Chemical Education Today
Commentary
The Perfect Text by Ruth Russo
And the atoms—cerium, lanthanum, thorium, yttrium, phosphate—danced round their predestined sites, tethered by the massless springs of electrostatics and by their neighbor’s bulk. They vibrated, and sang in quantized harmony to absent listeners, to me. R. Hoffmann (1 )
Recently I had the opportunity to review the manuscript for a textbook that was under consideration for publication. For the first time in my career, I saw a nonmajors’ chemistry textbook under construction. The book had promise: there were the requisite interesting tidbits for myriad multicolored boxes, and the chemical fundamentals were well explained. Yet something was lacking in the manuscript that would truly set this book apart from its competitors. I knew that this would not be the book that I’m looking for, the absolutely perfect book for my students. Explaining the fundamentals is not the problem: many textbooks do that very well. The problem is the packaging. I teach a course for general education called Chemistry in the Natural World. My chemist colleagues often deride my nonmajors’ course, calling it Chemistry for Poets (as if teaching chemistry to poets is a bad thing). But this is not my problem: the problem is that the authors and publishers of textbooks do not take into account the Poet with as much care as they take into account the Chemist. How do I know this? I have had the luxury of teaching one course that each of my students in each of my chemistry classes has taken. It is a two-semester course for first-year students, called Antiquity and Modernity, in which students and faculty, in small groups, read and critique texts by formative thinkers in the Western tradition, from Aeschylus to Darwin, Augustine to Nietzsche, Isaiah to Einstein, Virgil to Wordsworth. Hence, my students have some notion of scientific concepts and discoveries as embedded in the history of ideas, and are sensitized to writing style. My perfect text would acknowledge this background. The perfect text would embody a simple-yet-elegant approach. The current crop of nonmajors’ chemistry textbooks contain, in my opinion, too many little margin notes, boxes, and personal sketches. Textbooks are packed with detail, both fluff and substance, and thus unwittingly teach students information management skills rather than understanding, to use Gordon Barrow’s two views of introductory chemistry (2). In order to promote true understanding, a text must assume that college students are intelligent adults and must resist the impulse to make the text read like the back of a cereal box. While the notes and boxes are included with good in-
tentions (i.e., to catch students’ interest), they usually A focused text helps do so in a fragmented way, students focus their sometimes without explicit thoughts on the subconnection to the main body of the text—a way ject, helps them draw that is stylistically indistintogether a coherent guishable from, for exwhole out of the ample, the seasonal cosmetics layout in a fashion myriad fragments of magazine. Now publishers will object, saying, “But information and interpretation. that’s what students want! That’s what fits with their fragmented, rapid-fire, MTV learning style!” Even if this is correct, it doesn’t follow that catering to such a learning style (3) is good pedagogy. It may sell books, but it isn’t good for students’ intellectual development. A focused text helps students focus their thoughts on the subject, helps them draw together a coherent whole out of the myriad fragments of information and interpretation. Moreover, I’m certain the MTV approach is not what my students want. I’ve had too many students complain about having to decode textbook pages, having to waste valuable time and energy trying to glue the fragments of the page together, asking questions like, what does Marie Curie have to do with the kinetic molecular theory? If the material that would go in a margin note or a box is worthwhile, my perfect text would integrate it into the main body of prose, and make the transitions between ideas explicit. There is a beautiful physics textbook, Revolutions in Physics, by Barry Casper and Richard Noer (4). No colors, no sidebars, just a smooth narrative punctuated with line drawings, quotes, and simple equations. My perfect text would be like that, trusting that the inherent beauty of the subject matter is enough to interest thinking adults. Simple yet elegant. But perhaps chemistry is not as clean as physics, as linear, as amenable to a pared-down style. Perhaps my perfect text, in order to do justice to the many-faceted nature of chemistry, the broad scope (5), must include a great deal of marginalia, ideas spinning off the central themes. If so, then my perfect text would not only show chemistry as the central science, necessary for the understanding of geology, astronomy, biology, ecology and so on, but would also root chemistry firmly in the garden of ideas. Such a text must enhance and complexify the philosophical and historical asides that are currently a superficial part of nonmajors’ textbooks. For example, while many textbooks tell a pretty good story of the discovery of the atom, most recite only a couple paragraphs about atomism as an idea as old as antiquity, tossing out the names of Demokritos and maybe Lucretius, but not really explaining the difference between their worldviews and
