Chemical & Engineering News, the magazine that goes to all members of the American Chemical Society, has devoted a special issue to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The articles are mostly available to anyone, but a few of them are only available to ACS members. They provide important scientific background for the oil spill, much of it useful for classroom discussions. For an overview, go to http://pubs.acs.org/cen/oilspill/.

Responding to Oil Spills

. As recently as a few years ago it was popular to regard nanoscience and nanotechnology as fads that would pass. I recall, for example, being chided by some for using the term “nanoscale” in a first-year college chemistry textbook. But this is one fad that is not passing–at least as measured by the rapidly increasing number of undergraduate degree programs in nanoscience and nanotechnology. During the past three years the number of programs has increased by more than 100 and there are now more than 250 programs in 25 countries (see http://www.prweb.com/releases/nanowerk/nanotechnology_degrees/prweb4134154.htm). This is important with regard to how we teach both high school and first-year college chemistry, because students who are expecting to enter the nano fields will benefit from learning the many important ways that chemistry contributes to those fields, the many careers in such fields that are open to those who major in chemistry, and how such fields are important in solving problems such as the energy crisis. More nano in chemistry courses is certainly warranted. High school teachers who want to learn more nanoscience should check this URL:http://www.cel.cmich.edu/nanosci/.

Is the only way children will be able to communicate with their parents going to be through Facebook or Twitter?

I was struck by an item in the New York Times (Thursday, June 10, p. D1; http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/garden/10childtech.html?scp=2&sq=Scelfo%20&st=cse) that described a toddler who, after numerous attempts to get his mother to respond to a question, tried to bite her leg so she would put down her BlackBerry. The article goes on to describe how parents’ use of technology may be depriving children of interactions needed for their development of language skills.

In an admittedly non-scientific study of six Chicago-area households, Dana Suskind, a University of Chicago language researcher, found that in some cases the number of words spoken by adults to children ages 3-5 doubled or even tripled when the parents had their smartphones and computers turned off.  There is evidence that a language-rich environment helps children develop a broad vocabulary that helps them learn to read. So, in addition to affecting driving and other tasks where distraction can be life threatening, do smartphones and computers detract from the intellectual development of children? At this point we don’t know, and it will take some time for scientific studies to be done, but it seems likely that less attention translates to less development.

It is perhaps counterintuitive that appliances designed to foster communication have just the opposite effect, but communication with whom? For the people on the other end of the electronic line, the BlackBerries and iPhones are great. It is those in close proximity–with whom communication would happen in the absence of electronics–who are losing out.  Certainly electronic devices enable far faster and far more extensive communication than ever before, but with our heads in the clouds of communication, do we still have our feet on the ground?

There is no doubt that online attractions can be extremely enticing. One of the reasons some of my students gave for preferring a printed textbook to an online version was that when they studied from the printed version Facebook was not a single mouse-click away and so the temptation for diversion was much less. (Other students preferred the many new features enabled by the electronic version.) I know from personal experience that when a new email comes in I am tempted to interrupt my train of thought and attend to it right away.  Perhaps we all need to develop greater will power in this regard–declare a no-Internet time of day, refuse to be distracted, and pay more attention to what we are doing and those we are with.

I remember some years ago when my wife and I were in a restaurant. Another couple came in, sat down,  each got on a cell phone, and both talked to someone else. (As far as we could tell their phones were not connected to each other!) Why bother to meet for dinner and conversation if all of the conversation is going to be with someone who is not present? Isn’t it pretty selfish to ignore those we are with in favor of others who are not there?

I have always thought of teaching as a generous profession. We give our time and effort in hopes of helping students deal with situations they will encounter in the future and in hopes of improving society as a whole. What we do may not have immediately obvious consequences, but we believe it will influence things for the better in the long term. Is what we teachers are doing out of synch with modern society? Are we too unselfish for our own good? Can anybody still appreciate those whose motivation depends on future good, not just whatever is the flavor of the moment? I hope so, because what we do is (and always was) essential to our society.

The Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation has established the Jean Dreyfus Boissevain Lectureship, which  provides an $18,500 grant for a primarily undergraduate institution to bring in a leading researcher to give a series of lectures in the chemical sciences. In addition to presenting lectures, the Jean Dreyfus Boissevain Lecturer is expected to interact with undergraduate students and faculty during his or her time on a campus. The program provides funds to host the speaker and support summer research for two undergraduate students.

The deadline to apply is Aug. 17, 2010. Visit dreyfus.org/awards/jean_dreyfus_boissevain.shtml for application information.

