Teaching Chemistry

As someone who loved chemistry in high school and did not feel like that love was returned at all, this interview with Morten Meldal was very heartening to read. The fault is not with folks like me who might have gone on to have a professional life that involved chemistry but had no shot. Everything was made to feel impossibly hard and out of reach.

One of the things that I would really like if we could make chemistry part of the general education and have pleasure-driven teaching already from the first grades in chemistry, visualizations and so on. 

Pleasure-driven means that it should be very easy to consume for the students. Not all students come to school with equal ability to make abstractions or see images and so on. But if we make the images for them, if we are able to show this imaginary world as if it was something they could really see. To make cartoons of our chemistry world in order to make them understand this and not invoke any of all these calculations that you often have in chemistry at any early point but just let them be free and let them watch instead of let them use in the beginning. I think we could really reach far with that.

That was nowhere close to my experience in high-school and from what I could tell it fell far short for J as well. She was good at chemistry and had some natural feel for it unlike me but that did not help her dive as deep into it as she might have wanted. Watching chemistry in action, learning the stories about what it makes possible in the world starting as early as elementary school would be such an amazing gift for kids.