Why introductory chemistry is boring: a long-term historical perspective
I always hated experiments in chemistry class, as it was always boring and trivial. Kids who liked it, did so because it was a time to slack off, watch colors change, play around with the props etc. It didn&#x27;t help in understanding anything and was as detached from the rest of the chemistry lessons as if it was a subject to itself.<p>Interestingly, as a student I also disliked whenever the book went in the direction that TFA recommends: explaining the experimental underpinnings of theory. It always felt unsatisfactory, like a &quot;God of gaps&quot; argument. Whenever the student was not ready to hear the detailed derivations from more basic principles (advanced topics), the justification was just &quot;experiments have shown that [...]&quot;. Many times I found out there <i>are</i> more basic underlying reasons and felt cheated. I wanted to understand how the universe works, not who discovered it and when.<p>My young self would think, leave me alone with pictures of dusty old books and people with funny hair, I want to know how the universe is structured. We&#x27;re just a speck of dust in the grand scheme of the universe, I want to learn about galaxies, planets, elements. These are what any objective observer, like aliens, would care about, not the lives of some humans hundreds of years ago.<p>Today I understand better that I was already thinking inside of a certain scientific framework which very much depends on the guys with the funny hairs, and the way things are conceptualized aren&#x27;t really inevitable, they are models, with imperfections and there&#x27;s no magic source of authority who knows the answer to everything. We don&#x27;t have the blueprints from God and learning more about the process of scientific discovery would have been useful perhaps. Too bad that the average school teacher would not be up for that task. Nor would most 10-14-year-olds have the necessary intellectual framework and abstraction in place to understand what is even being discussed. &quot;I&#x27;m the teacher and this is how things are&quot; is much easier to get across.