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

This whole essay seems kinda rambling to me. Chemistry does have some issues today, but it's mainly due to whom the audience for the Chemistry is meant for. For example, it seems for a long time, Chemistry classes have been used to weed people out of majors who aren't really committed to the sciences/engineering. Gen Chem and O Chem both have been used for this. I think the authors issue may be that he's not a Chem major, and most of the information that is being given to him was not useful for his major or seemed to lack coherence to him. And if you aren't a Chem major, I can see this. But if you are a Chem major, then everything you learn in Gen Chem will be useful to you in all of your other Chem courses. I see it being addressed now a bit more than when I was in college. For example, you will see more O Chem courses that are being directed at Bio type majors versus an O Chem class that is directed at a Chem major. I think this is a good thing, most Bio majors probably won't need as rigorous a course in O Chem as a Chem/BioChem major would.

My highschool chemistry class required us to memorize that stuff, but they also let us use graphing calculators on every test... Memorizing it still pays off because it saves time, but I think a load of students didn't bother and just 'cheated.'

(I'm not really convinced this is truly a form of cheating since if you look up the answer frequently enough you'll end up memorizing it by accident anyway. You can only look up Pb so many times before you start to remember it means lead.)

I'm sorry, but that is a _very_ poor argumentation. In fact, it's just a rant.

Maybe I should let this pass but this essay really rubs me the wrong way. I would like to stress that the author is _not_ a chemist. That was obvious before he wrote it in his text. He does not have formal training in the discipline (art?) and thus his opinion should be taken with serious skepticism.

On the other hand, I am a (published) college trained chemist, specialised in computational/theoretical chemistry in grad school but I did go through a very good program with anywhere between 10-15 hours of lab work every week, every year. Contrary to the author, I remember the names of all the textbooks I used because I spent so much time with them. Really, the author seems frustrated with his own _very_ limited experience of chemistry.

There is a reason why we "follow recipes". Mishandling of chemicals can and do cause injuries. Labs do get blown up. For all of my education, entrance to any laboratory was conditional on passing a test. Every time. One would be evaluated by either graduate students or professors before being allowed in. If you did not know what you were going to do, how you were going to do it, why you were doing it, what you should expect to happen, along with any other necessary information deemed essential by the instructors, you would be refused access to the lab and consequently get 0 in the mandatory laboratory report. And accidents _still_ happened, sometimes innocuous, sometimes dangerous to the point of having to evacuate the lab for a few minutes.

Not all experiments were "cookbook laboratory work" either. From the very first lab session, students had agency in how you plan and execute your experiment. No two students held notes exactly the same, for example. And no two students researched the subject as much beforehand, something which was _very_ obvious during lab work. Sharing a laboratory with students who did not prepare properly is dangerous in a way you can't really grasp until you're three hours into a multi-step anhydrous synthesis, you need to act fast to add a reagent in your air-free setup and the student next to you flushes a syringe of oxalyl chloride[1] in the sink beside you.

We _did_ have to analyse unknown compounds. We _did_ have a lot of liberty in how we conducted experiments, as long as we prepared well and acted safely. Practicing balancing chemical equations is NOT useless as the author suggests. Contrary to what he seems to believe, empirical evidence is _all there is_. Theories have to conform to reality, not the other way around.

All in all, this is a very bad argumentation that _completely_ misses the point. The author is talking about general chemistry as if it defines a complete chemical education. In actuality, general chemistry is only the very most basic knowledge one needs to have to be allowed in a lab. Chemistry doesn't stop there.

I was ready to give the author a chance but he has shown himself to be unqualified to discuss the topic. Being a dilettante is fine but there is a mountain of work separating a dilettante and a professional. Nobody on HN would seriously consider a rant about the current state of Medical education written by someone who had 2 semesters of biology.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxalyl_chloride

Thank you! So much of this discussion is formed by a personal dislike of the topic or bad classroom experiences. I, personally, find accounting to be dreadfully boring, but I don't feel that the pedagogy of the field as a whole needs to conform to my particular tastes.

Also, lots of suggestions of incredibly dangerous classroom experiments to jazz things up, coming from people who don't know the dangers of the reactions they're proposing.

This is a bad idea. If you don't do your due diligence, you end up setting school children on fire [0].

[0]http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/2019/06/civil-trial-of-nyc-te...

In my view, math suffers from getting pulled in multiple directions all at once. It is:

* A tool for solving practical problems.

* A sorting hat for the more lucrative college majors.

* An introduction to formal thinking and abstraction.

* A score in a tournament called high school.

* A source of entertainment, mystery, and beauty.

It's hard to convey all of these things at once, and there may be social or political pressures to prioritize certain aspects over others. I was a math / physics double major, and then went to gradual school in physics. I was propelled by different aspects of math at different times, perhaps as I passed from one mentor to the next, or was swayed by my many side interests (programming, electronics, music).

I've tried explaining to my kids that the curriculum du jour, whatever it is, will give them practice with the mechanics of math, so that they're not bogged down in it when they're ready to meet math on their own terms.