also let us use graphing calculators on every test... Memorizing it still pays off because it saves time, but I think a load of students didn't bother and just 'cheated.'
(I'm not really convinced this is truly a form of cheating since if you look up the answer frequently enough you'll end up memorizing it by accident anyway. You can only look up Pb so many times before you start to remember it means lead.)
I always hated experiments in chemistry class, as it was always boring and trivial. Kids who liked it, did so because it was a time to slack off, watch colors change, play around with the props etc. It didn't help in understanding anything and was as detached from the rest of the chemistry lessons as if it was a subject to itself.
Interestingly, as a student I also disliked whenever the book went in the direction that TFA recommends: explaining the experimental underpinnings of theory. It always felt unsatisfactory, like a "God of gaps" argument. Whenever the student was not ready to hear the detailed derivations from more basic principles (advanced topics), the justification was just "experiments have shown that [...]". Many times I found out there are more basic underlying reasons and felt cheated. I wanted to understand how the universe works, not who discovered it and when.
My young self would think, leave me alone with pictures of dusty old books and people with funny hair, I want to know how the universe is structured. We're just a speck of dust in the grand scheme of the universe, I want to learn about galaxies, planets, elements. These are what any objective observer, like aliens, would care about, not the lives of some humans hundreds of years ago.
Today I understand better that I was already thinking inside of a certain scientific framework which very much depends on the guys with the funny hairs, and the way things are conceptualized aren't really inevitable, they are models, with imperfections and there's no magic source of authority who knows the answer to everything. We don't have the blueprints from God and learning more about the process of scientific discovery would have been useful perhaps. Too bad that the average school teacher would not be up for that task. Nor would most 10-14-year-olds have the necessary intellectual framework and abstraction in place to understand what is even being discussed. "I'm the teacher and this is how things are" is much easier to get across.
This echoes my experience. It wasn't until I was 17 or so that I figured out through independent reading that there actually are ideas in scientific work.
There's this weird kind of fake enthusiasm that always seems to be at the foundation of attempts to get kids "interested in science". Like the adults in charge also don't know what's interesting about it—or they're otherwise not "up for the task" as you say—so they instead just extract a bunch of idea-free surface details from the subject, and prop them up with outsized enthusiasm.
The result is a mockery. I was tempted to say at first that most kids can probably sense it—but I don't know if that's actually true: my recollection was that I spent a lot of time being surprised that I didn't find science and math interesting, because that kind of thing was becoming part of my identity already as a 'computer person'.
Then at some point when I found actually interesting treatments of scientific subject matter I was mostly left feeling kinda ripped off that I'd been offered this watered down fake version all my life. And what was with the adults trying to convince me it was the real thing?
> There's this weird kind of fake enthusiasm that always seems to be at the foundation of attempts to get kids "interested in science". Like the adults in charge also don't know what's interesting about it
It's been discussed a lot how STEM is seen by society as this dry useless thing, that adults can safely joke about the shared experience of how they hated it, got bad grades and have forgotten it all.
They'd like to spice it up, but have no idea how. So they say, "kids are visual", make it more exciting and flashy. Put more pictures and colors in the textbooks and write them with goofy fonts... It's basically symptomatic treatment, trying to alleviate the pain of the (so-imagined) "inherently painful" and dry STEM experience. And then there's another, stricter side who's like "don't make it too much fun, let them experience that pain, I had to do it too!". Both are missing the point.
I think I wouldn't have become a science-math-computer person if I hadn't had casual conversations with my chemist dad here and there, while driving, while walking. He didn't explicitly teach me this stuff, like let's sit down and learn chemistry, but instilled in me a sense of how abstract bookish stuff is connected to the real world and how it exists even outside the framework of school. It gave me the useful ability to disconnect the teacher from the subjects. Many students like the subjects taught by kind and inspiring teachers and hate those taught by boring or malicious ones. I never studied to please the teacher, but because I wanted to understand. If the teacher was bad, I just read the book or asked my dad who'd often point out misleading simplifications or outright falsehoods in what we were supposed to memorize and recite. Learning that something can be wrong "in the book" was also very helpful.
I think there are fundamental problems with the worldview that school instills in students. On a base level people learn to separate real life and school. When someone asks a quiz-like question, it seems to exists in schoolish-bookish universe and the answer is a lookup in school memories. For example, in these street interviews, when people are asked about some everyday, relevant question (e.g. when was World War II), many would answer "I was never good at [school subject X]" (e.g. history class), instead of saying, well grandpa often tells me about those times, it was in his youth, so about 70 years ago (just an illustrative example).
My situation was very similar: I got some kind of sense of what the "real thing" was from my dad who was doing research in cognitive psychology and HCI while I was growing up.
That may be an ingredient in what creates perspectives like ours: you have to have some exposure to actual scientific thought processes to get a sense that you're being served something inferior when it comes up.
Edit: I guess one thing that was kinda weird about my situation was that my dad's area of research wasn't in the set of mainstream sciences taught in public schools, so the 'official' sciences always remained separate in my mind until much later. Meanwhile I assumed chemistry/physics/biology/math were all just extremely dull.
