EDITORIAL
Serving Up a New Academic Year This is the time of the year when professors like myself begin to rummage around in their files to pull out the necessary outlines and notes for the soon-to-begin fall academic semester courses. Soon we will stand in lecture halls before groups of young men and women—some eager to learn, some wishing they had taken PE instead, some very unsure of the challenge that chemistry will present to them, and many equally unsure about the choice of their professional careers. It is the responsibility of the professor not only to explain the course subject but also to fan a fire of professional interest in chemistry among a significant fraction of the students, to simply instill some intellectual confidence and a bit of chemistry lore in others, and—sadly—to conclude that yet others have not mastered the subject. The complexity of these tasks is often misunderstood and underestimated, but they are the intrinsic stuff and pleasure of being a professor. Why then in the face of these lofty ideals is it that in preparing for our fall classes we so often simply turn out last year's old, dusty course outline (which was similarly turned out the year before)? Why doesn't the content of our undergraduate courses change as fast as do the topics of the research papers that appear in this journal? I think it is not sloth, but rather a
certain comfortable calcification of our image of what a student of analytical chemistry ought to know. Professors should regularly experiment with how to teach new areas as they emerge— not just to graduate but also to undergraduate students. This also means less attention to some older subjects, and hard choices have to be made. In the coming year, I have sections of standard material sandwiched around quartz crystal microbalance biosensors, laser principles, scanning tunneling microscopes, microscopic pifa values, and nanoelectrodes in store for my sophomore class. These "advanced topics" will be served up with noticeable ceremony to emphasize that this is the present and future of analytical chemistry. It is also useful to point out that such material is offered in graduate chemistry courses, only in a bit more detail. If I teach the students just a little about the frontier of measurement science but interest them a lot in hearing more, I will be satisfied. So decide that not everything in that old course outline is essential knowledge for a prospective young chemist, and pick out a side dish of really fresh analytical chemistry to serve up this year.
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 64, NO. 17, SEPTEMBER 1, 1992 · 819 A
