When Chemists Attack

I forgot to mention yesterday that the local news outlet, WBTW 13 has a poll up asking what should be taught in South Carolina schools.

I don’t much care for the phrasing of the question:

Which origin of the species theory should be taught?
* Creationism
* Evolution
* Intelligent Desgn
* All three

As far as I know, out of that list only evolution fits the scientific definition of the word theory – an explanation of a series of observations backed up by extensive experimental data. The results as of now aren’t as encouraging as the comments from Horry county were – 36% want straight creationism, 25% want straight evolution, 3% want straight Intelligent Design, and 35% want all three.

Since creationism and intelligent design are the same thing (intelligent design just leaves out the “god” language), call it 39% creationism, 25% evolution, and 35% who want both. They must’ve lost 1% to rounding. Not very encouraging except on one point – nobody seems to want the intelligent design version of creationism.

A local news outlet has a brief mention of a Socastee, South Carolina school that is apparently stuck in the Dark Ages – Calvary Christian School:

“We want them to have a balanced education so we teach what evolution is we don’t go into a lot of detail with evolution because we don’t think it’s true,” says administrator John Gregory.

Since they’re a private school and to my knowledge we don’t have any of that voucher garbage in this state yet, I don’t really have much to say about what they teach. Just this: their graduates should be forced to take remedial biology before entering college-level courses that require high-school biology. I’d consider the rest of their science education to be suspect as well.

The news article, unfortunately, messes up the definition of theory:

[At Calvary Christian School] Evolution is taught as a theory but creationism is considered fact.

Most scientists would not have a problem with evolutionary theory being taught, but I don’t think the writer of the article understands the words she’s trying to use. I prescribe a basic science class.

Unfortunately, schools around here seem to just dance around the science:

Horry County public schools teach evolution, but teachers focus on animals and don’t specifically address how people evolved.

… but if students are taught how everything else on the planet evolves, how can they not take the next step?

On the positive side, though:

Horry County schools spokesman Teal Britton tells News13 that so far, no parents asked school officials to incorporate intelligent design into the curriculum.

At least folks at the beach are apparently not clamoring to have nonsense smuggled into their science classes! Bravo!

Much noise is made in education circles about getting “technology” in the scence classroom. As near as I can tell from observing this noise, “technology” seems to be putting overheads into Powerpoint presentations instead of on traditional overhead projectors and putting CDs containing multimedia that can be viewed only under certain operating system versions.

Me, I would much rather focus on technology that helps my students spend their time productively in the laboratory. Here’s a picture of the IR spectrometer my school had when I came to work here:

Even though it was purchased in the 90s, it looks so … old and cranky. Look at the controls:

This is the kind of machine, frankly, that turns students off of analytical chemistry. Even in the 90s, this could have been done better. You can’t read the control panel in the picture, but most of the buttons have several functions each, and it’s not really obvious which buttons are appropriate to use at the time (especially if you are a student who is just learning about IR). In fact, when using this particular IR for student experiments in freshmen-level chemistry and our analytical class for technicians, I spent more time telling students what buttons to push and helping them get the instrument to cooperate than I did on things like helping students prepare samples and interpret the spectra. Chemistry should not be arcane button-pushing! (Leave that sort of thing to system administrators…)

Good technology ought to allow the students to be able to focus on the chemistry rather than the buttons. Any talk of technology in the science classroom ought to address this sort of thing rather than trying to dazzle students with little videos or animations.

When it became troublesome to get parts and service for the instrument, I went on the hunt for something specifically more friendly. Enter this little beastie (a Nicolet IR-100):

Note the lack of a panel of strangely labeled buttons. Everything is accessable through a nice friendly panel of clickable on-screen buttons. Things like collecting a background or sample scan, printing, and saving the spectrum to a file are in plain view. And you can put notes on your spectrum without sacrificing a goat! (Okay, the goat bit was an exaggeration, but …)

This is an instrument that students can learn to use in only a few minutes, and they then have time to think about what we really want to think about – how to prepare samples, how to find the important features on an IR spectrum, etc.

In most science courses, students spend either the same amount or more time in the laboratory than they do in the lecture. Let’s make sure the students lab ecperience teaches them something other than how to push buttons!