For my engineering degree, I had to pick between taking into to chem or intro to bio. Since I was an electrical engineer and didn't care for either subject, I put this requirement off until my senior year.
I took intro to chem because I thought it would be easier since I was mathematically inclined, but it was one of the worst educational experiences I had at university. The professor was clearly reciting the same notes he wrote 20 years earlier. The material was so trivial that the only way they could induce any sort of curve into the class was to put more questions on the exam than was reasonable to accomplish in the time period. The labs were abysmal, did not really teach any sort of generalizable lab skills, and never worked. If you asked the TAs for help, they would all gather on the far side of the lab and return 20 minutes later saying they never studied the copper cycle so they can't help you.
I dropped the class after my first exam out of frustration and decided to take intro to bio. Pretty much every complaint I had about the chemistry class was fixed in bio. The experiments even worked 9/10 times on the first try. Most importantly, though, I felt like I could take the knowledge I took from the class and use it in the future if the circumstance presented itself. Chemistry just confirmed I was able to count things properly, and I'd have no idea how to approach an actual chemical problem in the field.
You must have grokked dimensional analysis from your strong EE math background which made the class a piece of cake?
Maybe you should try organic chemistry, the curves in that class are brutal and it's almost impossible to know everything intuitively to do well in tests the first time you are exposed to the material and concepts. Fun class and topic for the intellectually curious mind.
I've also talked to my chemist friends in grad school and they admit they didn't really start liking chemistry until their junior year, which is when they felt confident they could work in a lab and figure out an experiment on their own. I noticed this is different than my engineering classes where they got us working on open ended lab problems from the first semester. Obviously our solutions were poor, but it got us feeling like we were able to apply what we were learning right away.
Organic chemistry is the bomb. I was bored to death with inorganic chemistry, maybe because of the way it was presented, but organic chemistry seemed like suddenly being shown that all the cool stuff in the world is made of lego pieces (carbon atoms), and there's a manual for how to put them together in different ways.
I wasn't exposed to it until university, but I always thought the material would make a good intro course for high school chemistry.
> all the cool stuff in the world is made of lego pieces (carbon atoms)
Amen. When I introduce organic chemistry, I use the Lego analogy.
I tell the students, "there are zillions of different organic molecules. What's weird is that you only get to 'play' with a small fraction of the periodic table in organic chemistry [C,H,O,N,P,S,F,Cl,Br ...]. So, how do you get 'zillions' of different molecules from a narrow set of elements?"
Then I show them a photo of several 2x2 Legos arranged as 1) a tower, 2) one-way staircase, 3) two-way staircase, 4) "circle"
Organic chem lab is awesome, too. I remember making isoamyl acetate (banana scent) with 30 other students and the whole lab smelled wonderful.
edit: I forgot. I worked with a guy who made a functioning spectrophotometer out of Lego parts and LEDs??. I think he got the idea from a journal devoted to undergraduate chemistry education.
edit2: I didn't read the entire blog post (because...super long), but I agree w/ the parts that I did read. e.g., "[Modern introductory chemistry is] ...sterile chemistry. It’s the equivalent of teaching kids scales before they learn to play a song, or insisting that kids learn grammar before teaching them how to write. It’s chemistry as rote and rules, with no joy to exploration."
A lot of the issue stems from presenting the information to students as if it were "the truth." A lot of what is presented isn't the truth--it's just a reasonable model to explain experimental data. And I think it's beneficial to explain that nuance to students. "This explanation/model works great under most circumstances, but it falls apart over here." I spent a large part of my undergrad years thinking everything I learned was gospel. And I wish my teachers had spent more time discussing model building based on experimental data.
I think it all comes down to the instructor. I took Organic the 1st time with a semi-famous professor who didn't want to be there and just sat next to an overhead projector and wrote down formulas for us to memorize. Boring! I squeaked by with a C. When I had to take it again for grad school because I failed the organic part of the entrance exams (imagine that) I had a completely different experience. The instructor obviously loved to teach and she taught us the principals as to why A+B=C rather than just memorizing. I loved that class and got an A.
Organic and inorganic chemistry are almost two separate subjects. I also took organic freshman year in college with a professor who I think probably ended up in the running for a Nobel Prize. I'm not sure he was particularly bad but it was a large lecture class, I hated organic and it was one of the first subjects I ever didn't really grok at some level, and actually somewhat changed majors because of it.
Inorganic on the other hand. I ended up getting a grad degree in Material Science which is closely related to aspects of solid state chemistry--so, yes, I liked aspects of chemistry. Just not organic.
The trouble with organic chemistry is that it's a lot harder than inorganic chemistry precisely because of the near-infinite complexities of organic molecules. If you want to teach people the basics, such as how to identify a sample or how to perform analytic chemistry (for example, work out how much of a compound you have got in a volume of solvent), you really have to start with inorganic chemistry.
On the other hand, understanding molecular bonding is much easier in organic chemistry. Inorganic chemistry mostly requires molecule-by-molecule computational solutions, whereas organic can get you quite far purely with rules of thumb. I majored in chemistry, and it was widely accepted that inorganic chemistry was "harder" because of the above.