The Harlow Shapley Visiting Lectureships in Ast…

In the past the ChemEd DL blog contained mainly items from the Journal of Chemical Education. These included editorials that I wrote when I was editor of the JCE and columns written by Erica Jacobsen and Laura Slocum, the high school editors. Other items were reprinted from the JCE when we thought they would be of interest to this audience. The JCE now has a new editor, Norbert Pienta, and is being co-published by the American Chemical Society, which has decided that all JCE content should be available only from the ACS Publications Web site. Therefore you have not seen a lot of posts here lately.

That is now going to change. There will be more posts and they will be different. I will try to provide thoughtful and thought-provoking statements about educational issues in chemistry that come to my attention. I will also provide news that may be of interest to readers from middle school through graduate level. (For example, I have just posted about an award for primarily undergraduate institutions from the Dreyfus Foundation.) There may also be posts from others who have something to say, and I would very much appreciate receiving your comments and questions about any thing I post. If you want to send your comments directly to me, my email address is jwmoore@chem.wisc.edu.

I look forward to a renewed ChemEd DL blog and to your continuing participation.

John

from Erica K. Jacobsen, JCE High School Editor

We had the opportunity to see an acquaintance’s baby a few weeks after he was born. A couple months later, we ran into the family again, and it was a shock to see how large he had grown in that time. It reminded me of the years when my own children were quite young. Friends who saw us every few weeks would remark on how big the kids had grown since they’d seen them last. At the time, the comments surprised me; because I was around the kids all the time, I hadn’t noticed the accumulation of the small, incremental changes that could build up over the space of even a couple of weeks.

2010 marks the beginning of the teen years of the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE) Classroom Activity series. It was launched in 1997 as a resource designed specifically for high school educators and students. Over the years, it has undergone its own small, incremental changes. For example, the earliest Activities used red printing as well as black and white, and did not necessarily include suggested answers to the student questions. Some years later, the page names changed from “Instructor Side” and “Student Side” to “Instructor Information” and “Student Activity”. Those and other small changes have accumulated to give the appearance that JCE readers have come to recognize. Now, another change has arrived with the publication of Activity #104 in the February 2010 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education. It is more of a growth spurt as the Journal enters a new stage of maturation and development, with its transition to copublication with American Chemical Society (ACS) Publications. This is the first Classroom Activity since this transition, and the changes are significant. Activities will now be published more in the style of regular articles, and will not be printed on a perforated cardstock sheet. In print, you’ll see most of the information that would normally appear on the “Instructor Information” portion of the Activity. This will give readers enough background to determine whether they’re interested in using the Activity in their classrooms or outreach. Interested readers can then access the supporting information online, which will include the Student Activity Worksheet, a section of suggested answers to any worksheet questions, and other extras, such as data tables.

A major benefit of these changes is the elimination of the one page, front-and-back space constraint that Activities had in the past. For this reason, Harris and Walker’s Activity this month, “A Novel, Simplified Scheme for Plastics Identification”, easily had space for an extensive flowchart, several graphics, and additional references. Including the Student Activity Worksheet as a separate file also allows users to modify the text to suit their own needs. You may wish to add or delete a question depending on the grade level you are working with, or to modify the procedure depending on the materials you have available. Advanced students could even create their own flowchart to separate the seven recyclable plastics, using density data and other information from the Activity. The series will still include the great hands-on, minds-on Activities readers have come to know, love, and use. They’re just growing up a little bit more.

Laura’s Take on the Issue

from Laura Slocum, JCE High School Associate Editor

Last year was my inaugural year for including an Earth Day focus in my classes. I reconfigured my syllabus and saved the topic of gases and gas laws until April, and used a JCE Classroom Activity related to the ACS Chemists Celebrate Earth Day (CCED) theme Air: The Sky’s the Limit! I wanted to celebrate Earth Day in my classroom again this year. However, I was struggling with how to include this year’s CCED theme, Plants: The Green Machines . Then, I read Richard Treptow’s article “Carbon Footprint Calculations: An Application of Chemical Principles” and found the answer I needed for my teaching style.

A number of students have asked me, “What is a carbon footprint?” I answer their question, they say, “OK”, and we move on. However, I am not certain that I have really answered their question or that they understand. Have you found yourself in a similar place?

Treptow’s article started me thinking about several things I could incorporate into my class to connect with the Earth Day plant theme, while also more fully answering the student questions about carbon footprints. If all goes well, I will share my ideas with you in a later article. After all, that is what Erica and I have been encouraging each of you to do in this Journal.

Illustrated haiku from the 2009 Chemists Celebrate Earth Day haiku contest by 6th−8th grade winner Sara Jane of the Wilson Dam ACS Local Section.

