Editorial pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Making the 2013 National Chemistry Week Theme a Personal Matter Norbert J. Pienta* Department of Chemistry, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602-2556, United States ABSTRACT: The 2013 National Chemistry Week theme on energy is featured and celebrated.
KEYWORDS: General Public, High School/Introductory Chemistry, First-Year Undergraduate/General
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techniques, measure environmental impacts and devise interventions, create new materials from these natural resources and the ways to efficiently reuse them, and develop alternative energy sources that will gradually replace our dependence on fossil fuels. Educators also have an opportunity and responsibility, particularly because we lay the groundwork and establish the fundamentals. The Next Generation Science Standards NGSS2 provide a framework for K−12 education, with energy topics appearing prominently among the disciplinary core ideas: (i) definitions, conservation of energy, energy transfer, and energy in chemical processes in physical science; and (ii) energy flow in organisms and energy transfer in ecosystems in life sciences. At the college level, courses for nonscience majors provide an occasion to impact the general population and inform the voting public. For example, popular textbooks such as Chemistry in Context, copublished by the ACS,3 promote both a basic understanding of energy topics and also applications related to world issues. In the first-semester general chemistry course, “energy” is a prominent topic, one that comes up in two weeks in my own curricular material (and again in the second semester). Thermodynamics has many traditional components, and they appear in sufficient number and complexity that one might be tempted to ignore context and applications. Besides ones that you discover and implement on your own, the Journal includes a variety on a range of topics,4 including ones in this issue. This author acknowledges his personal shortcomings in energy use, celebrates the role of chemists and chemistry in energy developments in the present and future, and promises to continue the energy conversation in future issues of this Journal.
he theme for the 2013 National Chemistry Week (NCW) is Energy: Now and Forever.1 One of the goals of NCW is to build awareness of the positive and beneficial aspects of chemistry at the local level. What better way to make an impact than to begin with oneself and to make the celebration last more than a week? Your editor has begun down this pathway with this editorial and by trying to find a colleague to write a more scholarly piece on this subject to end the month. My first responsibility is to define an energy goal or awareness for myself. What are the aspects of energy that are both personal and are worth acknowledging and recognizing? The commute to work reminds me daily that my family should have tried living closer to the university, that my vehicle does not get very good gas mileage, and that I abhor the oneperson-per-automobile morning traffic but can be counted in that statistic. So far this sounds more like a confession than cause for celebrating. Because that commute takes me past a massive gas station that glows brightly in the dark, I am reminded of how little of a deterrent current gasoline prices are toward my driving under the previously described circumstances. I want to call this refueling center a “filling station” because I live in the South, but that term connotes a different historic (and perhaps, economic) era, and this author was particularly irritated by their recent behavior. One does not want to impart too romantic of a mental image for a place that raises the cost per gallon $0.18 over the Labor Day weekend. We’re past that weekend, so the gasoline prices have dropped precipitously, an event worth celebrating, perhaps until one considers the real costs to society and the environment of old oil spills, new pipelines, or military actions in the Middle East in order to secure access. However, I can derive considerable satisfaction in knowing that chemistry plays critical roles in the industry and commerce related to fuels and to aspects associated with alternative fuels or to replacing traditional automotive technologies entirely. Chemists provide analytical © 2013 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
Published: October 8, 2013 1257
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed400662h | J. Chem. Educ. 2013, 90, 1257−1258
Journal of Chemical Education
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Editorial
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) For information about National Chemistry Week, see the ACS Web site at http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/outreach/ ncw.html (accessed Sep 2013). (2) See a description of the Next Generation Science Standards at http://www.nextgenscience.org/next-generation-science-standards (accessed Sep 2013). (3) Middlecamp, C. H.; Keller, S. W.; Anderson, K. W.; Bentley, A. K.; Cann, M. C.; Ellis, J. P. Chemistry in Context: Applying Chemistry to Society, 7 ed.; McGraw-Hill: New York, 2012. (4) For example, see a selection of JCE resources on batteries, biofuels, fuel cells, future fuels, nuclear energy, and solar energy at http://pubs.acs.org/page/jceda8/ncw2013.html (accessed Sep 2013).
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dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed400662h | J. Chem. Educ. 2013, 90, 1257−1258
