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

> 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

It's been discussed a lot how STEM is seen by society as this dry useless thing, that adults can safely joke about the shared experience of how they hated it, got bad grades and have forgotten it all.

They'd like to spice it up, but have no idea how. So they say, "kids are visual", make it more exciting and flashy. Put more pictures and colors in the textbooks and write them with goofy fonts... It's basically symptomatic treatment, trying to alleviate the pain of the (so-imagined) "inherently painful" and dry STEM experience. And then there's another, stricter side who's like "don't make it too much fun, let them experience that pain, I had to do it too!". Both are missing the point.

I think I wouldn't have become a science-math-computer person if I hadn't had casual conversations with my chemist dad here and there, while driving, while walking. He didn't explicitly teach me this stuff, like let's sit down and learn chemistry, but instilled in me a sense of how abstract bookish stuff is connected to the real world and how it exists even outside the framework of school. It gave me the useful ability to disconnect the teacher from the subjects. Many students like the subjects taught by kind and inspiring teachers and hate those taught by boring or malicious ones. I never studied to please the teacher, but because I wanted to understand. If the teacher was bad, I just read the book or asked my dad who'd often point out misleading simplifications or outright falsehoods in what we were supposed to memorize and recite. Learning that something can be wrong "in the book" was also very helpful.

I think there are fundamental problems with the worldview that school instills in students. On a base level people learn to separate real life and school. When someone asks a quiz-like question, it seems to exists in schoolish-bookish universe and the answer is a lookup in school memories. For example, in these street interviews, when people are asked about some everyday, relevant question (e.g. when was World War II), many would answer "I was never good at [school subject X]" (e.g. history class), instead of saying, well grandpa often tells me about those times, it was in his youth, so about 70 years ago (just an illustrative example).

I would guess students that are more interested in pure math are a minority though. I definitely don't think this group should be ignored, but perhaps the core classes could be more "practical" while still offering advanced pure math electives (potentially through a magnet type school that services multiple "regular" school districts). I believe it is already pretty common for universities to have multiple offerings of the same general math subject to this end, although this might be limited to schools with larger STEM programs.

IME K-12 math wasn't taught in a very engaging way regardless of whether one was interested in theory or applications. The people I knew that were into math all did after school and/or summer courses, although I don't know whether the interest came before or after their parents enrolled them in these supplements. Personally I did not think math was interesting until undergraduate, where I first gained an appreciation of the applied work and subsequently found myself interested in some pure math areas as well. I wish I had realized how cool math can be earlier on in my education- I do recall enjoying very early math, but I think by 5th grade I was unfortunately jaded.

I guess I ultimately wish high schools had a bit more diversity in classes. I don't know if this is feasible, but I feel by grades 11 and 12 it would be greatly beneficial if students had more choice between a number of focused electives. Even at my high school which was generally considered high quality, the upper level courses were largely the standard AP curricula, which at least in the case of biology was still very much a survey course. I don't think this helped students decide what they wanted to pursue enough, and it seems that freshman year of college for most people was largely a repeat. Why not let students get some sense of a couple subfields before they have to actually commit to something?

Online courses can maybe help but I feel they will have to be grounded somehow in the high schools to be fully effective. Anyways this got a bit off topic, but if anyone has any related information/thoughts I'd love to hear it- I am certainly interested in education but don't have much practical knowledge/experience outside of my own bubble at this time.

I told my kid that math might be boring perhaps through the end of high school because the time was taken up learning the “alphabet” of math, and see what the boring process learning the actual alphabet resulted in? I guess he believed me as he became a math major.

This is a bit of a rant.

For my engineering degree, I had to pick between taking into to chem or intro to bio. Since I was an electrical engineer and didn't care for either subject, I put this requirement off until my senior year.

I took intro to chem because I thought it would be easier since I was mathematically inclined, but it was one of the worst educational experiences I had at university. The professor was clearly reciting the same notes he wrote 20 years earlier. The material was so trivial that the only way they could induce any sort of curve into the class was to put more questions on the exam than was reasonable to accomplish in the time period. The labs were abysmal, did not really teach any sort of generalizable lab skills, and never worked. If you asked the TAs for help, they would all gather on the far side of the lab and return 20 minutes later saying they never studied the copper cycle so they can't help you.

I dropped the class after my first exam out of frustration and decided to take intro to bio. Pretty much every complaint I had about the chemistry class was fixed in bio. The experiments even worked 9/10 times on the first try. Most importantly, though, I felt like I could take the knowledge I took from the class and use it in the future if the circumstance presented itself. Chemistry just confirmed I was able to count things properly, and I'd have no idea how to approach an actual chemical problem in the field.

I think the whole problem is that people think experiments are less important than they really are. I agree with the idea of doing experiments to test a theory. This is in general. It applies in any field.

I've tutored people in how to do an experiment. They believed an experiment had failed when in reality they had learnt something useful. The experiment really fails when you learnt nothing, didn't get any useful result and it didn't help to confirm or deny anything. An inconclusive result is actually a signal that the experiment needs to be done better somehow - not that the experiment was a failure.

Science gets taught badly as some kind of dogma when experimental process is not understood. Plenty of people don't understand that the core of science is taking the position of not knowing why, coming up with a theory then finding experimental ways to confirm or deny and then improving the theory. They instead teach it as a set of facts, laws and rules. Ignorance of anything is punished or ridiculed. Challenging that dogma results in punishment.

"I don't know" is actually the first step towards real knowledge and discovery. Schools shouldn't teach that this is sinful. They confuse the essential background knowledge as the entire field. Just the facts. Only teach the facts and punish anyone who can't regurgitate them mindlessly.

How are you going to have enough humility to try several different approaches and accept being wrong on most of them if you're too scared to be wrong on even one of them? You have to accept being wrong. Anyone who isn't wrong often enough probably isn't asking or questioning hard, wide or large enough. You need to fail because if not, you're probably not experimenting. If you're not failing then you are not asking enough questions or your questions lack depth.

Rocket launches are a classic example. If you haven't failed at least multiple times you haven't actually tried hard enough. Difficult things require plenty of experimentation. You have to risk being wrong on each attempt. Try something new or confirm something is true. Better to explode on the launchpad during experimentation than lie about your level of understanding and risk some real payload or even worse, people's lives.

Writers have a similar refrain: if you haven't been rejected lately you aren't writing enough or you aren't pushing enough boundaries.