Chemical Education Today
Commentary
Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative…? by Catherine Hurt Middlecamp
Ozone depletion. Nuclear waste. Acid rain. People ask me, “Why do you talk about all this negative stuff in your chemistry course? Doesn’t this just reinforce the idea that chemistry is the problem?” Let me first say, “guilty as charged”. I do engage students in the study of these topics. In fact, my list of such “negative” topics is quite lengthy. Truly, one of my passions in life is to teach chemical principles through real-world issues. These issues are complicated and, at times, even a bit ugly in terms of what happens to people and the land on which they live. Thus, it is not surprising that colleagues express concern, perhaps wishing that I would portray chemistry (and of course, chemists) in a more favorable light. In the past, I tended to brush comments about negativity aside. But by so doing, I missed the chance to address the underlying issues. Why should we teach “negative” topics? What can they offer us and our students? And what might be their inherent value to our profession? Such questions surely warrant closer attention. Interestingly enough, it was Robin, a graduate student in sociology, who helped me to better answer questions such as these. We chatted at length one evening. At the outset, I confessed to her that I really didn’t know much about what sociologists did or studied. Not being put off by my ignorance, Robin started with the basics. “Sociologists study society,” she said. “We usually study the problems in society, because by studying them we can hope to learn something and make a difference in people’s lives.” “You deliberately study the problems?” I asked. “Why yes,” she responded. “And of course. The problems are by far the most interesting part. We learn by studying them, and then later we hope to apply our knowledge to make the world a better place.” “Oh my,” I thought to myself. I don’t know if Robin could tell how many light bulbs were flashing in my head, but truly I hung on her every word. As the evening stretched on, we explored the significance of this seemingly “negative” content. As I further reflect on what we do as chemists, I note the inherent paradox. The chemical sciences truly have transformed human existence for the better. We offer people many benefits: clean drinking water, methods to diagnose and treat illnesses, fuels for local and global transportation, capabilities for computing, and materials one barely could have imagined decades ago. Yet at the same time, we inadvertently have harmed the biosphere. Chlorofluorocarbons still persist in the stratosphere, photochemical smog exacts its toll on human health, and water supplies, once clean, in some cases no longer are potable. Our dramatic successes have been accompanied by serious losses and occasional tragedies. As we teach, we can embrace this paradox. Just as Robin routinely studies complex and sometimes ugly problems in
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sociology, likewise our students need to study similar ones relating to chemistry. Just as students in sociology get energized by studying the real-world difficulties, so can ours. Through this study, our students—majors and non-majors alike—can find issues worthy of engagement both in their studies and over the course of a lifetime. Difficulties and failures also present excellent teaching opportunities. Henry Petroski, a civil and environmental engineer from Duke University, has written extensively on the importance of studying failures. For example, Petroski points out that “success masks failure” (1). The more confident we are about how well something (for example, a Freon, tetraethyl lead, nanoparticles) is working, the more likely we are to miss that something else is going awry. Petroski speaks to this and related issues in his most recent book, Success Through Failure (2). Thus if we can utilize the teaching opportunities that failures present, our students can glean wisdom from the mistakes of the past. As we bring our difficulties and failures into the classroom, we must give our students the intellectual space to consider questions that may be personally relevant to them. These include “What do I care about?”, “How can my work make a difference?” and “What career path should I pursue?” In allowing our students to explore such questions, we enable them not only to see that our profession needs a wide variety of talents, but also that it requires these talents to remain viable. Back to the title song (3): You’ve got to accentuate the positive, Eliminate the negative, Latch on to the affirmative, Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.
In truth, the negative merits our attention. And the gray areas of in-between are precisely where the intellectual action is. I don’t want our students—or our profession—to miss out on this action. Literature Cited 1. Dean, Cornelia “Engineering a Safer, More Beautiful World, One Failure at a Time,” New York Times, May 2, 2006. 2. Petroski, Henry. Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design; Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2006. 3. Lyrics by Johnny Mercer, “Accentuate the Positive,” 1944.
Catherine Hurt Middlecamp is in the Department of Chemistry and in the Integrated Liberal Studies Program, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI 53706;
[email protected] Vol. 84 No. 1 January 2007
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