Each month feature editor Hal Harris recommends readings for teachers of chemistry and related sciences. Hal maintains a file of articles, pictures, and references coordinated with the topics that come up in his curriculum. Examples from that file make up this eclectic list of items he has read recently and which he thinks might be of interest to other teachers of science, especially chemistry.
America's public schools are in trouble, and there are few who would disagree. But despite billions of dollars spent in "reform" efforts, little real progress seems to be occuring. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was a step (or a misstep, perhaps) toward greater accountability by schools for student achievement. It had (has) many flaws, but it was at least an attempt to make necessary, big changes in our schools. Eric Hanushek (of the Hoover Institution of Stanford University) and Alfred Lindseth (a lawyer with expertise in school finance law) lay out a plan even more ambitious than NCLB. It would dramatically raise the pay and the status of teachers, but base their compensation (and even their continuation as teachers) on student outcomes. Students would be tracked across schools and districts if necessary, and assessments would be value-added, instead of yearly "snapshots", so that teachers teaching in economically disadvantaged areas would have a better chance to have a measured impact than those in advantaged situations. This problem will requires solutions far beyond the schools, and that is why courthouses and statehouses are in the title. This is a thought-provoking book.
Meet Flavia de Luce. You are going to like her. It is 1950 and Flavia, a very precocious eleven year old, lives in a small village in England in a deteriorating grand mansion with her father and two older sisters. Her passion is chemistry, which she has learned on her own by reading a textbook owned by her deceased mother and practiced in a laboratory inherited from her uncle. This little girl is full of the kind of chemical knowledge that fascinated most of us when we were young. She knows all about poisons and describes how to steam-distill urushiol from poison ivy to prank her sister. Flavia puts her wits and her chemistry to work to solve a murder mystery that literally drops on her doorstep. A mysterious stranger (who turns out to have had deep connections to the family) is found dying in the cucumber patch by Flavia herself. When Flavia's father is arrested for the crime, the young CSI goes to work to clear him and also to discover who the stranger was and why he was killed. This is an entertaining, light and wholesome read. It has already won the Debut Dagger Award from the Crime Writer's Association. Flavia reminds me of Harry Potter, but her power comes from chemical knowledge rather than magic.
When I saw this new book on the subject of evolution, I thought it would probably be one side or the other of the very tired evolution/creationism-"intelligent" design debate. I was delighted to find instead a very smart discussion of the status of our understanding of the origins of life, how life has changed over the millennia, and how we have learned about those things. Mr. Lane is a biochemist who has an insider's understanding and a broad perspective of the status of evolution, and I think the best parts of the book are the places where he points out the things that are not yet agreed upon, or not known at all. The chronologically-organized chapters describe how evolution led to DNA, photosynthesis, the cell, sex, and sight. This is a chemical rather than purely biological view of evolution, and I enjoyed it a great deal. It was nice to see the phrase "chance and necessity" appear in many chapters, an homage to the famous 1971 book by Jacques Monod, which was a Hal's Pick in September 2005.
The shortage of well-trained science teachers is widely recognized, but the solution to the problem requires first an appreciation of its causes. This little book, which is available free online, addresses the tangible and intangible reasons why fewer talented people choose science teaching as a career or choose not to stay in teaching. Compensation is a factor, but it is not as important as the perceived and real erosion of the status of teaching as a profession. Tobias and Baffert examine the effects of No Child Left Behind and testing, tenure, and unions as both positive and negative influences, and the role of National Board Certification and Professional Learning Communities. Finally, they examine the success of Finland in science and mathematics education, and identify the critical role that teachers have played in that success. This extended essay ought to be required reading for teachers, principals, school boards, and legislators.
Having just returned from the Gordon Research Conference on Chemical Education Research and Practice, I can attest to the central role that statistics plays in chemical education. "Of course", every published experiment in chemical education results in a statistical improvement, so it is amazing that all of those three, five, or ten percent improvements have not, so far, changed the overall performance of our students. Statistical methods are essential to prove that one teaching method is superior to another, and the differences are not generally very large. This situation can lead one astray, as the authors show occurred in the published "proofs" by S. Kanazawa that gender ratios are significantly affected by the attractiveness, physical stature, occupations, and tendency toward violence of the parents. A cautionary tale for educational researchers.
Jan Hendrik Schön published some of the most exciting and ground-breaking physics of the past decade. He published it in the most prestigious specialty journals such as Physical Review Letters and in Nature and Science. He won several important prizes and was being nominated for more of them when a problem came to light. The ?problem? was that Schön had no data to substantiate his ?discoveries?. His deception was disclosed not by assiduous reviewers, editors, or his supervisors at Bell Labs, but by an ad hoc group of skeptical readers in his fields of solid-state physics, molecular electronics, superconductivity, and nanoscience. They perceived that his results were too good and that there were too many breakthroughs in too little time to be plausible. While Eugenie Samuel Reich gets the big picture largely correct, she fails to give sufficient credit to some junior scientists like Lydia Sohn who were willing to risk their own careers to challenge the integrity of a rising supposed superstar. The fundamental problem turned out to have been something that is taught in the first chemistry course ? how and why to record one's original data in a scientific notebook.
What good is music? Oliver Sacks (author of The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, The Island of the Colorblind, and especially - for chemists - Uncle Tungsten) concludes in the Preface to Musicophilia that there is no apparent evolutionary advantage associated with human appreciation for certain combinations of sounds and rhythm. Nevertheless, music remains one of the most powerful evocators of memory and stimulant of emotion. As is always the case with Sacks, his writing is inventive and his perspective combines neuroscience with experiences that we can relate to. One of his chapters deals with the use of music therapy in the treatment of Alzheimer's and other patients with dementia. My daughter who is a hospice social worker had only recently told me similar stories about clients with whom she has had very positive results using music. Like much of the workings of the brain, the response to music is mysterious. It is great to have a guide like Oliver Sacks to take us on a tour of exploration. This inexpensive paperback edition is revised and expanded from the 2007 clothbound.
