Why should chemistry students (and teachers) have to put up with this?

Question

Why should chemistry students (and teachers) have to put up with these very boring topics, nothing to do with chemistry which is the study of structure, reactivity, and behaviour of substances:

Significant figures, which is either common sense or (in more interesting cases) really requires calculus.

Problems that mix up different kinds of unit, e.g. ft and cm, or g and lb. Or even cm and mm when there is absolutely no need to do so.

Weird problems involving volume, such as the length of a wire (two separate examples, under "Chemistry", on YA this week)

Stupid parodies of the scientific method, which muddle up different meanings of the word "theory", and give ammunition to creationists

We are supposed to have a working memory of 7 +/- 2 items. Why do we handicap our students by forcing them to reserve items for unnecessary complications, which must make it much more difficult to see the point of a problem?

(If answering, please say if you are a student or a teacher, and at what level)

Answer 1

Student

1. I don't know why, but chemistry was kind of fun for me.

Answer 2

I am a college student.

Study of structure is important in chemistry because it gives us a heads up to what chemicals might or might not react. It answers questions like "why are diamonds so hard" or "why does a pencil write on paper the way it does."

We have mixed up unit problems because you encounter mixed up units in real life and have to be able to deal with it. Like in the Olympics, the sprints run the 100m in less than 10 seconds, but I have no idea how fast that is unless it is in MPH, so you have to convert.

Volume is important in chemistry, it displaces stuff and has bouyancy.

Sig figs I always have been skeptical of, but it lets you know how precise you are. Think about it 99% is not the same as 99.99999%. If you have 1 million people and 99% accuracy, that means, you will have 10,000 misses. But with 99.9999 you only have 1 miss or 10 misses, I am too lazy to count 0s right now, but 1 or 10 misses is better than 10,000 misses no?

We force them reserve items for unnecessary complications because the real world doesn't always work in nice round numbers. Like multiplying anything by pi usually does not give nice round numbers.

Answer 3

Is cos of people saying the exams are easier that they are making everything all the more difficult and awkward. Soon they'll stop giving us textbooks so that fewer of us get A's.

Answer 4

Johnny D and L.A.L. have done well on some parts, I will add some input to a couple of items not covered and expansion on one commented.

Mixed unit problems and weird volume problems are used to check knowledge of using factor labeling and to have students manipulate data and units in problems better.  Volume problems are used to have students begin to find and use data not given them directly in a problem statement.  Later Chemistry problems are solved by a series of calculations following a specific method to solve each problem type.  

Bacon, one of the developers of the scientific method was a creationist.  The muddle in science education is that until Darwin and Dewey in the 1890's, Western science post secondary education usually included the equivalent of a M.Div. or Th.D. before studying natural philosophy.  Why?  Then the intent was to have good knowledge of the Creator before studying His creation.  After 1963, when prayer and the Bible were expelled from public school campuses the definition of science was changed to accomodate an agnostic/atheistic point of view.  Since only one view was and has been allowed in the classroom, reasonable discussion and arguments which may validate either side of the issue have been squelched.

Muddle about creation and evolutionary science has continued from that time.  Yet contemporary textbooks are not updated to the current status of evolutionary science in research.  

Darwin and his soon successors started out with a broad definition of evolution that requred the confirmation of three major concepts, abiogenisis, micorevolution, and macroevolution.  

Abiogenisis, the generation of living matter from non-living matter though attempted, has no successful experiment.  And many would say that there is no possible means of doing so.  Yet we do have recent work in which "designed" experiments may mimic early events.

Microevolution, the genetic drift within a given species over time, has been shown in many species at many levels.  Experimental design, and the scientific method are completely applicable in this area.

Macroevolution, which is represented by the tree of life and ascent of man and other biology text illustrations, is the concept that if microevolution could be extrapolated over enough time, eventually you may end up forming a new specie from the original ancestor.  The tree of life shows the hypothesis that more complex life evolved from less complex life forms.  Here, the geologic column of the fossil record, the fossil record itself, and the complexity of genetic and molecular biologies are a muddle.  Data for macroevolution are contradictory at best, and sometime scientific forgeries at worst.

