This guy is apparently a widely cited education scholar not an extremist Marxist or whatever: “You Can’t Get There from Here” Johnstone 2010 [PDF]: https://sci-hub.se/10.1021/ed800026d
“capitalist competition makes us stronger and more innovative”
sorry radlibs but there’s a reason why 35% of students in your shitty designed STEM classes drop out, they aren’t stupid for getting bad grades. You’re the stupid one for being so ignorant that you’ve managed to fail to educate people for over 60 years. I take back everything I said about “western kids want to be Twitch streaming gamers lol they’re losers”, these families literally have not had access to a decent science education for three generations!
Are we still persisting in making our students sick of chemistry because “that is how chemistry is done here”? Who set the scene? How did it all come about?
The answer lies not with some malevolent group of people, but with a response made in the 1960s in the United States and throughout the Western world to combat the perceived threat of Russian scientific supremacy. ChemStudy and Chemical Bond Approach sprang up in the United States, Scottish Alternative Chemistry and Nuffield Chemistry appeared in the UK, and similar schemes were launched
the PMC class of finance imperialism educators are a malevolent group of people, Jeffrey Epstein was a NYC math teacher 
his suggestions for improved chem curriculum
Begin with the idea of the filter that is driven by what the learners already know and by what interests them. There is no point in beginning a course in chemistry with a treatment of atomic electronic configuration or bonding because the anchorages in long-term memory are not there. Without attachments in long-term memory, a student can only learn by rote methods. An approach to chemistry through acids, bases, and salts is unlikely to stir students with enthusiasm. Apart from common table salt, how many salts are in place in long-term memory to provide relevance and reality for the learner? On the face of it, inorganic compounds are “simple”, but are they? So many wrong concepts are introduced by teachers or constructed by the learners in this area of chemistry. A glance at a book of chemical data will show the absurdity of suggesting that sodium (or any other metal) is “anxious” to lose electrons and chlorine is “desperate” to accept them. It is too soon to introduce lattice energy or hydration energy to provide a rational basis for compound formation. The octet rule, with all its pitfalls for later study, tends to raise its ugly head here as a sort of rationalization.
The model suggests that we should begin where students are, with their interests and experience, and lead them into discovering new ideas among the familiar. An obvious starting point is in organic chemistry, with gasoline, camping gas, food, clothing, plastics, and drinks and so much more that is familiar. I know that it has been the tradition to keep organic for later, but are we taking a “monkey” point of view? Let us consider some of the advantages in starting here.
The long-term memory already contains anchorages for what we want to teach and the filter is primed and ready to go. The working memory is not in danger of overload. We can go a long way into organic chemistry with only a few elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and possibly sulfur and phosphorus. Most of these are familiar (at least their names are) to the learner. By considering the spatial arrangement of the four electrons around a carbon, students, using their fingers, can see that a tetrahedral arrangement is likely. Never mind sp3 hybridization. It is a cobbling together of atomic orbitals (isolated atoms in the gas state) to produce a tetrahedron. This is using unreality to arrive at reality. Pasteur knew about the tetrahedral arrangement long before atomic orbitals were conceived.
Using the simple tetrahedral idea, we can do a lot of sound organic chemistry linked to what the students already know, avoiding overload of working memory. Only when we reach organic acids do we have to reconsider bonding, but this can now be linked to the simpler ideas of covalent bonding already established. Another advantage of beginning with organic is that there is no pressure to use balanced equations. Practicing organic chemists do not bother, so why should we?
The model has led us to select a starting point that fits what is already in a student’s long-term memory. The working memory is not overloaded because only a few elements are involved in making familiar compounds. The representation triangle can be used along its sides to build ideas of the relationship between the macro and familiar, with the molecular. The use of the representational is reduced, and no calculations are necessary. All of this provides a logical basis for an applications-led approach instead of a conceptual approach followed by a passing mention of uses and applications.
The troublesome mole can be rethought in the light of the model. It has been my sad experience to have graduate students who confessed their inability to do mole calculations. The very word “mole” left them uncomfortable. How could highly intelligent young people have such an aversion? They met the mole too soon, wrapped up in incomprehensible (and even totally irrelevant) calculations that flooded the working memory into a state of paralysis. In an earlier publication (4) I set out an analysis of a trivial (from my point of view) mole calculation. I saw it as a four-step procedure, which did not tax my working memory, because I already had tricks for grouping the processes, but students saw it as a ten-step task, which blew their working memory.
Chemistry was one of my favorite classes/subjects, in both high school and college.
There’s the complaint of “oooooo math is so boring because there’s nothing to apply it to!” Well chemistry gives you a very good application.