My experience is exactly the opposite. Inorganic chemistry is mostly governed by the valencies of the elements reacting (and thermodynamics, of course) which are easily learned. Whereas organic chemistry is enormously complicated by the sizes and shapes of the molecules.
But as it turns out, you can (mostly) rely on some very simple rules of thumb to describe all those different sizes and shapes. There are only so many functional groups from which the organic zoo is built, and the most common ones (e.g. a benzene ring) are very well understood by now. On top of that, organic chemistry usually involves the low energy shells, for which sp-hybridization schemes work pretty well in describing the bonding.
In contrast, inorganic chemistry regularly involves higher-energy shells, that have much more complicated geometries and energy levels. Relativistic effects also come into play, and the end result is that you often can't even make a guess at what the molecular orbitals look like. And if you don't know what the molecular orbitals look like, you also don't know how the molecule will react with other molecules, since you don't know what the charge distribution is.
EDIT: the general attitude in my uni, also among the professors, was that the inorganic folks had a much harder time theoretically than the organic folks. As in, the inorganic might make a fancy new compound, yet have no idea how the molecule "worked". On the other hand, the organic folks had a much harder time experimentally - they would usually only have a few mg of product, whereas in inorganic chemistry you can often end up with as much as you like.
Inorganic gets very complicated very quickly. You end up dealing with Group Theory and 3D symmetry operations before you know it. And this is ignoring bio-inorganic chemistry, which is also very important.
Why does chemistry have to be less boring? We are not short on chemists. Take it from someone who left the field
Exploding balloons, frozen roses, elephant toothpaste are all very unlike what a chemist will do for a living after they've been lured into the field with this magician's act. Personally I don't think it's a bad thing if the classes are a little dry.
It's true chem lab is a bit too much like following cooking instructions, but as a former TA I assure you the train would come off the rails for 2/3 the class if you tried to get students to do much more in the little time they have. I had colleagues who went to undergrad in India where they still have "identify this substance" exams. They related identifying solvents and powders by smell, look, and feel. It's hardly learning the scientific method
> Why does chemistry have to be less boring? We are not short on chemists.
Years back, I saw a talk suggesting there was no general shortage of STEM employees in the US, only a need for more programmers, and for science PhD's to more easily shift research focus. Though I've heard it is a bottleneck elsewhere (eg, for Brazil spinning up an indigenous petroleum industry).
But there's also an issue of quality. US chemistry education research describes precollege chemistry education content using adjectives like incoherent, and as leaving both teachers and students steeped in misconceptions. And available STEM competence is a training challenge in many US job areas.
Less boring needn't be less dysfunctional, but less dysfunctional might be less boring.
So when I was working on education content, my line was "it's not clear there's a need, but if it's going to be widely taught anyway, it might as well be taught less wretchedly".
There's also a question, that were science education to transformatively improve, whether a now safety-focused US society would actually want a population with widespread hands-on science skill. But perhaps intensifying surveillance might bridge that gap.
Because life is short? For the legions of students that take introductory chemistry, why shouldn't making the time spent in that class interesting and engaging be a worthy goal in and of itself?
I don't get why any idea to make life better in any way is met with so much backlash. It seems like people don't want life to be better for the next generation than it was for them.
For starters, being bored sucks. I pretty much bounced off of chemistry when our TA told us we needed to memorize a list of ions (?), like PO3, PO4, etc. I wanted to know why those particular combinations mattered, as opposed to PO5, PO6, etc. Her answer: It's too hard to explain--just learn the list. Ugh.
I ended up in CS instead, where everything has an explanation. (ha)
> Exploding balloons, frozen roses, elephant toothpaste are all very unlike what a chemist will do for a living after they've been lured into the field with this magician's act.
And these aren't the goals of the article!
The way I understand it, the article argues that every listener should get a good idea of scientific process, and argues that currently a lot of them don't, since they get served only "truths" without enough context, where the story of discovering the truth is more interesting to understand properly then to memorize some details.
Having better educated citizens should be of interest to anybody. Not in the sense of "knowing the names" of anything but in having better understanding of how the world works.
The first alchemists and chemists, including the "father of modern chemistry" Lavoisier, were rich noblemen indulging in a hobby. It's true, being free from the need to earn your daily bread means you can study what you like. If only it were so for all of us
Well, I learned chemistry (UK O-level and A-level) about 50 years ago, and back then you could do almost anything you fancied with the reagents available, which did stop short of things like fluorine, but only just. Did you know you can dip your (dry) fingers into concentrated sulphuric acid and only experience a feeling of warmth, as the acid reacts with the oils of your skin? As to what we got up to with metallic sodium, carcinogenic aromatics, and noxious gases, I shudder to think about now, but we did learn a lot of chemistry on the side. We did have a brilliant teacher, though.
Real talk it is. "Bicarbonate of soda" is not a thing, either say baking soda or sodium bicarbonate. Sulfuric acid is water soluble, there is nothing wrong with washing it off under running water. There is a bit of a problem if you are washing off a lot of acid (i.e. you stuck your whole arm into a vat of acid) or if you are using a container with water rather than a source of running water. When sulfuric acid gets diluted a lot of energy gets released, so if you have a lot of acid or not enough water, you might get burned before the acid is washed away.
