e d i to ri a l
Educational Budgets (i.e., Time)
A
s the new university academic year heads into the fall, I am reminded of an age-old task of the teacher. Your class meets on a regular schedule for a certain number of classroom days a week for a certain number of weeks. You have a quantity of teaching time that is normally not very flexible, and portions of class time need to be allocated to different subjects. How are they chosen? Other folks—parents, citizens, politicians, other teachers— who are advocates of particular subjects can become outraged upon learning that their favorites are receiving less class time or, worse, being dropped. A recent news article about some changes to history texts in China included a comment from a traditionalist that the compressed attention given to earlier events in the texts amounted to a “castration” of history. This Editor has in the past been accosted by traditionalists after advocating a trimming of the attention given to certain parts of introductory college-level analytical chemistry. Adherents of particular kinds of knowledge tend to insist that everyone should have it. Nonetheless, class time is a finite resource. New analytical chemistry topics appear on a regular basis—our subdiscipline is a living, growing part of science. Many new topics are estimated to be of future importance, and some are inserted into the class syllabus. However sifted, distilled, or streamlined, the new topics consume some of the time budget; something else must go. Topic X may not necessarily be reduced or eliminated because it is dull or no longer relevant, but because the newer knowledge may have greater value to the student. Time budgets are of course not unique to the profession of teaching. A singer gets 7 min on stage to show her range and passion of voice in an audition. The ad man gets 30 seconds to sell the product. In the chemical industry, new employees get training in safety, company procedures, and the products of their organization; the time for this learning is again a constrained resource.
© 2006 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
Is there a way to mitigate the overabundance of information that students and other learners need to sock away now in order to prepare for the future? The best thing that a teacher can do is to discuss the subject in a way that promotes the student’s capacity for future self-learning. This is, in fact, the most vital aspect of higher education, to prepare students for professional life outside the classroom. The ability to selflearn is not based on a pile of names, facts, and figures—although a kernel of them is essential to converse in the language of science. I maintain that a fresh topic about chemical measurement is most readily comprehended if one already appreciates the principles of the core phenomena that are exploited in the new transducer, or separator, or detector. For example, consider the measurements that rely on the piezoelectric effect; the Nernst equation; vibrational, electronic, nuclear-spin, and other energy-level transitions; chemical equilibria, including partitions between phases; the interrelations between timescales, physical dimensions, and the rates of transport and other chemical processes; electron and ionic space charges; and the directional forces of electric and magnetic fields. These examples will lie at the cores of analytical measurements yet to be invented. So, the suggestion of this Editorial to the teacher is to construct your class syllabus with an eye to a selection of chemical measurements that illustrate essential phenomena, such as the above, and to provide a setting for explaining those phenomena. Systemizing analytical knowledge in this manner will aid both mental retention and recognition in the future, when the student encounters new measurements.
N O V E M B E R 1 , 2 0 0 6 / A N A LY T I C A L C H E M I S T R Y
7353
