Ask people what their favorite class in high school was, and chances are you will not find someone who will say that their favorite was their chemistry class. Granted, chances are their favorite class will either be what they majored in, closely linked to their major, or an art/music/theater class that they realized would not support them after college. Still, very few people actually like chemistry.
Why is that?
If you look at the numbers, chemistry is a very lucrative field. In industry, starting salary for a chemist with a master's degree is 70k. A bachelor's degree in chemistry has the second highest average starting salary, with chemical engineering being the highest.
Chemistry is also the basis of pretty much everything in the life sciences, and the knowledge from chemistry, specifically analytical chemistry, is very much a part of a number of branches of physics, especially astronomy. Chemists are the reason why we have plastics, medicines, fuel sources, and countless other things that we take for granted in modern life.
So why does everyone groan when you bring a chemistry metaphor into everyday speech?
Aside from the obvious nerdiness of using science in everyday speech, people don't like chemistry. And I blame that almost completely on our school systems, and how we go about teaching it..
Imagine you're back in 7th grade science. Your teacher has said that he will now be starting a unit on elements and atoms (aka: the basis of chemistry). He shows you the periodic table, points out a few key elements such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and gold, explains what all those weird 1-2 letter symbols and numbers with ridiculously long decimals are, and then pulls out a diagram of the atom which looks like this:
Now imagine that you're in your high school chemistry class. The second day of class, your teacher says "You all know about the Bohr model, right? Well, it's completely wrong. Electrons don't follow perfectly circular paths. In fact, we can't even tell where they are and what they are doing at the same time. However, we can guess that they're somewhere in here. She then pulls up a diagram which looks like this
Now you have to spend time forgetting the Bohr model and start learning this new model (Electron Cloud). All that time you spent in 7th grade learning the Bohr model, including making that model of Uranium out of a Styrofoam ball, large wooden beads, a dowel,and 12 gauge steel wire, was absolutely wasted. And you know it.
Strike one
Now that you're slightly unhappy about this, your teacher then makes it worse. When you're talking about thermodynamics, she puts a few equations on the board and tells you to memorize them. However, she knows that you aren't going to do that without some forcing. Therefore, she assigns 25 questions a night for 2 weeks, all of them having to do with those same few equations. To make things worse, she automatically assumes that you did horrible in algebra and therefore makes you write out every single step that you take to isolate the variable that you're finding before plugging in any value, thus turning a 30 minute homework assignment into a 2 hour homework assignment.
Strike two
Finally you get to do some labs. You go in thinking that this is your chance to wear fancy coats, handle dangerous acids, and explode things. Because, you know, that's what chemists do in the movies.
You walk into the lab, and there's a few small pieces of metals, each a different shade of grey, as well as some little platters with piles that all look like salt and a few beakers. Your teacher says to dissolve the different piles into different beakers of water and add the chunks of metal to the beakers once everything's fully dissolved, and look for signs of reactions. "What are should we look for? The metal disappearing? The solution changing color? Explosions?" you ask. "Look for bubbles"
Bubbles
First you don't get a fancy lab coat (and those goggles that you have to wear will not stop fogging up), then you're handling boring materials, and now you're looking for goddamn bubbles. To top it all off, she makes you write a 3 page report on exactly what produced those bubbles and why.
Strike three. Chemistry sucks.
Now you know some of the major problems with the way we teach our kids chemistry. If we are going to make chemistry fun and exciting, we need to have our teachers stop focusing on concepts that are either completely outdated or just plain wrong, stop inundating the students with stupid exercises in algebra (that's what math classes are for), and actually do some interesting labs without such a focus on the report. Chances are, if they go into sciences then they won't be doing the same format as teachers want them to write in, and if they don't then they won't be writing a lab report to begin with. Who knows? Maybe people would actually start to like chemistry again.
Keep thinking.
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