I had to get up to date with general and physical chemistry over the last few months for my graduate studies; my background is in theoretical physics and I've not taken any chemistry above GCSEs.
I spent my nights working through a couple of chemistry textbooks and man, I loved it. It's an exquisitely complex subject: I wouldn't call it elegant, but there's an intrinsic beauty in the sheer practicality of it.
A lot of very, very smart people I've spoken to - most of whom had taken chemistry for A-levels - have found it odd that I've enjoyed it so much. Their memories of the subject are in complete contradiction to mine (literally speaking, because they associate chemistry with memorisation).
The difference, I think, is the fact that my introduction to chemistry came after I became competent with quantum and statistical physics: the fundamental topics of physics from which chemistry as a whole springs forth. Now that I think about it, the introductory chemistry book I studied at first would have been unbearably frustrating if all I had to work with were constitutive relations and hand-wavy arguments.
Chemistry was dull until I took Atomic Physics at university (where I was reading Physics); I still remember the textbook, the masterpiece of brevity "Atomic Spectra" by T.P.Softley.
At that point, suddenly there was an underlying structure to it and it was no longer just the dull memorisation of facts that had made it my worst performing subject at secondary school (like you, GCSE was as far as I took it and I regret even wasting my time on it there). Far too late, of course; by then Chemistry was a distant blob in the rear-view mirror.
> Students are given incredibly precise instructions and told to find a certain result. If they fail to find the result, they are made to redo the “experiment”.
In my final Chemical Engineering Unit Operations lab course there was a distillation column with the associated instrumentation suffering from neglect and abuse, as indicated by the saw-tooth molar ratio across the height instead of the smooth curve one would expect. My teammates for this lab insisted that we just fake up good-looking data for the distillation column to put in our report because that's what the other teams were doing. I put my foot down and told the team that we would use the data that was recorded, and draw conclusions in the lab report about the poorly-maintained equipment, and maybe something would be done about it before the next semester.
Well sonuvabitch... We received the only passing grade on that particular unit op lab, and the department chair allocated money to refit the lab equipment.
When learning, it's not about the result as much as it is getting the process right, something from which the standardized curriculum and test culture has steered education away.
My introduction to chemistry professor lied to us about a compound we were testing in order to see who would lie about their results and who would be honest even though they thought they were going to be graded poorly. Pretty sure both the alleged compound and actual compound were mostly harmless so there was little danger in his deception and the lesson was learned by the class to not falsify experiment data.
No offense to the author, but it might be poor teachers.
My high school chemistry teacher was one of the best I've ever had. She made it very fun, and had a stream of kids taking her classes and ultimately getting 4s and 5s on the AP chemistry test. It was so much fun I spent a semester as her lab assistant.
I took Chemestry 1 and 2 in High School and the classes could not have been more different. Chem 1 was engaging with lab work, real world applications, showing what a reaction meant in real life, etc...
Chem 2 was "memorize some math, do these abstract math problems, take a test, repeat". Zero lab work. No demonstrations. Little discussion about how it relates to the world. Most kids dropped out after that.
Really, a great teacher can make anything interesting and fun.
Which is powerful and valuable. Indeed I think this next decade we'll see many great teachers become very well known and wealthy as a result of the reach and impact they'll be able to achieve online.
Me too: my high school chemistry course was one of the best courses I ever took including H.S./college/medical school. Hard and wonderful. FunFact: I too spent a semester as chemistry lab assistant in lieu of a study hall.
I had an awesome high school chemistry experience as well. Chemistry is such a "hands on" science with fire, color changes, explosions, weird reactions, etc. I'm always surprised when people think it is boring.
> The laboratory work of introductory chemistry is closer to a cookbook than an experiment. Students are given incredibly precise instructions and told to find a certain result. If they fail to find the result, they are made to redo the “experiment”.
This absolutely resonates with me. I am re-learning chemistry now, and this sticks out to me as something that frustrated me as a student. The amount of time that it took to get the experiment right sapped away all my curiosity for what I was actually doing. It's worth mentioning that part of the purpose of the labs is to teach lab techniques. But the cost seems really high to me. I think it teaches people to be good lab techs, but not good scientists.
> part of the purpose of the labs is to teach lab techniques. But the cost seems really high to me.
That cost is potentially about to change, with AR/VR-based virtual labs.
Sword combat is something that requires a lifetime of dedicated hard training, with associated injuries... or is something grandma can pick up in a few minutes and do to music. With simulation, realism can be throttled to meet user and class objectives and constraints. Exposure to real-world Murphy messiness is of course still a learning objective. But fighting it need not be quite so pervasive and costly a tax on knowledge acquisition. Especially where "the biggest payoff is having seen it/done it once" is sufficient to need. Also, challenges like getting "incorrect" results, experiment debugging, record keeping, and ethics, can be more systematically taught.
And with lab tech becoming increasingly automated...
