Why introductory chemistry is boring: a long-term historical perspective

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.

> 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.

Certainly, don't pick your nose :)

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.

Michael Faraday's Chemistry History of a Candle.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0INsTTU1k2UCpOfRuMDR...

"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.