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Creativity, Research, and the Rat Race
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John W. Moore
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706-1396 |
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This issue is out of print. |
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The Macintosh is a favorite of organic chemists. Its point and click operation and its graphics capabilities are a natural for handling structures, spectra, and other things organikers hold dear. Kersey Black's Proton NMR Spectrum Simulator, the major program in this issue, makes excellent use of these Macintosh trademarks, putting them together to provide a new approach that nicely complements existing software. The ability to construct almost any organic molecule on screen and then calculate its NMR spectrum at a variety of field strengths can be extremely valuable to teachers of organic chemistry as well as to their students. In addition Black has provided means for comparing spectra of two different molecules, and for correlating specific protons with the peaks they cause in a spectrum. Before I saw Proton NMR Spectrum Simulator I was convinced that existing Macintosh software, such as NMR Simulator (1) and SpectraDeck (2), provided all the tools a teacher would want or need in the area of NMR spectroscopy, and I would have advised prospective JCE: Software authors to choose another topic. Obviously this program has changed my mind. By starting with a molecular structure and calculating a spectrum Kersey Black has provided a more general and open-ended tool than any that relies on digitized spectra. Of course there is always the danger that the calculated spectrum will not agree exactly with the measured one, but our reviewers' comparisons reveal that the agreement is usually very good. Moreover the three kinds of programs complement each other quite well. Spectra can be generated by an instrument simulator or looked up in the HyperCard SpectraDeck, students can be challenged to propose a molecular structure, the spectrum simulator can be used to predict a spectrum, and then comparisons can be made. There is no requirement that the proposed structure be included in a database provided with the program, and so any student suggestion, even one not close to the actual structure, can be tried out. If it is far from the mark, that will become obvious immediately upon viewing the calculated spectrum. My experience with this program, and other experiences with Project SERAPHIM software, lead me to believe that it is all too easy to get into a rut in our thinking about software and pedagogy. Though the vein of ore that was first discovered may be played out, we need not dismiss an area as being unworthy of further exploration. Indeed, if the analogy to ores holds, the opposite would more likely be true. Originality and creative thought may well lead to additional rich lodes. We need more young people, like Kersey Black, to provide new ideas that complement those we have already had. But where do we find a mother lode of such persons? That's hard to do, because our current system does not reward (or sometimes even tolerate) creative activity directed toward improved teaching. Often it is necessary for a young person to devote 100% of his or her efforts to work that hews to rather strict requirements for getting tenure and being promoted. Often those requirements do not include developing better, more imaginative instructional materials. That is unfortunate, because it means that we are seriously undervaluing some aspects of an academic career and overvaluing others. Moreover, we may be stifling the very creativity we value so much not only in the instructional area, but in research as well. The following words of J. J. Thomson (3) have been in the back of my mind for years:
"...if you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible results being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: you want this kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it." Isn't this (paying for research) exactly what we have been doing in research universities with respect to assistant professors? Isn't this what NSF and other funding agencies have been fostering for years? More and more complaints are being registered about the rat race of research and funding, but anyone who wants to stay in the game has very little choice. Is this what we really ought to be doing? When it comes to people and creativity, the shortest distance between two points may not be a straight line. (Indeed, any pilot knows it is not, even on the surface of the earth!) I think we ought to be looking more carefully at means for encouraging creativity--real creativity, not results on demand. And that means creativity in all aspects of a university faculty member's life, not just research as it is currently, narrowly defined. Literature Cited |
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Last Updated: April 26, 2001 Created: December 3, 1996 |
Created by: J. L. Holmes Comments to: jceonline@chem.wisc.edu |
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| © 1997 Division of Chemical Education, Inc., American Chemical Society. All rights reserved. | |