"Elevate Them Guns a little lower"
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key tenet of the conventional wisdom in the postdputnik era of chemical education is that a typical entering freshman student is not only vastly better prepared than before (which is possible but arguable) hut is somehow inherently more intelligent (which is nonsense). As a consequence it is incumbent upon the teacher of general chemistry courses and the writer of general chemistry texts to move as rapidly as possible to the elegant if sometimes esoteric topics which lie a t the "cutting edge," "battle front," or "frontier" of chemical research. Much of this Prefatory metaphor tends to be martial in tone and one occasionally has visions of general chemistry courses opening with the sounding of the "Advance." This essay is a plea for chemical boot camp.l Are our entering students so much better prepared than before? Typically, alas, no. The top 5 1 0 % (and there are some rightly influential schools which see only these students) are today most impressivemathematically mature, physically sound, ready and eager for the chemical fray. Indeed a few are so good that one is reminded of the Duke of Wellington's: "I do not know what they do to the enemy but by God they frighten me." For these students, who need guidance more than instruction, superb texts have been written and ingenious experiments devised. They will not concern us Further here. But what of the remainder? This large group corres~ondsto a broad, flat-topped distribution of abilities val;; has moved but slightly whbse most towards brilliance in the last ten years. Indeed it is perhaps not too unfair to claim that the major change has been not so much in the relative extents of their knowledge and ignorance but rather in their specific natures. Much of the time they are as confused as ever-but ahout different things than previously. The reasons are not far to seek. As a result of the various curriculum reforms, the teaching of high school chemistry, physics, and biology has irreversibly been made more logical, more rigorous, and more abstract. Now logic, rigor, and abstraction are no doubt suitable for the typical high school girl or boy who just happens to be destined to be a professor of chemistry, physics, or biology. They are also quite suitable for the less fortunate providing the chill winds of logic, rigor, and abstraction are tempered to the somewhat vulnerable (if these days not exactly shorn) lambs of learning. On the whole CBA and, particularly, CHEMS seem to me to be a little more considerate than their acronymic cousins in biology and physics, but by no stretch of the 'For another view of this question see Professor Henry Gehrke's letter-to-the-editor on prtge 440.
Provocative opinion imagination are they easy even for the good student. I n fact I would be reasonably content if my students mastered the contents of the CHEMS text (all of it) by the end of their freshman year. What then do we do with this "bottom 90%'' of entering college students? The presently fashionable answer seems to be to embark on an introduction to physical chemistry which is both modern and rigorous. There is a certain tendency to confuse the "modern" and the "recent" (as Feynman has pointed out Newton's Law of Gravitation is not recent but is certainly modem) but the real problem goes much deeper than this and lies with the attempted rigor. Physical chemistry requires a knowledge of mathematics to give it form, of physics to give it meaning, and of chemistry to give it life. The mathematical problems a t this level are easily overstressed. Any general chemistry instructor worthy of his salt can get by without an integral sign and today's student, if as prone to computational error as ever, is to his credit less awed by simple mathematics than before. But the problems with basic (not simple) physical concepts seem to me to be almost unsurmountable. If a student does not feel in his bones the qualitative nature (and not merely the formulae and units) of momentum, energy, work, potential, and the like, it is vain to believe that any fundamental understanding of, say, the viscosity of gases or the intricacies of molecular orbital theory can reasonably be achieved. In general this group of students does not approach that level of understanding of basic physics. Faced with the task of explaining phenomena they have often not seen with concepts they do not yet understand their chemical hopes are often decimated. As was said of a similar occasion: 'Vest magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre." The student remains as confused as evelLbut this time mainly about the same things. For the non-chemistry major the experience often leads to a lasting, and even hitter, bewilderment about a subject which might later prove enlightening and even useful. But perhaps the real tragedy (for us as well as for them) lies in the not inconsiderable number of put* tive chemistry majors who opt out at the freshmanlevel. Many of these quite obviously do not belong ("I gotta 'B' in high school and sorta thought. . . ") hut some of them would surely ultimately make more-than-adequate chemistry majors if they could be encouraged to persevere. We need them all. What then do I propose? I am certainly not suggesting that physical chemistry be banished from the general chemistry curriculum for I have no wish to appear demonstrably foolish. But because physical chemistry is unquestionably primus inter pares it does not follow that all of it has to be taught first. Even were this posVolume 45, Number 6, June 1968
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sible it would not necessarily be desirable for one of the things we are trying to do in general chemistry is to seduce the student into further study and physical chemistry is a lady of far from lascivious visage. The temptation to claim that "chemistry is too important to be left to the physical chemists" is strong but a trifle unfair. Almost all of us have conspired by leading or following in the present trend. By limiting ourselves to topics which can be compre
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hended rather than merely learned it might for instance be possible to reintroduce some of the chemistry which is being displaced from the senior inorganic chemistry course by the advance of the group theoreticians. But that no doubt is another essay. Derek A. Davenport Purdue University Lafayette, Indiana
