Secondary School Feature Articles

* Authentic Research within the Grasp of High School Students, by Annis Hapkiewicz, p 1212

* JCE Classroom Activity #19: Blueprint Photography by the Cyanotype Process, by Glen D. Lawrence and Stuart Fishelson, p 1216A Author Recognition

A new program has been instituted to recognize high school teachers who are authors or coauthors of manuscripts published in the Journal. In May, letters were sent to teachers who wrote articles published in JCE beginning with Volume 74 (1997). If you were an author, you should have received a letter from us in late May or early June stating that your high school principal has been sent a Certificate of High School Author Recognition to be presented to you at a suitable occasion. Because the letters were sent late in the school year, you may not see the certificate until fall, or you may not receive your letter until then if we had only your school address. If you have authored or coauthored an article published in JCE and did not receive a letter, please contact me using the information about the Secondary School Chemistry Editor appearing on the Information Page in this issue.

Syllabus Swap

In the August issue, this column contained an invitation to exchange high school syllabi. The day after my copy of the August issue arrived, I received an email from a teacher indicating an interest in participating in an exchange. If you are interested, check the August "Especially for High School Chemistry Teachers" column for a brief discussion of the informal exchange program, or contact me.

Research Conducted by High School Students

In his June 1999 editorial "Learning Is a Do-It-Yourself Activity", p 725, John Moore wrote about the need to engage students actively in the learning process. As I have mentioned in this column previously, research conducted by students is one means of accomplishing this goal. In this issue, p 1212, Annis Hapkiewicz explains how she has drawn her Okemos [Michigan] High School students into a class research project that employs simple materials but leads to an elegant solution. It is highly likely that her students' conceptual understanding of solution properties, density, heat capacity, phase change, diffusion, and scientific inquiry was greatly enhanced by the experience. Other accounts of research by high school students in class, small-group, and individual settings will be published in future issues. I hope that the various approaches described will stimulate new ideas for student-conducted research to facilitate learning.

One frustration that high school teachers and students may experience is difficult access to instrumentation needed to carry out investigations. Calculator Based Laboratory (CBL) and other new technologies provide some relatively low-cost solutions to the problem, but the cost of specialized sensors can still be a barrier. In this issue a method for constructing an electrode for determining carbon dioxide concentration is described (p 1253). The article is not identified with Secondary School Chemistry mark (t) because it might not be of interest to a large number of high school teachers, but if the idea is appealing I encourage you to read the article. JCE has received several submissions from high school teachers describing devices constructed by their students, so I know there is some interest in low-cost build-it-yourself instrumentation. If you are among those who find this type of article interesting, please let me know. It will guide me in assigning the SSC icon to articles.

Beginning Anew, Again

For many readers, this issue will arrive only a few weeks or days before the beginning of the new school year. Others will already have begun the new school year. One of the joys of teaching lies in the cyclic nature of the school year. Ideas from summer workshops and conferences can be developed and implemented. Fresh faces in our classrooms provide another opportunity to try new approaches and to perfect proven teaching strategies. With all the publicity given to the occasion in the popular press, it seems trite to mention that this school year will end in the 21st century. Nevertheless it is an inescapable fact that this year's senior class will be the first to live out all their post-high-school years in a new century and a new millennium in a world where technological change occurs at breathtaking speed.

When they become adults, this school year's students will face the host of problems that plague our planetproblems that will not be left behind with the mere turn of a calendar page: poverty, hunger, political upheaval, disease, natural disasters, environmental degradation. The new school year provides us with an opportunity to help these students equip themselves with the intellectual skills and working knowledge necessary to tackle global problems and local problems. It is a daunting task, one that can only be understood fully by those who teach high school students year after year, often with limited resources and inadequate reward. So why devote this space to something that every experienced teacher knows? Precisely to wish you well, to encourage, to say hurrah, and especially to thank you for what you have done and what you are going to do to educate youth for a productive and chemically literate life in the new millennium.