While quantum mechanics has been able to answer many practical questions about the structure and bonding of atoms, molecules, nuclei, and even subatomic particles, it still does not adequately yield its own ultimate meaning. The ability of an electron to be in more than one place at once, to appear on both sides of a node, and to have no defined boundary are only the "down payments" for the mysteries of quantum mechanics, about which even its developers were conflicted. I was fortunate to have heard a lecture by David Mermin based on his famous Physics Today article, "Is the Moon There When Nobody Looks?", a wonderful introduction to the disturbing consequences of what is called "entanglement" that is still well worth reading. The first part of Gilder's description of modern quantum mechanics does not break much new ground, but this reader tuned in when she began to describe David Bohm and his "hidden variables" approaches, and continues through real correspondence and imagined but plausible conversations between the likes of J. M. Jauch, John Bell and interviews with Nicolas Gisin and Anton Zeilinger. She may have filled some gaps with conversations that never occurred, but through that, she has made clear the disturbing truth about what quantum mechanics means.
The off-label use of neuroenhancing drugs such as Provigil (modafanil), Adderall (mixed amphetamines), or Ritalin (methylphenidate) is a fact of life and a growing practice in high schools, colleges and universities and in the business world. These drugs are apparently not difficult to obtain, either with a prescription written by a compliant physician, diversion from a family member diagnosed with ADHD, or from Internet sources. Margaret Talbot describes the extent to which these so-called 'smart pills' are being used now, and raises questions about the extent to which they may have harmful side effects or be addictive. Do they constitute an unfair advantage akin to the use of anabolic steroids by athletes? Should they be constrained for that reason? Will we soon be asking our students to pee in a cup before tests? Professors and teachers may be as susceptible as their students to the temptation to try these drugs. Under pressure to complete a manuscript or a proposal, how many will resist the temptation to gain hours of productive work, or clarity of thought? This article makes clear that our society has not yet begun to deal with the consequences of these drugs and their successors.
This beautiful book could certainly enhance your coffee table, but don't buy it just for its looks. Be prepared to spend some time with it, and join the wonder that mathematicians are expressing at the brilliance of this new way of describing and inventing symmetries. "The Symmetries of Things" begins with a classification of the elements of symmetry - the orbifold signature notation, whose features are "wonders, gyrations, kaleidoscopes, and miracles". Combined, they give the "signature" of a pattern. There is a Magic Theorem that tells you how features can be combined. John Conway may be known to you from his cellular automaton "Game of Life" and the puzzles and amusements that have been described by Martin Gardner. His coauthors are a former graduate student (Burgiel) and Goodman-Strauss, who is a mathematician whose exceptionally beautiful illustrations are widely-known. More than twenty years in the making, the book is divided into three parts. The first should be accessible to lay readers who may be lured into mathematical ideas before they realize it. Part two introduces color to symmetry and requires some understanding of group theory (and was more than sufficiently challenging to this physical chemist). Part three is intended only for professional mathematicians and goes into symmetries in higher dimensions. I don?t see exactly how this is relevant to chemistry, but I would not be surprised if it finds application in supramolecular chemistry and self-organization.
I am an enthusiastic fan of Brian Hayes' "Computing Science" column in the Sigma Xi publication, American Scientist, which is the source of most of the essays in this book. Before that, I read his articles in The Sciences, a now-defunct but beautiful little magazine once published by the New York Academy of Sciences. Back issues of it can be downloaded freely. Hayes claims not to be a mathematician, but he brings computer tools to bear on problems that use mathematical concepts that are familiar to most students of science. The eponymous essay is the one that is most closely related to the chemistry curriculum. The schemes that guarantee that your mattress will get its lumps evened out when your turn it every few months is an application of group theory that I will use as an example in my quantum chemistry course. Another essay discusses the location of the "continental divide", a topological problem that may have occurred to you if you have ever driven across the country and seen markers for it in places that seem odd or impossible. "Inventing the Genetic Code" looks back at the 1950's, when it was not known how DNA/RNA specifies proteins to be synthesized. Elegant schemes were proposed by Gamov, Feynman, Teller and especially Crick, whose "adaptor hypothesis" is called by Hayes "the prettiest wrong idea in all of twentieth-century science". As it turned out, evolution thought of an even prettier one.
The BCCE in 1994 was at Bucknell University, not far from the US home of Joseph Priestley, and I was one of a group that went there to see his place. While I knew some of his scientific contributions, I did not at the time appreciate how important a role he had played in the intellectual life of the nascent republic. While they were not close when either of them was in office, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams exchanged 165 letters during the last years of their lives. In them, the two men wrote about Alexander Hamilton (a mutual antagonist) twice, Benjamin Franklin five times, and George Washington three times. They mentioned Joseph Priestley, the expatriate Unitarian and discoverer of oxygen, fifty two times. Such was the influence on his adopted country of this "amateur" scientist. Priestley was no theorist - he left to others (including Lavoisier) the careful quantitative experiments that were essential to prove that mass is conserved, even in chemical reactions that involve gases. Priestley's science was of sufficient quality to get him into the Royal Society, but his theological tracts against the worship of saints and the divinity of Jesus got him run out of the England. Priestley made all of the details of his work available freely to colleagues, hiding nothing and spreading his love for experimentation to anyone showing an interest. His motto, "Exciting the Attentions of the Ingenious" would be a good one for my JCE Feature, "The Cost-Effective Teacher".