High School Chemed Learning Information Center (CLIC)

from Erica K. Jacobsen, JCE High School Editor

“The only constant is change” sprang to mind while reading

the draft version of the January 2010 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE). Wi-fi connection at the ready, I turned to the Internet for information about its originator. (It was apparently a popular activity this month; see Editor-in-Chief Norb Pienta’s column in this issue.) The Greek philosopher Heraclitus surfaced in connection with variants of the quote. A choice on the first page of the Google search results that appealed to me was a philosophy essay, which used the illustration of a river in a discussion of the quote. Even though the waters constantly change, it is still the same river.

Smaller changes to JCE have been occurring throughout my years here. New feature columns have been added, current columns tweaked, the appearance and organization of the table of contents adjusted, and so on. An even larger change is upon us, as this is the first issue of JCE copublished between the American Chemical Society (ACS) Publications Division and the ACS Division of Chemical Education. It has resulted in new workflows and an overall evaluation of how things have been done and how they should best be done in the future. It is likely changes both big and small are still to come. However, even though changes eddy and swirl around how JCE works, to use the illustration mentioned above, JCE remains the same river. It still remains the premier publication for chemical educators. Its content is still written by teachers, for teachers. The authors of articles in this issue still share great ideas that have worked in their own classrooms, for you to consider using in yours.

Two examples that caught my eye are described below. Branan and Morgan describe “mini-laboratories” to supplement conventional laboratories. They share the example lab Banding Together where students make observations of temperature changes when stretching and relaxing rubber bands (see Figure 1). The lab experience itself really is “mini”, but can stimulate valuable discussion as students work through a series of questions, including a culminating final question. Occasional use of this style of lab may be one option to reduce the burden of lab report grading that Laura discusses later in this column. More than two dozen mini-laboratories are available at http://www.mini-labs.org/ (accessed Nov 2009).

Figure 1. Qualitatively detecting the temperature change associated

with stretching a rubber band (J. Chem. Educ. 2002, 79, 138).

Driscoll, Gelabert, and Richardson describe how their institution fosters connections across disciplines through the use of learning communities. Students still take standard courses, such as a first-year general chemistry course and microeconomics. However, various pairs of courses are linked through concurrent enrollment in a reflective tutorial, which explores connections of the two subjects and includes an experiential component, such as various hands-on community projects and field trips.

JCE’s Secondary School Chemistry Section

As a brief update, Laura Slocum and I both continue to serve the high school readership of the Journal. This will include my serving on Norb Pienta’s new editorial board as an Associate Editor in the high school and precollege areas. Laura and I are both working on projects started even before the transition, including outreach to preservice teachers and a second JCE Classroom Activity reprint collection. We will also see you at the Spring 2010 ACS High School Day Program in San Francisco and at our usual booth at the NSTA 2010 national conference in Philadelphia.

Laura’s Take on the Issue

from Laura Slocum, JCE High School Associate Editor

We can probably all agree that lab reports are a necessary and required part of high school chemistry courses. However, grading them requires a substantial investment of time and effort. I just spent about 26 hours grading 124 lab reports. That is two sets of lab reports for two different courses, and I know that the number of reports I am grading is low compared to many of you. Lab report grading is the only thing I really dislike about teaching and the one area of teaching where I am always looking for a “simpler” approach. I found Gragson’s and Hagan’s idea of peer-review, much like the approach of this Journal as it reviews submitted articles, intriguing and one that I am going to try in my Introduction to Organic Chemistry class when they turn in their lab reports. The students already do some of this in their AP English Literature classes, so they will not be completely surprised by reviewing each other’s work. However, I have never had them do this with their lab reports, so some definite direction and guidelines will be necessary. In the article, Gragson and Hagan provide directions for how they guide their students through this process. I will mold their directions, which were used for physical chemistry lab reports, to fit my course and students. I am really looking forward to trying this process with my advanced students this semester and then later in the spring term with my first-year students.

from Laura Slocum, JCE High School Associate Editor

Recently, I have spent many hours working with seven students as they develop their own demonstrations and hands-on activities focusing on elements—the theme of this year’s National Chemistry Week (NCW)—“Chemistry—It’s Elemental!” What a special privilege this has been for me. My love of chemistry and my desire to share that love with others is coming to life in these students. Giving students the opportunity to “do chemistry” is one of my primary goals, and these students are doing that as they teach others how to do chemistry safely. The students have taken ideas from past laboratory experiments—the lighting of a piece of Mg ribbon, or video clips from Periodic Table Live! (the addition of sodium to water, see image below)—or searches through the literature, especially the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE) and the Internet, and adapted them to fit their presentation style.

(http://www.chemeddl.org/collections/ptl/PTL/elements/Na/frames.html)

This came about when a faculty member at my school asked if I would be interested in reaching out to a small, private school in downtown Indianapolis, IN. I answered with a resounding Yes! The school’s eighth-grade science teacher was thrilled to have us come to her two science classes of 21 students each. When I asked our junior and senior classes for volunteers, seven students—3 boys and 4 girls—immediately came forward and were really excited to share their passion for chemistry with the younger students, especially during NCW. This kind of student enthusiasm makes me feel very special as a teacher.