Setting aside the semantics about what constitutes an 'experiment', constant failure due to minutiea you didn't consider in your technique is what actual science looks like. It is deeply frustrating, but it's the nature of the beast. And it's how you learn, and become a better scientist.
It's the difference between writing pseudocode that vaguely looks like it does what you want, and having an actual, executable program that works as intended. The devil's in the details.
That's true, but I think the point is that we're stifling exploration. I was trying to come up with an example challenge that would have been the right kind of experiment for me. The one that came to mind is as follows:
$10 (pick any amount) of gold is dissolved in a glass is front of the student. If they can get it back, the gold is theirs.
You can provide varying amounts of information to make the task easier or harder. Grades depend on creativity, effort, and communication.
So, the 'cooler' experiments are also more dangerous, and your example is illustrative of that. I'd be hesitant to hand students a flask of aqua regia (the only acid that can dissolve gold) and tell them to go nuts.
Ignoring the obvious safety issue of every student having an effervescent, volatile strong acid solution (which is tricky to handle safely even as an experienced chemist), there are a handful of incompatible chemical combinations with aqua regia that would require an immediate lab evacuation and call to the fire department. You'd need constraints and some serious vetting of the students' plans before you could let them touch the stuff.
I like the idea of open-ended experiments, but technique is so crucial to these things that even if they're right in theory, in practice they'd often get a negative result because of technical shortcomings of their technique. This is why you end up with cookbook experiments
If I were a teacher, I would begin an introductory chemistry course with these words: “Chemistry is the single most important area of knowledge today and for all foreseeable future. (Sorry physics.) This is because the world we live in
and we ourselves are built from atoms, and because all future progress, the very evolution of the human being, all rest now on our understanding of the limitless possibilities presented by an ability to control atoms’ behavior. It is chemistry, in its modern sense, that holds the key to the future of the humankind. We may never reach the stars, we may never understand the “true nature” of elementary particles - but that’s OK, because 99% of what’s really important for us in the world we live in can indeed be modeled - and controlled - based on the simple view of the world as a bunch of atoms interacting in certain ways.”
> Chemistry is the single most important area of knowledge
Well that's what a chemistry teacher would say, and a literature teacher would say literature is most important because it lets us understand our place in society etc. etc. The computer science teacher would say every white collar worker now works with computers, it has transformed the world as we know it, that's the most important one.
The English-as-a-foreign-language teacher would say learning English is the most important thing as it opens up the window to all the sciences, all the international news, communication across cultures, just about all employees today in any industry need to know English etc.
But of course history is the most important one because [...].
No, actually sport (PE) is the most important one, because [stats about obesity, heart disease etc.]
Or wait, no actually, scratch all that, the most important thing kids should learn is practical everyday skills, not ivory tower stuff they'll never use. So basic finance, taxes, credits, budgeting, elections, etc. all the way.
It's a trope that teachers always think their subject is the most important and give an amount of homework as if no other subject existed and students could spend all afternoon preparing for just that class.
Although as I read my comment, I think this would be pretty nice: if teachers actually pitched their subjects. But they usually just act as if it's the most important one, without arguing it.
That is more or less the same pitch of physics, while most of the important activity is taking place in the biosciences at the moment.
The underlying assumption is reductionism: if we understood atoms best, we can understand and control everything built on them. I am not sure that I can agree with you on that. Complexity makes that a pipe dream.
We understand atoms well enough already; as far as “bioscience” is concerned, the current focus is on molecular structures (chemistry in its modern sense) as the most promising direction of research.
Pretty sure every kid who hears "is the single most important area" zones out for the rest because they know it's pointless intro material. Then they zone back in for the real material.
About 10 years ago, the "honors" gen chem course at Cornell taught by Stephen Lee was attempting to do this. He might have written the course notes into a book by now but his health isn't great.
The course syllabus was presented as an onion bulb with the outer layers labeled as parts of MO theory (wavefunctions etc) and the core was the "beautiful flower" of the chemical bond, which grows out of the surrounding concepts. The course began with wavefunctions discussed in the context of audio and vibrating plates (e.g. violin bow on a square plate with salt shows its resonance modes) and built it up into first principles derivation of macroscopic observable properties of a substance.
Anyway, the coursework was absolutely brutal for most freshmen, and the premeds hated it, but about 5 percent of students every year got absolutely enamored by the beauty of solid state physics.
I don’t think the author’s patronizing attitude towards historical theories is helping his thesis much. He starts off proposing that chemistry in 50 years will be way ahead of chemistry today, and so we need to focus on how evidence from experimentation leads to theories to back them up instead of the converse. Alchemy and humors and the four elements all had some amount of observation of outcomes which lead to those theories, and later on evidence disproved them and a new theory took hold. There’s no need to talk about how silly and wrong those people were—rather, more so just how much more we know about the world.
Additionally there’s a hidden assumption that introductory chemistry should be teaching people what chemists do. I’d venture that a majority of people who take an intro chem class won’t go on to do any experimental chemistry other than baking. Their curriculum specifies that they need the class, and perhaps those theoretical concepts are built upon from a biological, medical, or physical angle. In this case, the important things to know are 1) the theory, and 2) that the theory explains the world as we know it, so that if another theory comes around to explain new evidence we don’t have “new math”-style public backlash of unfamiliarity.
