A former student of mine called me today to let me know he appreciated my efforts of teaching him high school chemistry. It’s OK. The young man graduated this year, and he is now in a good engineering program at one of the better local universities, and it sounds like he is going to be a chemical engineer. Besides hearing a friendly voice, it was one of those moment that teachers cherish and makes all the sacrificies they endure worthwhile. I touched at least one young life.
It’s especially bittersweet for me because I no longer teach. My teaching career was short and not very sweet, and it made me question the value of what if anything I have accomplished in my long and checkered career path. I went from being a research biochemist, two years of unemployment, back to school to get two more degrees, part time tutoring for several years, and then teaching high school chemistry for about two years. Now, I work at the Census Bureau.
Yes, talk about your crooked miles.
Anyway, for the sake of not plastering his name all over the internet, I will call him Jeff. He went to a private Catholic school here in Louisville, and it is where I had my first full time teaching gig. There was no one at the school for me to team teach with. I was the lone chemistry teacher, which also made me “head” of the chemistry department. I taught every sophomore and what was called a Chemistry II class for seniors. And I mean every sophomore student — from the honors, regular, and students with special needs.
I had no reserve of chemistry labs to rely upon, nor did I have any teacher plans to fall back on. I had to steal chemistry labs from online or make up my own, and I definitely had to make all those lessons on the fly. I had no chemistry text to rely upon, so I did something nuts. I used a general chemistry text from my old undergraduate days as a basis for designing my lessons.
I hear the groans coming from across the mists of time with that decision.
I did my damndest to water down the lessons for my students though. Well, I thought I had watered it down. On reflection, I needed Lake Michigan amounts of water.
Yes, Jeff, who was in my honors class, admitted that my chemistry class was very hard. And I apologized to him about what I had inflicted on all my students. But he admitted that it gave him a good foundation for what he is being taught now, and his friend Bill, another good student, said the same thing to Jeff.
They are both getting hit with quantum mechanics in their college chemistry course. And yes, I went over that in too great a detail with my high school students. I covered the historical experiments that dealt with the nature of matter and light. I went into the debate about whether light is a wave or particle. I covered the Bohr model of the atom, and I dove into all the gory details of electron orbitals, their quantum numbers and what they mean, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, The Pauling Exclusion Principle and so forth.
I say in my defense that this was my FIRST time teaching high school chemistry. Remember, no one was there to help me, except my former university advisor. And I do mean I got no help from my principal. None. Zero. Nada. This was because the principal hated and feared me.
And how was I to know that they didn’t really cover quantum mechanics in the public high schools in Kentucky either? I never attended a public high school. I went to those private Catholic schools in Louisville. And back in the bad old days, they taught the basics of quantum mechanics in high school. Therefore, I assumed this was still part of a regular high school chemistry curriculum.
HAH!
Anyway, it wasn’t all theoretical pain I inflicted on my students. I did try my best to come up with chemistry labs. I finally got around to instituting Friday labs as a regular thing. I did several labs that requried teaching my students to capture and measure gases produced during a chemical reaction by water displacement. Some got their minds blown when I filled a graduated cylinder with water, quickly inverted it into a water bath, and the water stayed vertical. They also liked when the gases produced with an acid and antacid tablet or a metal with an acid reaction displaced the water in the graduated cylinder.
And I had lots of labs with fires and light shows. I had my students place metallic salt solutions in fire to see the different colors produced and how this related to quantum mechanics. And I did the famous lighting of magnesium strips. I even did calcium carbide in water. In case you are wondering, this simple lab produces acetylene, which can be ignited multiple times with a match. It also produced calcium hydroxide, which forms a precipitate that can be filtered. Nothing like setting fire to bubbling water.
Even though labs were a lot of work on my part, I knew the students preferred them to my lectures. And I didn’t mind. Working with the hands beats listening to me drone on.
The lectures and labs made me, according to Jeff, “Infamous.” LOL.
It helps to keep in mind some of the fun my students had during the labs. Most probably were grateful to get the hell out of my class when all was said and done. High school sucks for most kids.
At the end, the principal did not renew my contract. She also blackballed me from teaching in any other private school in Louisville. And when I went to teach in the public schools, the stress was too great for me. I had an emotional break down, and it ended my teaching career.
But it was wonderful to hear from Jeff. I will treasure that memory. Something worthwhile came out of all of that mess.
