Why introductory chemistry is boring: a long-term historical perspective

You can replace chemistry with math in his article (and he sort of mentions this in context near the end). I can't remember once being shown the physical problems that drove progress in math until I reached calculus. I remember being bored to tears in algebra 2, a class which was basically being taught as linear algebra + trigonometry. It wasn't until the following summer that I discovered 3d transforms, and a bunch of other applications of all that matrix manipulation and how all the sin/cos manipulation helped with RF electronics.

Back 25 years ago I was convinced that that entire class could have been taught as an extension of more concrete subjects (electronics, computer graphics, signals, etc) that simply weren't taught in the high school I went to, despite the fact it was what we now call a STEM magnet school. Classes I later wished I could retake, if only to pick up on all the math subtleties I mostly ignored because it all seemed so pointless.

Now that I have kids, I see that nothing has really changed. Sure they get a lot of "word problems", but the problems are so artificial they might just be worded as "what is the result of adding A and B and dividing by C" for all the natural concepts they get across.

Thankfully I had a pretty reasonable chemistry teacher, who did a lot of demos and gave us interresting experiments to keep the class from being a bunch of random facts.

I always hated experiments in chemistry class, as it was always boring and trivial. Kids who liked it, did so because it was a time to slack off, watch colors change, play around with the props etc. It didn't help in understanding anything and was as detached from the rest of the chemistry lessons as if it was a subject to itself.

Interestingly, as a student I also disliked whenever the book went in the direction that TFA recommends: explaining the experimental underpinnings of theory. It always felt unsatisfactory, like a "God of gaps" argument. Whenever the student was not ready to hear the detailed derivations from more basic principles (advanced topics), the justification was just "experiments have shown that [...]". Many times I found out there are more basic underlying reasons and felt cheated. I wanted to understand how the universe works, not who discovered it and when.

My young self would think, leave me alone with pictures of dusty old books and people with funny hair, I want to know how the universe is structured. We're just a speck of dust in the grand scheme of the universe, I want to learn about galaxies, planets, elements. These are what any objective observer, like aliens, would care about, not the lives of some humans hundreds of years ago.

Today I understand better that I was already thinking inside of a certain scientific framework which very much depends on the guys with the funny hairs, and the way things are conceptualized aren't really inevitable, they are models, with imperfections and there's no magic source of authority who knows the answer to everything. We don't have the blueprints from God and learning more about the process of scientific discovery would have been useful perhaps. Too bad that the average school teacher would not be up for that task. Nor would most 10-14-year-olds have the necessary intellectual framework and abstraction in place to understand what is even being discussed. "I'm the teacher and this is how things are" is much easier to get across.

This is a bit of a rant.

For my engineering degree, I had to pick between taking into to chem or intro to bio. Since I was an electrical engineer and didn't care for either subject, I put this requirement off until my senior year.

I took intro to chem because I thought it would be easier since I was mathematically inclined, but it was one of the worst educational experiences I had at university. The professor was clearly reciting the same notes he wrote 20 years earlier. The material was so trivial that the only way they could induce any sort of curve into the class was to put more questions on the exam than was reasonable to accomplish in the time period. The labs were abysmal, did not really teach any sort of generalizable lab skills, and never worked. If you asked the TAs for help, they would all gather on the far side of the lab and return 20 minutes later saying they never studied the copper cycle so they can't help you.

I dropped the class after my first exam out of frustration and decided to take intro to bio. Pretty much every complaint I had about the chemistry class was fixed in bio. The experiments even worked 9/10 times on the first try. Most importantly, though, I felt like I could take the knowledge I took from the class and use it in the future if the circumstance presented itself. Chemistry just confirmed I was able to count things properly, and I'd have no idea how to approach an actual chemical problem in the field.

Organic chemistry is the bomb. I was bored to death with inorganic chemistry, maybe because of the way it was presented, but organic chemistry seemed like suddenly being shown that all the cool stuff in the world is made of lego pieces (carbon atoms), and there's a manual for how to put them together in different ways.

I wasn't exposed to it until university, but I always thought the material would make a good intro course for high school chemistry.

