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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

#81

Post by omar_a1 »

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…

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.

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

#82

Post by mncharity »

ghaff wrote: post #68
ethhics wrote: post #37

Good article, interesting material to think over. 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 amo…

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. [1] https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/science-and-cooki...

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?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL546CD09EA2399DAB

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

#84

Post by decebalus1 »

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 is boring.

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

#85

Post by phaedryx »

jlarocco wrote: post #17

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 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.

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

#86

Post by stefco_ »

oefrha wrote: post #59
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 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

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.

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

#87

Post by ghaff »

mncharity wrote: post #82
ghaff wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [1] https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/science-and-cooki...

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? [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL546CD09EA2399DAB

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.

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

#88

Post by EliRivers »

maestrokuro wrote: post #62

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 o…

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.

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

#89

Post by awayfromhomenow »

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…

funny you should mention that: I saw a YouTube video last week that went through some linear algebra real-world uses - edge-detection being one of them... it would have been awesome to have been told/shown that rather than just "study this".

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

#90

Post by omar_a1 »

peterlk wrote: post #56
intrepidhero wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 ha…

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

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