“We need to anchor around what people are already familiar with” is an insult to people’s intelligence and curiosity. Sure, the school environment doesn’t really promote it, but there are plenty of people who take a clear interest in objective systems of composition. Not to mention how if scientists had insisted on originally learning chemistry with organic chemistry as a starting point, we never would have gotten anywhere because the results would be too complicated and muddled to make any rigorous conclusions. Sure, the classes don’t focus as much as they should on the etiology of chemistry and how we got to the concepts of valence and AMU, but you can’t build a foundation when you don’t understand what’s beneath it. You have to grow your understanding from the bottom up rather than the top down, otherwise you are inviting superstition into your understanding. Dalton and Priestley and all those other fops started out from the elemental level, and there’s a good reason for that.
You want something more captivating? Here you fucking go:
2 Na(s) + 2 H2O(l) -> 2 NaOH(aq) + H2(g)
If I wasn’t already thoroughly interested at age 12, that shit sealed the deal.
Skill issue, I had no problem with that stuff in high school. It’s literally a fixed coefficient, maybe the least conceptually scary thing out there.
“chemistry needs to be a glorified home-economics class” get outta here
congrats on your rugged individualism!
I’m not particularly disciplined, at all. And this isn’t stuff that takes 5+ years up the math class ladder to understand.
When you measure reactants and products, you get a ratio, and with a small adjustment that just takes simple multiplication, it’s a ratio with whole numbers. There are no secrets, no curveballs, no red herrings. There is no concealed conceptual jump that you have to make, like proving theorem G as a practice exercise; they lay it out clearly so that an interested middle-schooler could probably grasp the material. You get a clear and significant and indisputable answer at the end, and all of this makes it feel pretty fun.
Introductory chemistry didn’t put a bunch of the usual stumbling blocks in my way, like extensive homework or papers, or parsimg through a whole bunch of research for a relevant reference.
First-year physics and math classes are way less intuitive than the chemistry ones. Calculus involves way more mental grappling.
Shit like “The model suggests that we should begin where students are, with their interests and experience, and lead them into discovering new ideas among the familiar” is not just why there’s a misinformed stereotype of leftists wanting to be coddled through everything… it’s also why there are so many textbooks full of fluff and inane mnemonic devices and digressions that try too hard (yet still fail) to be “relevant”.
I will say, though, that high school was a better framework to learn this stuff in than college, with 4 hours of class per week for 9 months rather than 2.5 hours per week for 3.5 months.
is this a bit
Death to America
I think e’s describing doing a practical demonstration of a chemical reaction by dropping sodium into water. If it’s a small piece it’ll fizz around really fast and get hot, and if it’s a big piece it’ll catch fire or explode.
Sodium metal reacts with water explosively. This is that reaction.
You only put a bit of the sodium in the water. Not too much.
Never understood this complaint lol. Math is literally chock full of real stuff, literally every math problem in hs and most of college can be envisioned as a real shape
math was “fun” because it made sense. chem was not fun because it made no sense (compared to math and physics)
it felt like it had a lot of rules, but the rules never had any synergy with each other. while with math and physics all the rules are self evident and you can derive almost anything from anything else
biology was fun because it was sufficiently complex that there were no rules, only tendencies
Math is boring because some people don’t intuitively get the symbology because it’s shit and made up ad hoc due to historical contingency. Feynman famously had to learn math by inventing an entirely new symbol system and then mapping the standard one onto it, because the standard one is so ass backwards. Additionally, the parts of math that do come easier, like geometry, are hard to map onto the symbolic parts of higher math. You can’t go straight from triangles to Hamiltonian functions.
If you’ve learned algebra, differential calculus instantly fucks your head over because dy/dx feels like “d” is a constant finite value. Which means now you have to set up an exception that cascades down a whole set of general rules and frameworks you’ve set up. And this happens again, and again, and again throughout university math. And this is before the professor decides that for the next stage using ’ to represent a derivative is easier.
Intuitive and visual introductions work much better. To this day I solve integration visually in my head to get a rough approximate answer, then do the equation and hope to god I haven’t made some tiny error that gives me an answer very close to the correct one by the wrong method.
At least in science when they blow your entire paradigm apart they can explain why your old one is a special case of the more general theory. here they just say “Fuck you learn to solve”
I found that biology had really simple, clear rules, granted that was mostly molecular biology. Same with Chem. Organic chem is just lego. Inorganic is a bit harder due to quantum shit (I do not want to do a 4th order partial differential equation, thanks) and things like transitional states being more important.
I’ve never heard of this and couldn’t find anything on it in a search, and his Feynman lecture on algebra is pretty bog-standard.
Mathematics education absolutely needs to be fundamentally restructured (as right now it’s divorced from it’s roots as a system of logic), but no one in my experience of teaching calculus has had any trouble with the dy/dx differential notation as the limiting case of delta y/delta x.
It’s in his biography. This was when he was a teenager.
Agreed on foundational logic as needed for math education. New Math was probably the only sensible 1960s western innovation in education.
I definitely had trouble and so did many friends. This was an advanced student high school class though (equivalent to second year US I think? Just basic calculus up to differential equations.)
This is the closest I can find and I’m gonna have to insist Feynman take the L on this one.
cries in linear algebra