Why introductory chemistry is boring: a long-term historical perspective • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by acqq » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 8:32 PM UTC

papreclip wrote: post #30

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 cook…

> 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.

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

#72

Post by mncharity » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 8:32 PM UTC

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…

> 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...

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

#73

Post by chongli » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 8:39 PM UTC

thereisnospork wrote: post #65

oefrha wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fruitfu…

>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?…

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.

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

#74

Post by chongli » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 8:45 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #61

esoterica wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#75

Post by jimmaswell » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 8:45 PM UTC

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.

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

#76

Post by ghaff » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 8:50 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #22

dreen wrote: post #13

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.

This isn't really new though. As I recall, it was the norm quite a few decades ago for me.

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

#77

Post by AlexMoffat » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 8:51 PM UTC

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…

Distillation using benzene. I remember that. Not something anyone is allowed to do now, and rightly so.

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

#78

Post by tmaly » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

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…

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.

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

#79

Post by tsimionescu » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

jcims wrote: post #35

madengr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I hated was having to memorize orbitals in freshman chemistry, then after taking modern physics as a junior, the orbitals were deduced easily. Anyway, I hated chemistry, as it seemed all rote memorization. Physics was so much better. It’s also more applicable to RF.

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 somet…

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.

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

#80

Post by mncharity » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

csense wrote: post #28

I wonder if it's related to liability. 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.