There's actually an interesting online Harvard course that uses cooking to illustrate (especially) chemistry principles. [1] The course isn't perfect but it's an interesting take on using something that many people do day-to-day as a way to introduce scientific concepts.
The lecture videos are online.[1] And if you're in Boston, are open to the public (though arrive early for the line, and samples often don't make it to the back of the room).
Teaching science and cooking together seems an underutilized opportunity. There's McGee's On Food and Cooking, but... hopefully there's something better now?
There's Cooking for Geeks (Jeff Potter from O'Reilly) which is pretty good although McGee is probably still the bible. Some of Alton Brown's is also pretty good.
TBH, a lot of Home Economics translated into more modern times and a more scientific basis would probably make for pretty good curriculum additions.
This whole essay seems kinda rambling to me. Chemistry does have some issues today, but it's mainly due to whom the audience for the Chemistry is meant for. For example, it seems for a long time, Chemistry classes have been used to weed people out of majors who aren't really committed to the sciences/engineering. Gen Chem and O Chem both have been used for this. I think the authors issue may be that he's not a Chem major, and most of the information that is being given to him was not useful for his major or seemed to lack coherence to him. And if you aren't a Chem major, I can see this. But if you are a Chem major, then everything you learn in Gen Chem will be useful to you in all of your other Chem courses. I see it being addressed now a bit more than when I was in college. For example, you will see more O Chem courses that are being directed at Bio type majors versus an O Chem class that is directed at a Chem major. I think this is a good thing, most Bio majors probably won't need as rigorous a course in O Chem as a Chem/BioChem major would.
Perhaps it should be. Keeping only the genuine interested engaged and a high bar of entry, we end up with only the competent actually pursuing a career in chemistry. Similarly, front-end development and javascript was (and is) not boring and look at where we are now. Nobody should be complaining that <insert branch of science where if you fuck up people die> is boring.
I was bored of chemistry until I started cheating on tests. Somehow creating my own system to represent all those reactions so I can cram all of them in 3pt font on a 3x1cm piece of paper has gotten me sufficiently interested that at some point I realised I've learnt it.
This is why many collegiate level exams now permit you to cram as many equations, rules, etc. as will fit on a single piece of paper (one side) and use it during the exam.
> In 100 years, this was the shift. Chemistry, as something that one did, was relegated to more advanced courses. You would no longer be able to do chemistry by taking an intro course alone.
> The regress, then, would come in disregarding the empirical evidence entirely, and transforming chemistry entirely into something that one learned, rather than did.
The author makes some good points.
There are also some interesting connections to software.
The way many kids today learn how to write software today is by doing and using first, and only later learning what they're doing. That's possible thanks to the relentless compound effect of Moore's Law operating over six decades or so.
It doesn't work that way in chemistry. Chemistry kits used to be commonplace up until the 70s. Various chemicals (such as acetone, concentrated isopropanol, and even certain drugs) used to be commonly available over the counter without hassle. Safety concerns have obliterated that pathway. There has been no Moore's Law making chemistry safer, cleaner, or more engaging over the last 60 years.
So the path to professional chemist (or even enthusiastic amateur) is completely different from the path to professional programmer.
Oddly enough, I see YouTube starting to re-kindle the idea that you can do amazing things at home with some ordinary materials and a little know-how. No, you don't have to read the whole damn book and take all the tests before showing off.
Tinkering with powerful things you're not qualified to use is incredibly addictive.
I think the pedagogical methods could be much improves if it began from the standpoints of something like:
"we're going to go through the history of the development of Chemistry, beginning with alchemists, and work our way forward with the principles discovered and labs the illustrate those principles."
Instead, from what I remember, we started with "Memorize the periodic table and the molecular weights of each element. Quiz on Friday."
Introductory chemistry that would be interesting would trend towards the expensive and the dangerous. I'm not sure how you fix that - high schools are not going to be letting kids do metallurgy or create black powder fireworks, so you are going to be stuck with the mostly pointless and very boring lab work.
"Interesting" doesn't have to mean "spectacle". Getting a few droplets of water out of a burning candle isn't riveting to watch but its still very interesting.
> "Interesting" doesn't have to mean "spectacle". Getting a few droplets of water out of a burning candle isn't riveting to watch but its still very interesting.
Judging by the amount of stimulation thrown at kids these days, getting water out of a burning candle will most likely be classified between 'meh' to 'ok boomer'.
That is probably going to appeal to about one half of a typical chemistry class, and leave the other half bored and sullen.
My experience of chemistry was that it was very abstract nonsense that was taught to us, which is incredibly sad, when chemistry is all around us all the time, and understanding how it works is invaluable. There are myriad practical examples to investigate. Why do your baking powder biscuits rise? Why does the octane rating of your gasoline matter? Photography. How does epoxy work? Etc, etc.
What we actually did was a lot of tedious equation balancing on paper, and titrating liquids.
