Expert Insights

Topic

Strategy

Too often I think students and others think that analytical chemistry is just that measurement step. When you use the AA, when you use the ... and doesn’t take into account, well all of the other stuff, what’s the actual problem you’re trying to solve? What are you actually trying to do, sampling, measurement, validating your results? Because only then when you’ve got a result, only then does it actually become information.	This understanding builds students' knowledge about the basic structure of matter which stimulates them to think in sub-microscopic level that provides the fundamental understanding for further chemistry learning.
Students see equations and panic. Students struggle to transfer mathematical knowledge to chemical situations. Students silo knowledge and find it hard to relate concepts to actual systems.	It was a revelation to me in second year when [one of the top professors] said to me, "Buy a model kit." And so now I tell all my students.
At the start of every class my standard thing was ‘can you see me, can you hear me, can you see the slide?’ I would always look up the back for someone to put their hand up and always I would never talk to the front row. I’d always talk middle and back row and if someone was talking in the back row I’d pick them up and say ‘hey you, be quiet’ and then they know that I’ve seen them. So you’ve got to focus on the whole class not just the people at the front - the people at the back as well. Because sometimes smart people sit at the back as well, not just the dummies who want to get out. You’ve got to make sure you know everyone in the class. And the surprising thing is that most kids sit in the same place every lecture. So you can actually recognise where they are and who they are. You don’t know their names but there’s a pattern in the way they sit. You’ve just got to be aware of that. So the trick is to embrace the whole class with your - you know physically, just with your eyes and and the way you talk. You know, when you wave your hands, wave it to the back row. Make sure they’re involved.	They struggle with the language of chemistry. So we sort of need to teach them the process and how to work out how to do these things. We know that their tendency is just to attempt to memorise reactions. Whereas if we can teach them to derive … find out what the nucleophile and the electrophile is then all they have to do is draw a curly arrow from the nucleophile to the electrophile, rather than trying to work out what the reaction is itself.
But if you’re honest, they’ll be honest right. And I think that’s really important. If you b*gger something up and you really do make a blue or even a little blue, tell them. Say ‘oh look this was wrong, you know this is what it should be’. So that’s important - to be honest, to be upfront. Recognise that we’re dealing, in 2015 or 2014, we’re dealing with OP1 to maybe 14. Recognise the breadth of that class. Don’t teach the top, don’t teach the bottom, teach somewhere in the middle, but try to make sure that you don’t lose the top ones and lose the bottom ones, which is very difficult to do and you only do it with experience.	The actual curly arrow mechanisms are in a way themselves cartoons, how they map to the reality in the way that a Micky Mouse might map to real life.
We teach way too much stuff. We teach way too much stuff that we used to teach because students didn’t have the resources available to them that they’ve got now. I mean if you look at the resources - they’ve got textbooks, they’ve got electronic media, they’ve got Sapling. They can do the problems in their own time in a guided way with something like Sapling. We don’t have to do it, all we’ve got to do is give them the framework to solve the problems. And I think we often misunderstand how much we should give them because I think we underestimate the value of letting them solve problems in a guided way with things like Sapling. And I think, you know, in the old days we’d just do problem after problem after problem, which is as boring as anything.	I find that some students pick up what the mole concept is from the idea of grouping numbers of things that are every day size.

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