Chemical Education Today
Especially for High School Teachers by Diana S. Mason
Gordon’s Legacy You may have heard of the Gordon Research Conferences (GRC), but do you know they are named for Neil E. Gordon and who Gordon was? The Chemical Heritage Foundation has just published the “GRC Story” (p 1139), which brings together the beginnings of the GRC and where the Gordon legacy has taken us. Do you also know that Neil E. Gordon founded the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE)? Volume 1 was published in 1924. Its cover and a photograph of Gordon are at the right. In the very first editorial in this Journal, Gordon expressed his hope that teachers will claim the Journal as their property, and described the most important functions of JCE: • Act as a medium for bringing timely papers to the attention of chemistry teachers • Encourage community by offering a wide circulation of significant reports, studies, and experiments • Keep teachers and students in touch with professional societies, such as the American Chemical Society (ACS)
The ACS has made great strides toward including secondary school teachers in the largest professional organization of its type in the world. One of the programs begun under past-president Bill Carroll’s tenure is Chemistry Teacher Connection (see http://store.jce.divched.org/shop/product _info.php?products_id=89), which gives a special discount for membership in the ACS Division of Chemical Education and an online JCE subscription. Another is the ChemClub program (p 1123). If you don’t have a ChemClub, consider starting one and carrying out activities that expand the knowledge of your students. One way to do this is to teach your students to perform demonstrations and encourage them to pass on chemical concepts to younger students. Having them teach younger students is one of the best ways to engage your students with chemistry concepts that tend to be more difficult. Other ACS activities that you might be interested in are National Chemistry Week (October 22–28), Chemists Celebrate Earth Day, Chemagination (a writing contest), and joining with your ACS Local Section to promote students’ interests in chemistry. The ACS Office of High School Chemistry (p 1124) is also providing new teacher training options as well as continuing to create activities guaranteed to engage high school students in discovery. Engaging your students will improve their knowledge base and their retention—and it may need ideas that come from venturing outside your bubble. Chemistry, in its purest form—unalloyed with other disciplines—is becoming rarer and may be nearing extinction. Most chemical science research includes one or more other disciplines, as do many courses. For example, you can now take courses in departments of chemistry that target forensics, toxicology, environmental studies, and of course, the old standby, biochemistry www.JCE.DivCHED.org
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Secondary School Featured Articles 䊕 Color Science, a Course for Nonscience Majors by Maria C. Gelabert, p 1155. 䊕 Two “Gas-in-a-Bag” Reactions To Show the Predictive Power of the Relative Acid–Base Strength Chart by Brett Criswell, p 1167.
(or is it chemical biology!). It is always meaningful when students learn about the real-world uses of classroom chemistry. Many of these uses are highlighted by teaching biologically relevant chemistry (see p 1171 for some suggested approaches). How are you preparing your chemistry students for this multidisciplinary approach to problem solving? This issue of the Journal does a good job of trying to fulfill Neil Gordon’s vision. It documents how the ACS and high school teachers can work together and it also brings us timely papers. Discover some Interdisciplinary Connections via the use of color (p 1155) and the complementary demonstrations on pages 1158 and 1161. A couple of other useful DigiDemos can be found on pages 1167 and 1170. This issue also describes ways to improve your classroom presentations (p 1176), an interesting approach to using molecular models in the classroom (p 1182), a new way to link density and forensics (p 1187), and a new twist on identifying unknowns using chemical and physical changes (p 1185). Upcoming Events: BCCE and ChemEd 07 You should have received this issue of the Journal just before attending BCCE at Purdue, which looks like an excellent conference. If you like the BCCE (or if you cannot attend), consider attending ChemEd 07: Lone Star Solutions (see http://www.chem.unt.edu/chemed07; accessed Jun 2006) next summer in Denton, TX. Where’s Denton? It is at the apex of the Golden Triangle. (See if you can find it.) Triangles Speaking of triangles, do you know that triangles—䊕 in the table of contents—denote articles that might be of interest to you? Check it out. Sometimes it is not obvious from the title that you might find an article to be interesting and/ or useful. Every month Erica Jacobsen (Associate Editor of the Secondary School Section) and I evaluate all the articles in the issue and together select ones that we think have value for secondary teachers. If you want to cut to the chase, check out the 䊕 articles first! And stay tuned for next month—the Classroom Activities return for another academic year!
Vol. 83 No. 8 August 2006
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Journal of Chemical Education
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