Yup the same. I don’t remember a single lab, all I remember is the equation balancing which was dictated from above without any explanation as to why it worked or was relevant to reality.
I had a chemistry book that I read cover to cover multiple times as a kid. It introduced the periodic table, went through every major group, explained reactions, acid/bases, oxidation, fission and fusion. It was a pretty solid textbook. What was it that got me to read it over and over? Every single page had something that related to real life. What's a noble gas and why is it interesting? Well, it doesn't catch fire or corrode things, but it has this neat property when you create an electric arc in it's presence. Here are the subatomic properties that give rise to it's macroscopic properties. I'm sure it was simplified but it was presented in a fun way that encouraged my sense of wonder.
Good writing should be compelling. This true for every subject.
There really needs to be two different general chemistry tracks, one for the students that are thinking about studying chemistry and one for everyone else. Where I went to college the general chemistry classes were very much designed with the assumption that the students taking them would go on to study chemistry. Despite this actually being a minority of the students taking them. For those of us that did study chemistry, I think they prepared us well for subsequent course and lab work. For those that didn't and just needed to satisfy the requirement, I imagine they were very tedious.
I think the whole problem is that people think experiments are less important than they really are. I agree with the idea of doing experiments to test a theory. This is in general. It applies in any field.
I've tutored people in how to do an experiment. They believed an experiment had failed when in reality they had learnt something useful. The experiment really fails when you learnt nothing, didn't get any useful result and it didn't help to confirm or deny anything. An inconclusive result is actually a signal that the experiment needs to be done better somehow - not that the experiment was a failure.
Science gets taught badly as some kind of dogma when experimental process is not understood. Plenty of people don't understand that the core of science is taking the position of not knowing why, coming up with a theory then finding experimental ways to confirm or deny and then improving the theory. They instead teach it as a set of facts, laws and rules. Ignorance of anything is punished or ridiculed. Challenging that dogma results in punishment.
"I don't know" is actually the first step towards real knowledge and discovery. Schools shouldn't teach that this is sinful. They confuse the essential background knowledge as the entire field. Just the facts. Only teach the facts and punish anyone who can't regurgitate them mindlessly.
How are you going to have enough humility to try several different approaches and accept being wrong on most of them if you're too scared to be wrong on even one of them? You have to accept being wrong. Anyone who isn't wrong often enough probably isn't asking or questioning hard, wide or large enough. You need to fail because if not, you're probably not experimenting. If you're not failing then you are not asking enough questions or your questions lack depth.
Rocket launches are a classic example. If you haven't failed at least multiple times you haven't actually tried hard enough. Difficult things require plenty of experimentation. You have to risk being wrong on each attempt. Try something new or confirm something is true. Better to explode on the launchpad during experimentation than lie about your level of understanding and risk some real payload or even worse, people's lives.
Writers have a similar refrain: if you haven't been rejected lately you aren't writing enough or you aren't pushing enough boundaries.
My Chemistry 101 class in college that I just took for elective credits was fun and interesting. It had a lab class too that was harder for me but overall good experience. It made connections to past physics class knowledge which I enjoyed too. A lot of concepts stuck with me from it. Mileage must vary.
Do schools even have chem labs these days? Are the burners hooked up? Mine were, but the kids i talk to now increasingly dont get to do real chemistry. It's becoming just a book class for them.
I did not complete more than a hand full of college courses, though one of the was an intro to chem. I absolutely loved it, despite it being one of those once-a-week (Sunday morning) multi-hour slogs.
My particular complaint was, too much focus in covalent x ionic bonds, while metallic bonds were ignored completely. Not sure if current local high school curriculum still does this.
My introductory chemistry (and later physics) teacher was a fantastic, out of this world individual. On the first day he told us about friar roger bacon setting off gun powder to scare away some folks and then our teacher lit a pile of gunpowder on fire (which burns rapidly but does not explode). Hell of a way to start the class, and he had physical demos and historical stories every day that tied in to his lessons.
I'm sorry, but that is a _very_ poor argumentation. In fact, it's just a rant.
Maybe I should let this pass but this essay really rubs me the wrong way. I would like to stress that the author is _not_ a chemist. That was obvious before he wrote it in his text. He does not have formal training in the discipline (art?) and thus his opinion should be taken with serious skepticism.
On the other hand, I am a (published) college trained chemist, specialised in computational/theoretical chemistry in grad school but I did go through a very good program with anywhere between 10-15 hours of lab work every week, every year. Contrary to the author, I remember the names of all the textbooks I used because I spent so much time with them. Really, the author seems frustrated with his own _very_ limited experience of chemistry.
There is a reason why we "follow recipes". Mishandling of chemicals can and do cause injuries. Labs do get blown up. For all of my education, entrance to any laboratory was conditional on passing a test. Every time. One would be evaluated by either graduate students or professors before being allowed in. If you did not know what you were going to do, how you were going to do it, why you were doing it, what you should expect to happen, along with any other necessary information deemed essential by the instructors, you would be refused access to the lab and consequently get 0 in the mandatory laboratory report. And accidents _still_ happened, sometimes innocuous, sometimes dangerous to the point of having to evacuate the lab for a few minutes.