As I write this editorial, the students are still developing some of the demonstrations. The school visit will occur in two weeks, during NCW. They have already selected demos and hands-on activities that focus on elements in groups 1, 2, 16, 17, and 18. The students have taken charge of their own organization and planning; my role has been to make sure everything is safe and the materials the students need are available.

In the December 2009 issue of the Journal, the article by McCarthy and Widanski especially spoke to me about the importance of my role as a high school chemistry teacher. The authors report on “chemistry anxiety” and address several issues from their research. Their data on different types of chemistry anxiety indicate that handling chemicals ranked second of chemistry anxieties, more anxiety-provoking even than learning chemistry. By allowing my students to share their passion for chemistry with younger students, I hope the younger students will see the passion and “fun” of exploring chemistry and not have as many fears as they grow up. This also gives the older students the opportunity to handle chemicals in a new situation and to plan, test, and perform a demonstration. I hope this lowers the older students’ anxiety.

This type of exchange that we have with our students and then share with each other in the Journal is what teaching is all about, from my perspective. So, as 2009 draws to a close, remember that Erica and I are here to help each of you share ideas from your classroom, a laboratory, an activity, and so forth with your fellow colleagues. Just ask.

Erica’s Take on the Issue

from Erica K. Jacobsen, JCE High School Editor

I was glad Laura highlighted McCarthy and Widanski’s article. High school educators browsing through the table of contents of the December 2009 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education might think the triangle () next to “Assessment of Chemistry Anxiety in a Two-Year College” is a typo. Don’t let the title fool you. The article discusses the existence of anxiety toward chemistry in three areas: learning chemistry, chemistry evaluation, and handling chemicals. The authors state, “Recognizing the existence [of chemistry anxiety] is the first step in reducing negative attitudes toward chemistry”—an issue of which educators on any level should be aware.

American Chemical Society 2010 Spring Meeting

If you are attending the ACS’s spring national meeting in San Francisco, don’t miss the High School Day program. The meeting’s overall theme is “Chemistry for a Sustainable World”; the High School Day organizers are coordinating their program with this theme. Early materials state that presentations will “make the case for green chemistry” and will include hands-on activities, information about available resources, and discussion of how to smoothly implement green chemistry in your own curriculum. JCE will present “Go Green for Earth Day with the Journal of Chemical Education”, which will include JCE resources for the green chemistry theme and Earth Day 2010, and a soon-to-be-published JCE Classroom Activity.

JCE High School Chemed Learning Information Center (CLIC)

By Dan Toomey, Edgewood Middle School, Madison, Wisconsin

I have used “A Kool Reaction from the Fine Print” JCE Classroom Activity with my 8th grade students as guided-inquiry method in order to introduce atoms. (This activity is the one that was done in the Chemistry Comes Alive! Part 4 NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar on October 15.) We began the lesson discussing why it is important to read the fine print on labels, and I passed around packages of Kool-Aid and asked students to locate any important instructions. As we discussed labels I realized that many of my students are not well versed at reading labels. There were good observations regarding the ingredients in Kool-Aid, and I asked them why it might be important not to store things in metal containers.

Student responses were varied, and I asked them what the Kool-Aid and steel wool might look like at their smallest sizes. In other words, I tried to get students to start thinking about what the Kool-Aid and steel wool were made of at the atomic scale. We launched into the activity, and as might be expected there was much joy after students observed the color change. After the activity, we discussed what was occurring at the molecular level between the substances involved, and we looked closer at iron as an element and its properties. We are beginning our chemistry unit, and will focus on the NSES and AAAS standards associated with matter. NSES: Matter is made of minute particles called atoms, and atoms are composed of even smaller components. AAAS: All matter is made up of atoms. In the 5E Learning Cycle, this activity is a great example of students engaged in the unit. As we continue to explore and engage with other activities, the class can refer back to this activity and continue to add to our understanding of elements, matter, atoms, moles, and strong and weak acids.  Who would have thought steel wool and Kool-Aid could lead to that?

What can you and your students learn from videos showing reactions of the elements? A lot! The link below is to an article that describes what we learned from videos that show elements reacting with air, water, acids, and base and how what the video showed compared with textbook descriptions. Tied to this year’s National Chemistry Week theme, Chemistry: It’s Elemental!, this article is fascinating reading for anyone interested in chemical reactions.

Article: Seeing is Believing: Learning from Periodic Table Live! Videos

Copyright 2009, Journal of Chemical Education, Division of Chemical Education, Inc. Reprinted with permission