Why does chemistry have to be less boring? We are not short on chemists. Take it from someone who left the field

Exploding balloons, frozen roses, elephant toothpaste are all very unlike what a chemist will do for a living after they've been lured into the field with this magician's act. Personally I don't think it's a bad thing if the classes are a little dry.

It's true chem lab is a bit too much like following cooking instructions, but as a former TA I assure you the train would come off the rails for 2/3 the class if you tried to get students to do much more in the little time they have. I had colleagues who went to undergrad in India where they still have "identify this substance" exams. They related identifying solvents and powders by smell, look, and feel. It's hardly learning the scientific method

Well, I learned chemistry (UK O-level and A-level) about 50 years ago, and back then you could do almost anything you fancied with the reagents available, which did stop short of things like fluorine, but only just. Did you know you can dip your (dry) fingers into concentrated sulphuric acid and only experience a feeling of warmth, as the acid reacts with the oils of your skin? As to what we got up to with metallic sodium, carcinogenic aromatics, and noxious gases, I shudder to think about now, but we did learn a lot of chemistry on the side. We did have a brilliant teacher, though.

I had to get up to date with general and physical chemistry over the last few months for my graduate studies; my background is in theoretical physics and I've not taken any chemistry above GCSEs. I spent my nights working through a couple of chemistry textbooks and man, I loved it. It's an exquisitely complex subject: I wouldn't call it elegant, but there's an intrinsic beauty in the sheer practicality of it.

A lot of very, very smart people I've spoken to - most of whom had taken chemistry for A-levels - have found it odd that I've enjoyed it so much. Their memories of the subject are in complete contradiction to mine (literally speaking, because they associate chemistry with memorisation).

The difference, I think, is the fact that my introduction to chemistry came after I became competent with quantum and statistical physics: the fundamental topics of physics from which chemistry as a whole springs forth. Now that I think about it, the introductory chemistry book I studied at first would have been unbearably frustrating if all I had to work with were constitutive relations and hand-wavy arguments.

> Students are given incredibly precise instructions and told to find a certain result. If they fail to find the result, they are made to redo the “experiment”.

In my final Chemical Engineering Unit Operations lab course there was a distillation column with the associated instrumentation suffering from neglect and abuse, as indicated by the saw-tooth molar ratio across the height instead of the smooth curve one would expect. My teammates for this lab insisted that we just fake up good-looking data for the distillation column to put in our report because that's what the other teams were doing. I put my foot down and told the team that we would use the data that was recorded, and draw conclusions in the lab report about the poorly-maintained equipment, and maybe something would be done about it before the next semester.

Well sonuvabitch... We received the only passing grade on that particular unit op lab, and the department chair allocated money to refit the lab equipment.

When learning, it's not about the result as much as it is getting the process right, something from which the standardized curriculum and test culture has steered education away.

No offense to the author, but it might be poor teachers.

My high school chemistry teacher was one of the best I've ever had. She made it very fun, and had a stream of kids taking her classes and ultimately getting 4s and 5s on the AP chemistry test. It was so much fun I spent a semester as her lab assistant.

> The laboratory work of introductory chemistry is closer to a cookbook than an experiment. Students are given incredibly precise instructions and told to find a certain result. If they fail to find the result, they are made to redo the “experiment”.

This absolutely resonates with me. I am re-learning chemistry now, and this sticks out to me as something that frustrated me as a student. The amount of time that it took to get the experiment right sapped away all my curiosity for what I was actually doing. It's worth mentioning that part of the purpose of the labs is to teach lab techniques. But the cost seems really high to me. I think it teaches people to be good lab techs, but not good scientists.

If I were a teacher, I would begin an introductory chemistry course with these words: “Chemistry is the single most important area of knowledge today and for all foreseeable future. (Sorry physics.) This is because the world we live in and we ourselves are built from atoms, and because all future progress, the very evolution of the human being, all rest now on our understanding of the limitless possibilities presented by an ability to control atoms’ behavior. It is chemistry, in its modern sense, that holds the key to the future of the humankind. We may never reach the stars, we may never understand the “true nature” of elementary particles - but that’s OK, because 99% of what’s really important for us in the world we live in can indeed be modeled - and controlled - based on the simple view of the world as a bunch of atoms interacting in certain ways.”