Not all experiments were "cookbook laboratory work" either. From the very first lab session, students had agency in how you plan and execute your experiment. No two students held notes exactly the same, for example. And no two students researched the subject as much beforehand, something which was _very_ obvious during lab work. Sharing a laboratory with students who did not prepare properly is dangerous in a way you can't really grasp until you're three hours into a multi-step anhydrous synthesis, you need to act fast to add a reagent in your air-free setup and the student next to you flushes a syringe of oxalyl chloride[1] in the sink beside you.
We _did_ have to analyse unknown compounds. We _did_ have a lot of liberty in how we conducted experiments, as long as we prepared well and acted safely. Practicing balancing chemical equations is NOT useless as the author suggests. Contrary to what he seems to believe, empirical evidence is _all there is_. Theories have to conform to reality, not the other way around.
All in all, this is a very bad argumentation that _completely_ misses the point. The author is talking about general chemistry as if it defines a complete chemical education. In actuality, general chemistry is only the very most basic knowledge one needs to have to be allowed in a lab. Chemistry doesn't stop there.
I was ready to give the author a chance but he has shown himself to be unqualified to discuss the topic. Being a dilettante is fine but there is a mountain of work separating a dilettante and a professional. Nobody on HN would seriously consider a rant about the current state of Medical education written by someone who had 2 semesters of biology.
Thank you! So much of this discussion is formed by a personal dislike of the topic or bad classroom experiences. I, personally, find accounting to be dreadfully boring, but I don't feel that the pedagogy of the field as a whole needs to conform to my particular tastes.
Also, lots of suggestions of incredibly dangerous classroom experiments to jazz things up, coming from people who don't know the dangers of the reactions they're proposing.
This is a bad idea. If you don't do your due diligence, you end up setting school children on fire [0].
Considering plenty of chemistry can melt your face off or dissolve your lungs or otherwise make you disappear I'm happy that chemists have the sense to invoke formality and protocol in how they proceed. I'm guessing the better specimens are able to write their own protocols; know how they fail; know beforehand what is likely to happen and how to deal with it all. The lesser ones are likely ticking time bombs of rapid poisoning and spontaneous combustion.
"Look at the boring explosion. Did that entire hillside just vaporise? How boring!"
Said no one ever
I remember a chemistry teacher running around in panic because he dropped a sample of something (phosphorus or sodium ?) on his shoe and it was stuck. He had carefully taken it out of a small oil filled container. Smoke filled the room. His shoe was burnt and four classes surrounding that lab were evacuated.
One unfortunate truth is that even if you make class interesting, most of the time "interesting" does not transfer to "learning". Most students only pay attention to the fun part which includes color, sound, visual effects, etc. but they quickly lose attention when cognitive engagement gets involved.
Every teacher can learn a few tricks to make class fun, but it is very difficult to keep students engaged in learning conceptual and theoretical knowledge.
Some students are problem-solvers. A cognitive gap between the problem and the solution is enough to keep them motivated and engaged.
What you really need IMO is to make lessons relevant to students. And I mean personally, deeply relevant, not "I need this arbitrary piece of trivia to jump through the next arbitrary hoop on an arbitrary series of hoops they keep throwing at us for some weird reason" relevant.
I agree. Relevance is something that lessons need and much of the curriculum I encountered in school did a pretty poor job of explaining why I might want to learn a thing. But then again, a lot of students are in a class precisely because it's a hoop they have to jump through (this was me in a lot of classes). And there is only so much a teacher can do to entice these students into interest and enthusiasm.
I really enjoyed taking Chemistry in college, especially the labs. I learned a lot and found it to be far more engaging that my Mathematics curriculum.
The problem with Chemistry is that to do anything interesting professionally, you must have a PhD. The PhD in Chemistry is a long, difficult slog.
If you give teenagers a bunch of chemicals and tell them to learn by experiment, they'll probably end up doing bad stuff (drugs / poisons / explosions), either by accident or on purpose.
In 1850, society was a lot more accepting of this kind of thing than it is now.
Perhaps increasing concern for safety, and liability, and more recently, regulation of narcotics and explosive supply chains.
It's a meme that a 1950's and earlier chemistry set couldn't be sold now, for all of the above. But apparently sets were already changing with increasing concern for safety from the 1960's on.
VR/AR changes the relationship between safety and practice, so it'll be interesting to see what happens next.
Back 25 years ago I was convinced that that entire class could have been taught as an extension of more concrete subjects (electronics, computer graphics, signals, etc) that simply weren't taught in the high school I went to, despite the fact it was what we now call a STEM magnet school. Classes I later wished I could retake, if only to pick up on all the math subtleties I mostly ignored because it all seemed so pointless.
Now that I have kids, I see that nothing has really changed. Sure they get a lot of "word problems", but the problems are so artificial they might just be worded as "what is the result of adding A and B and dividing by C" for all the natural concepts they get across.
Thankfully I had a pretty reasonable chemistry teacher, who did a lot of demos and gave us interresting experiments to keep the class from being a bunch of random facts.