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I was sent an article by the president of my college regarding a concept known as “significant learning”. The author, Dale Lugenbehl, says: “Often we ask students to learn something, but we don’t tell them what’s in it for them if they do. We need to take time to say, ‘Here are some of the things you can do with this once you’ve learned it. Here are some of the ways people are hurt by not knowing this.’” 1 I’ve heard too many tales about coffee pots being cleaned with fuming perchloric acid, about saturation tests with pure bromine instead of bromine water, and exploding THF pots—so why should we be surprised when elementary-education or criminal-justice majors are afraid to light a Bunsen burner? Chemistry and the Chemical Industry: A Practical Guide for Non-Chemists is an excellent tome for anyone who may work with chemistry and chemists but has little or no training in chemistry. The book contains no mathematics whatsoever. The meat of the book can be found with fifty or so descriptions of common chemicals, both organic and inorganic, their uses and manufacturing, and their suppliers. There are information boxes: a brief history of chemical industry; the language of chemistry; a description of properties and states; definitions of matter, elements and atoms, and molecules and compounds. There are chemical equations presented, but they are presented in balanced form and are generally pretty simple. The book discusses polymers in some detail (covering such topics as how they are named, simple syntheses from monomers, the polymers synthesized with the greatest production, natural polymers); the same amount of detail is provided for aromatic compounds. The final chapter discusses waste disposal and environmental protection, with different types of pollution and methods of pollution control, complete with a table listing the most prominent industrial accidents and chemical bans from the 1700s onward. Let’s assume that a budding scientist is in your household. A fast way to introduce the chemical industry to him or her is to give this book as a present. Maybe you’re teaching consumer chemistry or introductory chemistry to non-majors. Study this book to introduce pertinent examples of chemical production in both inorganic and organic chemistry. I wouldn’t recommend it as a textbook or a supplement, because it presents only the end result and not the process. However, the public library might appreciate it as a general reference. Now, what brilliant chemist conducted a saturation test with concentrated bromine? Why me, of course. Needless to say, I tell my students, “This is the danger if you don’t know how to use bromine correctly.” Significant learning, I must say… Literature Cited- Lugenbehl, D. Learning At A Deeper Level. Learning -Abstracts World Wide Web Version, 6 (1), January 2003. League for Innovation in the Community College. (Accessed May 2003).
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