c.
EDITOR'S OUTLOOK
HEMISTS who read Sinclair Lewis' "Arrowsmith some years ago will no doubt still recall the emphasis laid by one of Arrowsmith's research directors upon the necessity for complete, exact, and permanent lahoratory notes. All chemists with any successful Laboratory Notes research experience have had to learn that lessonand why perhaps by precept or intuition hut often, i t is to he feared, by sad mischance. Can the routine training of undergraduate chemists be made to contribute toward the instillation of that lesson? Can laboratory courses be so arranged and the requirements for laboratory note-taking so laid down that students may come to look upon the notebook as representing something more than an arbitrarily imposed task from which a happy escape will eventually he made? Or does the laboratory course have other and distinct functions and should the spirit and technic of research experimentation be dealt with separately? These and related questions have presented themselves to Chairman Newel1 of the Division of Chemical Education and may form the basis for some discussion a t a not-too-distant meeting. In the meantime we feel confident that Dr. Newell would lend a receptive ear to expressions of opinion touching on these points.
BVIOUSLY the average person is very much like other peoplewhat makes him an average person. Just as obviously superior people are "different." Through a middle-headed type of reasoning, unfortunately all too common, some people transOn Being ose cause and effect and arrive a t the conclusion that by Different :eing different, superiority of a sort may be achieved. This, like mumps, is commonly an affliction of youth but age is not necessarily immune to it, and the older patient is likely to be the harder hit. It is too often overlooked that inferior people are also "different." Some of what we have just said of people extends itself by implication to books, to teaching methods, to demonstration experiments, to courses of study-to what you will. To say that they are "different" is not necessarily to recommend them. From what do they differ? And how? And why? We think highly of original minds and, considering the favorable connotation we usually attach to the term, we think rightly. But the fact remains that maniacs and half-wits are more commonly than not original in their ideas. Perhaps we would display greater respect for words and a keener insight into fundamental realities if we extolled independent rather than original minds. 2011
2012
JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL EDUCATION
DECEMBER, 1932
It is of no avail to obey St. Paul's injunction to "test all things" unless we also heed his direction to "hold fast that which is good." We are not better (or wiser) than our fathers except in so far as we can add their accumulated wisdom and experience to our own. Briefly and vulgarly, we cannot be consistently original without consistently coppering the bets of a lot of very shrewd pickers.
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HERE is an old and oft-quoted recipe which begins: "First take your hare." Any system which aims a t doing justice to the superior teacher. whether a t the college " or the secondarv-school level. must set itself a similar initial task. First Take We all know a few superior teachers and we have some Your Hare confidence that, given time and opportunity for observa- tion, we could discover more. But which of us would undertake to lay down specifications or criteria which would comprise a satisfactory touchstone in the hands of others less sapient and less dispassionately judicious than ourselves? Let us first turn to objective criteria. These are easily ascertainable and tabulatable and they admit of little or no error in personal judgment. But we find here a broken straw on which to lean. Dr. Doe and Dr. Roe both bear the degrees of respectable institutions, hut here all similarity between them ends. Within a given period Dr. Blank publishes some twelve titles comprising eight pounds, four ounces of printed matter; Dr. Einstein publishes about two pages-one title. In the past five years Professor-by-courtesy John Smith has vacationed pleasantly and none too arduously a t three famous summer schools. Professoralso-by-courtesy Wm. Jones has toiled inconspicuously in his private laboratory, the university library, and his study. Need we go farther? If the burden of selection be laid upon the shoulders of dean or president we open the door to favoritism and to faulty or insufficiently informed judgment. And if the dean or president be indeed the reincarnation of Solomon, he will nevertheless be suspected of these weaknesses which he has not, with consequent damage to faculty morale. The theme is enlarged upon in a little note by Charles Rogers Hicks entitled, "Bonuses for Pets." [Sch. & Soc., 34, 834-5 (Dec. 19, 1931).] Shall we turn to the students? Is the average student a mature and competent judge of teachers? May not student popularity sometimes be based upon qualities which are actual defects? Probably we have here a problem to which there is no scientij5c answer; but we have also one to which some satisfactory firacticnl answer must be found.