About 10 years ago, the "honors" gen chem course at Cornell taught by Stephen Lee was attempting to do this. He might have written the course notes into a book by now but his health isn't great.

The course syllabus was presented as an onion bulb with the outer layers labeled as parts of MO theory (wavefunctions etc) and the core was the "beautiful flower" of the chemical bond, which grows out of the surrounding concepts. The course began with wavefunctions discussed in the context of audio and vibrating plates (e.g. violin bow on a square plate with salt shows its resonance modes) and built it up into first principles derivation of macroscopic observable properties of a substance.

Anyway, the coursework was absolutely brutal for most freshmen, and the premeds hated it, but about 5 percent of students every year got absolutely enamored by the beauty of solid state physics.

Good article, interesting material to think over.

I don’t think the author’s patronizing attitude towards historical theories is helping his thesis much. He starts off proposing that chemistry in 50 years will be way ahead of chemistry today, and so we need to focus on how evidence from experimentation leads to theories to back them up instead of the converse. Alchemy and humors and the four elements all had some amount of observation of outcomes which lead to those theories, and later on evidence disproved them and a new theory took hold. There’s no need to talk about how silly and wrong those people were—rather, more so just how much more we know about the world.

Additionally there’s a hidden assumption that introductory chemistry should be teaching people what chemists do. I’d venture that a majority of people who take an intro chem class won’t go on to do any experimental chemistry other than baking. Their curriculum specifies that they need the class, and perhaps those theoretical concepts are built upon from a biological, medical, or physical angle. In this case, the important things to know are 1) the theory, and 2) that the theory explains the world as we know it, so that if another theory comes around to explain new evidence we don’t have “new math”-style public backlash of unfamiliarity.

This whole essay seems kinda rambling to me. Chemistry does have some issues today, but it's mainly due to whom the audience for the Chemistry is meant for. For example, it seems for a long time, Chemistry classes have been used to weed people out of majors who aren't really committed to the sciences/engineering. Gen Chem and O Chem both have been used for this. I think the authors issue may be that he's not a Chem major, and most of the information that is being given to him was not useful for his major or seemed to lack coherence to him. And if you aren't a Chem major, I can see this. But if you are a Chem major, then everything you learn in Gen Chem will be useful to you in all of your other Chem courses. I see it being addressed now a bit more than when I was in college. For example, you will see more O Chem courses that are being directed at Bio type majors versus an O Chem class that is directed at a Chem major. I think this is a good thing, most Bio majors probably won't need as rigorous a course in O Chem as a Chem/BioChem major would.

Perhaps it should be. Keeping only the genuine interested engaged and a high bar of entry, we end up with only the competent actually pursuing a career in chemistry. Similarly, front-end development and javascript was (and is) not boring and look at where we are now. Nobody should be complaining that <insert branch of science where if you fuck up people die> is boring.

I was bored of chemistry until I started cheating on tests. Somehow creating my own system to represent all those reactions so I can cram all of them in 3pt font on a 3x1cm piece of paper has gotten me sufficiently interested that at some point I realised I've learnt it.

> In 100 years, this was the shift. Chemistry, as something that one did, was relegated to more advanced courses. You would no longer be able to do chemistry by taking an intro course alone.

> The regress, then, would come in disregarding the empirical evidence entirely, and transforming chemistry entirely into something that one learned, rather than did.

The author makes some good points.

There are also some interesting connections to software.

The way many kids today learn how to write software today is by doing and using first, and only later learning what they're doing. That's possible thanks to the relentless compound effect of Moore's Law operating over six decades or so.

It doesn't work that way in chemistry. Chemistry kits used to be commonplace up until the 70s. Various chemicals (such as acetone, concentrated isopropanol, and even certain drugs) used to be commonly available over the counter without hassle. Safety concerns have obliterated that pathway. There has been no Moore's Law making chemistry safer, cleaner, or more engaging over the last 60 years.

So the path to professional chemist (or even enthusiastic amateur) is completely different from the path to professional programmer.

Oddly enough, I see YouTube starting to re-kindle the idea that you can do amazing things at home with some ordinary materials and a little know-how. No, you don't have to read the whole damn book and take all the tests before showing off.

Tinkering with powerful things you're not qualified to use is incredibly addictive.

