Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Kicking the Football? Here it is, mid-August, and I don’t have my syllabus (or all my plans) together for the fall semester that will begin in a couple of weeks. I leave for the ACS meeting in a day and a half. There are so many things to do. Entropy reigns! (Well, only figuratively. See the papers on pages 1382–1397.) Will I get it all together before that big first day of classes? At this time of year I always have great plans, but also I wonder whether I am Charlie Brown—the eternal optimist, ready to try to kick that football one more time. I know I could score a field goal if only the football weren’t pulled away at the last millisecond. But it seems invariably to be pulled away. Or maybe I just don’t connect with it properly. Why do I keep kicking that football? What is it about a new school Teaching science, year that gets me psyched up and like science itself, excited? Teaching (that is, devising seems always to and implementing environments produce more and experiences that help people learn) is a challenge, largely bequestions than cause we don’t really know that answers. much about how to do it effectively. It’s so easy for that football to slither away, never having gotten off the ground. That’s one of the things that make teaching interesting and exciting. There are so many ideas to try, and it’s fun to see whether they will work. Both successes and failures suggest additional new approaches. Teaching science, like science itself, seems always to produce more questions than answers. For those of us who enjoy experiments, it is an ideal profession. Another reason to get fired up is that a new school year offers opportunities to work with such wonderful people. Whether courses are successful depends on teachers, students, and interactions among them. Every fall there are new groups of students, providing teachers with new opportunities, challenges, experiences, and even friendships. Every fall we teachers have new ideas about both content and pedagogy that spur us to greater efforts and thereby help to develop our students’ intellects and abilities. Even more important is that young people (and the young at heart who come back to school to learn more) bring with them a vitality whose vicarious effect is to energize teachers and everyone else around them. A school or campus full of students is a far different place from one populated by faculty alone. Perhaps the best reason to get excited about a new semester is that I really don’t think we are Charlie Browns kicking footballs. That’s why this editorial’s title includes a question mark. We teachers have a much greater effect on students than we seem to think. Inured as we are to the process of grading, correcting, and finding faults and problems that
students should Even a student who achieves avoid, we often concentrate on a poor grade comes out of a what is wrong or chemistry course knowing far imperfect about more than someone who has what we do. Thus we run the risk of not taken chemistry at all. losing sight of the big picture—our overall success. Even a student who achieves a poor grade comes out of a chemistry course knowing far more than someone who has not taken chemistry at all. Most students have learned a great deal, though few have learned as much as we would have liked. As Marie Curie put it, “One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.” We should savor those moments when former students tell us that what they learned in our courses was of great value subsequently—even if they hadn’t thought it would be. And we should multiply by a large factor the number of such moments, based on the likelihood that there are lots more students out there who did not think to tell us. The magnitude of intellectual growth that can occur in a year was driven home to me a long time ago when I taught physical chemistry in two successive years. The first year was the first time I had taught the course, and it went very well. This was largely due to the great group of students I had. At the beginning of the second year I missed that first group of students, thinking the new class to be far inferior. However, by the end of the second year the new class had matured intellectually in essentially the same way that the first one had, and their average score on a standardized examination was within experimental error of the first group’s. Only then did I realize how much students were gaining from that course— not just book learning, but also synthesizing and unifying chemical knowledge and becoming more mature in their approach to problems and to science. I think that this kind of maturation is happening in most of our courses, even though it may be less easily observable. In A Backward Glance Edith Wharton wrote, “In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.” As teachers we ought to rejoice in what seem to be only small successes, be confident that our students will achieve great things, maintain our curiosity and help students to enhance theirs, and embrace change. The beginning of a school year is a great time to reaffirm this—and to recognize that it also will be lots of fun!
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 76 No. 10 October 1999 • Journal of Chemical Education
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