Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

get21stnight.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 143 posts

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

#91

Post by awayfromhomenow »

mncharity wrote: post #66
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…

> 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 chemis…

You used to be able to learn how to produce explosives via the Encyclopedia Britannica... now, not so much.

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

#92

Post by yters »

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…

My interest in math and all things STEMy stemmed from computer games. Then I realized basic solutions could be generalized, and that got me interested in more abstract aspects of mathematics.

I think a curriculum based around game programming could provide a concrete context for many STEM disciplines.

Then you get into the story, consistent gameworld, art and sound side of computer games and you can introduce humanities subjects such as the classics, philosophy, art, and music.

So, in short, we could base an entire Uni curriculum, spanning the sciences and arts, all centered around creating a computer game.

And best of all, the student's capstone will be something any person can play, instead of dragging themselves through pages and pages of hard to read writing.

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

#93

Post by bonoboTP »

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…

> Chemistry is the single most important area of knowledge

Well that's what a chemistry teacher would say, and a literature teacher would say literature is most important because it lets us understand our place in society etc. etc. The computer science teacher would say every white collar worker now works with computers, it has transformed the world as we know it, that's the most important one.

The English-as-a-foreign-language teacher would say learning English is the most important thing as it opens up the window to all the sciences, all the international news, communication across cultures, just about all employees today in any industry need to know English etc.

But of course history is the most important one because [...].

No, actually sport (PE) is the most important one, because [stats about obesity, heart disease etc.]

Or wait, no actually, scratch all that, the most important thing kids should learn is practical everyday skills, not ivory tower stuff they'll never use. So basic finance, taxes, credits, budgeting, elections, etc. all the way.

It's a trope that teachers always think their subject is the most important and give an amount of homework as if no other subject existed and students could spend all afternoon preparing for just that class.

Although as I read my comment, I think this would be pretty nice: if teachers actually pitched their subjects. But they usually just act as if it's the most important one, without arguing it.

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

#94

Post by Retric »

stefco_ wrote: post #86
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 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…

Practical does not mean interesting. A lot of math is based around accounting and taxes.

How big is this field and how do I split it evenly into N pieces. That’s more or less why Geometry was considered foundational for so long. Carpenters are often used as examples, but they generally avoid anything mathematically complicated instead using simple rules.

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

#95

Post by obilecantrem »

There really needs to be two different general chemistry tracks, one for the students that are thinking about studying chemistry and one for everyone else. Where I went to college the general chemistry classes were very much designed with the assumption that the students taking them would go on to study chemistry. Despite this actually being a minority of the students taking them. For those of us that did study chemistry, I think they prepared us well for subsequent course and lab work. For those that didn't and just needed to satisfy the requirement, I imagine they were very tedious.

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

#96

Post by bonoboTP »

I always hated experiments in chemistry class, as it was always boring and trivial. Kids who liked it, did so because it was a time to slack off, watch colors change, play around with the props etc. It didn't help in understanding anything and was as detached from the rest of the chemistry lessons as if it was a subject to itself.

Interestingly, as a student I also disliked whenever the book went in the direction that TFA recommends: explaining the experimental underpinnings of theory. It always felt unsatisfactory, like a "God of gaps" argument. Whenever the student was not ready to hear the detailed derivations from more basic principles (advanced topics), the justification was just "experiments have shown that [...]". Many times I found out there are more basic underlying reasons and felt cheated. I wanted to understand how the universe works, not who discovered it and when.

My young self would think, leave me alone with pictures of dusty old books and people with funny hair, I want to know how the universe is structured. We're just a speck of dust in the grand scheme of the universe, I want to learn about galaxies, planets, elements. These are what any objective observer, like aliens, would care about, not the lives of some humans hundreds of years ago.

Today I understand better that I was already thinking inside of a certain scientific framework which very much depends on the guys with the funny hairs, and the way things are conceptualized aren't really inevitable, they are models, with imperfections and there's no magic source of authority who knows the answer to everything. We don't have the blueprints from God and learning more about the process of scientific discovery would have been useful perhaps. Too bad that the average school teacher would not be up for that task. Nor would most 10-14-year-olds have the necessary intellectual framework and abstraction in place to understand what is even being discussed. "I'm the teacher and this is how things are" is much easier to get across.

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

#97

Post by _dw7s »

JackRabbitSlim wrote: post #20
thrower123 wrote: post #2

Introductory chemistry that would be interesting would trend towards the expensive and the dangerous. I'm not sure how you fix that - high schools are not going to be letting kids do metallurgy or create black powder fireworks, so you are going to be stuck with the mostly pointless and very boring lab work.

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.

> "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.

Judging by the amount of stimulation thrown at kids these days, getting water out of a burning candle will most likely be classified between 'meh' to 'ok boomer'.

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

#98

Post by ineedasername »

I think the pedagogical methods could be much improves if it began from the standpoints of something like:

"we're going to go through the history of the development of Chemistry, beginning with alchemists, and work our way forward with the principles discovered and labs the illustrate those principles."

Instead, from what I remember, we started with "Memorize the periodic table and the molecular weights of each element. Quiz on Friday."

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

#99

Post by westoncb »

bonoboTP wrote: post #96

I always hated experiments in chemistry class, as it was always boring and trivial. Kids who liked it, did so because it was a time to slack off, watch colors change, play around with the props etc. It didn't help in understanding anything and was as detached from the rest of the chemistry lessons as if it was a subject to itself. Interestingly, as a student I also disliked whenever the book went in the direction tha…

This echoes my experience. It wasn't until I was 17 or so that I figured out through independent reading that there actually are ideas in scientific work.

There's this weird kind of fake enthusiasm that always seems to be at the foundation of attempts to get kids "interested in science". Like the adults in charge also don't know what's interesting about it—or they're otherwise not "up for the task" as you say—so they instead just extract a bunch of idea-free surface details from the subject, and prop them up with outsized enthusiasm.

The result is a mockery. I was tempted to say at first that most kids can probably sense it—but I don't know if that's actually true: my recollection was that I spent a lot of time being surprised that I didn't find science and math interesting, because that kind of thing was becoming part of my identity already as a 'computer person'.

Then at some point when I found actually interesting treatments of scientific subject matter I was mostly left feeling kinda ripped off that I'd been offered this watered down fake version all my life. And what was with the adults trying to convince me it was the real thing?

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

#100

Post by downerending »

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…

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)

Post reply on HN