I think the pedagogical methods could be much improves if it began from the standpoints of something like:

"we're going to go through the history of the development of Chemistry, beginning with alchemists, and work our way forward with the principles discovered and labs the illustrate those principles."

Instead, from what I remember, we started with "Memorize the periodic table and the molecular weights of each element. Quiz on Friday."

Introductory chemistry that would be interesting would trend towards the expensive and the dangerous. I'm not sure how you fix that - high schools are not going to be letting kids do metallurgy or create black powder fireworks, so you are going to be stuck with the mostly pointless and very boring lab work.

I had a chemistry book that I read cover to cover multiple times as a kid. It introduced the periodic table, went through every major group, explained reactions, acid/bases, oxidation, fission and fusion. It was a pretty solid textbook. What was it that got me to read it over and over? Every single page had something that related to real life. What's a noble gas and why is it interesting? Well, it doesn't catch fire or corrode things, but it has this neat property when you create an electric arc in it's presence. Here are the subatomic properties that give rise to it's macroscopic properties. I'm sure it was simplified but it was presented in a fun way that encouraged my sense of wonder.

Good writing should be compelling. This true for every subject.

There really needs to be two different general chemistry tracks, one for the students that are thinking about studying chemistry and one for everyone else. Where I went to college the general chemistry classes were very much designed with the assumption that the students taking them would go on to study chemistry. Despite this actually being a minority of the students taking them. For those of us that did study chemistry, I think they prepared us well for subsequent course and lab work. For those that didn't and just needed to satisfy the requirement, I imagine they were very tedious.

I think the whole problem is that people think experiments are less important than they really are. I agree with the idea of doing experiments to test a theory. This is in general. It applies in any field.

I've tutored people in how to do an experiment. They believed an experiment had failed when in reality they had learnt something useful. The experiment really fails when you learnt nothing, didn't get any useful result and it didn't help to confirm or deny anything. An inconclusive result is actually a signal that the experiment needs to be done better somehow - not that the experiment was a failure.

Science gets taught badly as some kind of dogma when experimental process is not understood. Plenty of people don't understand that the core of science is taking the position of not knowing why, coming up with a theory then finding experimental ways to confirm or deny and then improving the theory. They instead teach it as a set of facts, laws and rules. Ignorance of anything is punished or ridiculed. Challenging that dogma results in punishment.

"I don't know" is actually the first step towards real knowledge and discovery. Schools shouldn't teach that this is sinful. They confuse the essential background knowledge as the entire field. Just the facts. Only teach the facts and punish anyone who can't regurgitate them mindlessly.

How are you going to have enough humility to try several different approaches and accept being wrong on most of them if you're too scared to be wrong on even one of them? You have to accept being wrong. Anyone who isn't wrong often enough probably isn't asking or questioning hard, wide or large enough. You need to fail because if not, you're probably not experimenting. If you're not failing then you are not asking enough questions or your questions lack depth.

Rocket launches are a classic example. If you haven't failed at least multiple times you haven't actually tried hard enough. Difficult things require plenty of experimentation. You have to risk being wrong on each attempt. Try something new or confirm something is true. Better to explode on the launchpad during experimentation than lie about your level of understanding and risk some real payload or even worse, people's lives.

Writers have a similar refrain: if you haven't been rejected lately you aren't writing enough or you aren't pushing enough boundaries.

Instead of “experiment” which brings to mind novelty and discussion, they’ll should try “experience” or “practicum”.

My Chemistry 101 class in college that I just took for elective credits was fun and interesting. It had a lab class too that was harder for me but overall good experience. It made connections to past physics class knowledge which I enjoyed too. A lot of concepts stuck with me from it. Mileage must vary.

Do schools even have chem labs these days? Are the burners hooked up? Mine were, but the kids i talk to now increasingly dont get to do real chemistry. It's becoming just a book class for them.

I did not complete more than a hand full of college courses, though one of the was an intro to chem. I absolutely loved it, despite it being one of those once-a-week (Sunday morning) multi-hour slogs.

My particular complaint was, too much focus in covalent x ionic bonds, while metallic bonds were ignored completely. Not sure if current local high school curriculum still does this.

