Volume 1, Number 7

There was no July 1924 issue! Nor was there an issue in August of that year. Neil Gordon and his colleagues were exhausted by the strain of getting the Journal started on very short notice and keeping it going for six months. Therefore they decided that during the summer months, when many readers would be on vacation, they would skip two issues. This means that you will have to wait until the September issue (or go to your library and check) to find out what was in Volume 1, Number 7 of JCE.

Volume 25, Number 7

The reproduction of a vase by Exekias that you see on this page was used to make a point in the first article in the July 1948 issue by W. B. Wiegand of Columbian Carbon Company. Titled "Attitude and Education", it was the text of an address presented at the winter meeting of the Industrial Research Institute. Wiegand argued that the prime purpose of education was to inculcate healthy attitudes and that the teacher, not the subject, was the most important factor in achieving this goal. He described a number of examples in which the obvious enthusiasm of teachers for their subjects (one of which was Greek art) turned students on and enabled them to learn more effectively.

A paper by F. C. Brenner of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn described a new crystal model kit that consisted of spheres drilled with holes at right angles and tetrahedral angles. The spheres could be made into closest-packed arrays or connected with sticks to show unit cells such as that of fluorite shown here. The same models could be used to construct molecules as diverse as tetraphosphorus pentaoxide, benzene, and enantiomers of cis-dichlorobis(ethylenediamine)cobalt(III) ion.

In the continuing series titled "Chemical Education in American Institutions", Robert D. Rowe of San Diego State College wrote on the junior college movement, which had begun around the turn of the century. Rowe summarized a survey of two-year college chemistry curricula. General, organic, and quantitative analysis courses were offered at most of the colleges surveyed, as was a one-semester survey course. A broad range of pre-professional and technical courses, often tailored to the needs of the local community, was offered at the colleges surveyed.

E. H. McClelland of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh provided a detailed description of the requirements for reviews of technical books. This was particularly apropos, because the issue contained 21 reviews of technical books. Reviews that caught my eye were of "The Nature of Life: A Study of Muscle" by A. Szent-Györgyi, which was said to contain excellent electron microscope photographs, and of the first edition of "The Systematic Identification of Organic Compounds" by Ralph L. Shriner and Reynold C. Fuson.

Volume 50, Number 7

On page 496 of the July 1973 issue Thomas S. Briggs and Warren C. Rauscher of Galileo High School Lux Laboratory in San Francisco reported an oscillating iodine clock reaction that gave "striking cyclic changes from colorless to gold to blue using simple reagents". To illustrate that the oscillating change in iodide concentration involved four orders of magnitude, they included the graph below. Their discovery has been used by many of us and has fascinated countless students in high schools and colleges throughout the country.

Though computers were still housed in large, air-conditioned rooms and were often programmed via decks of punched cards, a number of chemists were making effective use of them in teaching as well as research. Eight papers in this issue reported on computer programs. Castleberry, Culp, and Lagowski described an educational experiment in which the effectiveness of computer-based instruction was evaluated in a general chemistry course. Breneman reported on minicomputer-aided instruction, and others described programs that normalized grades, calculated heats of combustion, analyzed results of physical chemistry experiments, solved secular equations, calculated mass spectra, and calculated rate constants. Output devices were usually character based and graphics were rudimentary, as exemplified by the teletype plots of hydrogenic orbitals shown above.

The editorial, "On Abandoning Grading and Reconsidering Standards" advocated neither and presented four arguments for maintaining traditional standards and realistic grades. This immediately followed half a decade when poor grades might result in being drafted and serving in Vietnam and student protests were based on government policy rather than whether or not to enforce rules against student drinking. Editor Lippincott pointed out that after several years few students return to thank a professor for making things easy, but many express appreciation for challenges that proved they could do more than they thought they could.