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
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