My introductory chemistry (and later physics) teacher was a fantastic, out of this world individual. On the first day he told us about friar roger bacon setting off gun powder to scare away some folks and then our teacher lit a pile of gunpowder on fire (which burns rapidly but does not explode). Hell of a way to start the class, and he had physical demos and historical stories every day that tied in to his lessons.

Here’s a great video on the man: https://youtu.be/gX2vPmp2sSE

And his course notes are here: http://boomeria.com/

Truly a rare a special individual.

I'm sorry, but that is a _very_ poor argumentation. In fact, it's just a rant.

Maybe I should let this pass but this essay really rubs me the wrong way. I would like to stress that the author is _not_ a chemist. That was obvious before he wrote it in his text. He does not have formal training in the discipline (art?) and thus his opinion should be taken with serious skepticism.

On the other hand, I am a (published) college trained chemist, specialised in computational/theoretical chemistry in grad school but I did go through a very good program with anywhere between 10-15 hours of lab work every week, every year. Contrary to the author, I remember the names of all the textbooks I used because I spent so much time with them. Really, the author seems frustrated with his own _very_ limited experience of chemistry.

There is a reason why we "follow recipes". Mishandling of chemicals can and do cause injuries. Labs do get blown up. For all of my education, entrance to any laboratory was conditional on passing a test. Every time. One would be evaluated by either graduate students or professors before being allowed in. If you did not know what you were going to do, how you were going to do it, why you were doing it, what you should expect to happen, along with any other necessary information deemed essential by the instructors, you would be refused access to the lab and consequently get 0 in the mandatory laboratory report. And accidents _still_ happened, sometimes innocuous, sometimes dangerous to the point of having to evacuate the lab for a few minutes.

Not all experiments were "cookbook laboratory work" either. From the very first lab session, students had agency in how you plan and execute your experiment. No two students held notes exactly the same, for example. And no two students researched the subject as much beforehand, something which was _very_ obvious during lab work. Sharing a laboratory with students who did not prepare properly is dangerous in a way you can't really grasp until you're three hours into a multi-step anhydrous synthesis, you need to act fast to add a reagent in your air-free setup and the student next to you flushes a syringe of oxalyl chloride[1] in the sink beside you.

We _did_ have to analyse unknown compounds. We _did_ have a lot of liberty in how we conducted experiments, as long as we prepared well and acted safely. Practicing balancing chemical equations is NOT useless as the author suggests. Contrary to what he seems to believe, empirical evidence is _all there is_. Theories have to conform to reality, not the other way around.

All in all, this is a very bad argumentation that _completely_ misses the point. The author is talking about general chemistry as if it defines a complete chemical education. In actuality, general chemistry is only the very most basic knowledge one needs to have to be allowed in a lab. Chemistry doesn't stop there.

I was ready to give the author a chance but he has shown himself to be unqualified to discuss the topic. Being a dilettante is fine but there is a mountain of work separating a dilettante and a professional. Nobody on HN would seriously consider a rant about the current state of Medical education written by someone who had 2 semesters of biology.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxalyl_chloride

My high school chemistry teacher opened with the thermite reaction experiment. Chemistry at my school was far from boring.

what are the good freshmen level chemistry textbooks these days ?

maybe just me, but intro chem was not boring in the slightest. o.chem OTOH ... rote memorization for the most part, from a firehose

One unfortunate truth is that even if you make class interesting, most of the time "interesting" does not transfer to "learning". Most students only pay attention to the fun part which includes color, sound, visual effects, etc. but they quickly lose attention when cognitive engagement gets involved.

Every teacher can learn a few tricks to make class fun, but it is very difficult to keep students engaged in learning conceptual and theoretical knowledge.

Some students are problem-solvers. A cognitive gap between the problem and the solution is enough to keep them motivated and engaged.

I really enjoyed taking Chemistry in college, especially the labs. I learned a lot and found it to be far more engaging that my Mathematics curriculum.

The problem with Chemistry is that to do anything interesting professionally, you must have a PhD. The PhD in Chemistry is a long, difficult slog.

I wonder if it's related to liability.

If you give teenagers a bunch of chemicals and tell them to learn by experiment, they'll probably end up doing bad stuff (drugs / poisons / explosions), either by accident or on purpose.

In 1850, society was a lot more accepting of this kind of thing than it is now.