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

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

#41

Post by samatman »

MadWombat wrote: post #15
zabzonk wrote: post #3

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 s…

> fingers into concentrated sulphuric acid You might want to wash your fingers under a lot of cold water after that :)

Real talk: don't do this.

Instead, wash the affected area with bicarbonate of soda. Then cold water.

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

#42

Post by datashow »

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.

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

#43

Post by edge17 »

StillBored wrote: post #18

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…

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)

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

#44

Post by malkarouri »

Koshkin wrote: post #34

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 presente…

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.

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

#45

Post by TeMPOraL »

datashow wrote: post #42

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…

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.

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

#46

Post by xkcd-sucks »

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.

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

#47

Post by fooker »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #25
black6 wrote: post #14

> 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…

I refused to "do a Hubble" and recorded the results I got and got marked down for poor experimental accuracy. Aside, I hate the practice of calling demonstrations "experiments".

What is "do a Hubble"?

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

#48

Post by turk73 »

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.

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

#49

Post by intrepidhero »

peterlk wrote: post #31

> 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 too…

I'm not sure you can have one without the other.

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

#50

Post by TaylorAlexander »

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.

Here’s a great video on the man: https://youtu.be/gX2vPmp2sSE

And his course notes are here: http://boomeria.com/

Truly a rare a special individual.

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