The muddle of evolutionary science is that it was created by a Supreme Court and some lower court decisions and not from a critical examination of the data for either explanation.  Have you ever wondered why there is such an outcry at even the mention of a reasoned critical discussion of evolution and creation science from the elementary to graduate levels?  Every other topic of science is allowed to be questioned in the classroom.  Why the muddle on this one in Biology or Chemistry classroom?  

Presently students are told all three from the Pre Cambrian era to Cenezoic era.  Yet they are not shown in textbooks fossils of human footprints, handprints, bones, and artifacts with contemporary dinosaur fossils.  Textbooks fail to show the complete history of evoluitonary science which reveals the narrowing of the definition to fit only microevolution in present research.  Muddle enough, both creation and evolutionary theories agree on microevolution.

Science educator, technical college

Answer 5

I can understand your irritation with the Standard Chemistry curriculum. However, Sig figs and the understanding of the importance of units I feel only take a small time to cover, yet take a critical role in how students evaluate the rest of the problems they will cover in almost any branch of science. Now, some Chemistry classes take maybe to much time to cover these small topics, but the best time to cover them is during a summer assignment or some other type of homework.  I agree that sometimes the complications of covering them can often result in wasted time, but over all it maybe necessary for students who do not remember sig figs or units. It is important to keep in mind that not every student is a scientist, and may find other knowledge more important to retain than sig figs or unit conversions.

I am a student, level is high school.

Sincerely, David

PS: Thank you for answering my question on photon polarization. I would not mind more detail, but you gave me something to look further into. Thank you as well for making me a contact.

Answer 6

Because all of that is the basis of chemistry.

Student, college sophomore

Answer 7

I am not a science teacher but there seems to be mixed views on the new courses among those I know.  Some curse the lack of hard scientific knowledge, while others like the scope it gives them for approachng topics from a range of directions.  Remember, with the idiot comprehensive system, those taking the courses will range from numpties to nuclear physicists, so it's tough!!

Answer 8

the BIG problem with education in the UK is that it doesnt teach students to think, it only teaches them to pass exams

if a student cant do simple maths like converting units then they shouldnt be allowed anywhere near a university

Answer 9

I'd just like to add that I am a university student studying chemistry and found the way it was taught in school set me up well for uni. I agree with what people have said above. A lot of stuff you must study is not really chemistry but it is important if you ever want to work through to a chemistry problem, because that's how they appear in the real world.

Answer 10

I think the problem is that most high school teachers aren't very creative, they just follow the book or the set curriculum and don't know how to make up an interesting problem. Conversion problems are important because often times you'll encounter different units when doing real world problems but some conversion problems are just long, boring and pointless. Students already have to memorize a lot for chemistry, what's the point in forcing them to memorize more units? They can always look up the conversion factors between different units if they ever need to.  

But you can't completely blame the teachers, even interesting teachers are forced to give these problems to students because these are the type of questions that appear on standardized tests.

Now about the word "theory," teachers should do a better job of making distinctions between a theory with almost no proof whatsoever and a theory that have a vast amount of evidence to support them but I think even if teachers made an effort to emphasize the meaning of the word "theory" in whatever context it is being used, it wouldn't make a difference. As long as ignorant creationists hear the word "theory" they'll find some way to use it as ammunition no matter how much you try to explain to them. I'm a high school student.

Answer 11

1.  Well said, Johnny D...you have brought new light into this debate. So, how can we get the test-makers to become more practical, to put emphasis on the SUBJECT without recourse to unnecessary complexities? I find conversions required in real-life problems, but not to the extent that the problem becomes secondary.

2.  Significant figures are needed to determine the accuracy of an answer, but I have never had a problem with them. I simply use the number containing the least real digits, do my calculations with one additional digit, then round off to SF determined above. This is probably an over-simplification (for which a mathematician would take me to task), but has served me well in this real world. I refuse to become involved in esoterica. As Bob Newhart (the accountant) said: "If I get within a dollar, what the h**l..."

3.  A semantics problem seems to have cropped-up here...and are they not ever-prevalent! To me the words postulate, theory and principle are used to denote increasing reliability, increasing weight of evidence, in that order. Again, an etymologist might protest but wth. Creationism may be considered a theory, but one easily handled: the instructor needs only point out that the student will be exposed to many such, and he/she should determine its relative weight for validity.

Again, I hope I have not stepped on too many toes  :-))