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 75 No. 2 February 1998 • Journal of Chemical Education
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Chemical Education Today
Commentary
This ideal text would be a work of literature. It would sustain the discussion of Big Chemical Ideas… throughout. our own. What is the history of atomistic philosophy? How did it change from the Roman Empire to the present? Has it been influenced by technological advances through the ages? Is atomism doomed in our postmodern era, the era of a dizzying multiplicity of bosons, quarks, leptons, and muons? This ideal text would be a work of literature. It would sustain the discussion of Big Chemical Ideas— entropy, chemical change, evolution of elements and biological molecules, the scientific method, the search for beauty—throughout. I could see thoughtful biographies of scientists, with more analysis than two or three paragraphs can deliver. What did it mean to Alfred Nobel, for example, to read his own obituary in a French newspaper? What did it mean for the development of modern science that Newton was steeped in the study of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem? Such a book needn’t be terribly long (a big book is a big evil, opined Callimachus 2500 years ago), but should combine solid and wide-ranging scholarship, sparkling prose, and a strong interpretive voice. I’m thinking here of a chemistry-specific version of Jacob Bronowski’s sweeping Ascent of Man series (6), or Timothy Ferris’s masterful Coming of Age in the Milky Way (7). Both works push the boundaries, interpreting facts instead of merely spelling them out, making the science memorable. I suppose that regardless of whether it pushes the envelope or speaks with elegant simplicity, my perfect text presents a problem from the publisher’s point of view. Ron Gillespie commented recently upon the publishing companies’ heavy investment in the textbook status quo (5). If this investment has a chilling effect on the development of innovative approaches to teaching general chemistry, the situation is even chillier for nonmajors’ chemistry. At present, the intended audiences for a nonmajors’ textbook include 2-year college students enrolled in all types of programs, students in large 4-year universities from hundreds of different majors, and the relatively tiny fraction of students from small colleges. This is good from a publisher’s perspective: an adequate nonmajors’ text has a big, lucrative market. However, I think that
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the nonmajors’ texts try to serve too many different constituencies. The intended audiences differ in the knowledge base that each brings to the material, as well as the information that each is expecting to gain from the textbook. Is there any way one nonmajors’ text can fit all audiences, at all schools? My perfect text would tell the stories of chemistry specifically to my audience of reasonably intelligent, striving-to-bewell-read, nonvocational students at a small, private, liberal arts college, a market which is already awfully small, and likely shrinking. My perfect text would probably not appeal to any other audience, and would likely not be a runaway best seller. Hmmm. An author who is willing to explain, sing, hammer, wheedle, muse and shout—to do just about anything to avoid packaging chemistry. A publisher who receives a lot of gratitude, but not much profit. A book that combines I suppose that regardless of whether it pushes the envelope or speaks with elegant simplicity, my perfect text presents a problem from the publisher’s point of view. subtlety, depth, sustained reflection, color, and scholarship at the nonmajors’ level. All these attributes of the perfect text must come together if we are to convince our best-educated nonscience majors that chemistry is indeed a great scientific adventure (2). Literature Cited 1. Hoffmann, R. An Unusual State of Matter. The Metamict State; University of Central Florida Press: Orlando, 1987. 2. Barrow, G. J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74, 1154. 3. Pittman, R. How TV Babies Learn; The New York Times, Jan 24, 1990, p 19. 4. Casper, B.; Noer, R. Revolutions in Physics; Norton: New York, 1972. 5. Gillespie, R. J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74, 484. 6. Bronowski, J. Ascent of Man; Little, Brown: Boston, 1973. 7. Ferris, T. Coming of Age in the Milky Way; Morrow: New York, 1988.
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 75 No. 2 February 1998 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
