When Chemists Attack

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!

If there’s one thing about these Tennessee teenagers, they know how to provoke a reaction!

Administrators at Oak Ridge High School went into teachers’ classrooms, desks and mailboxes to retrieve all 1,800 copies of the newspaper Tuesday, said teacher Wanda Grooms, who advises the staff, and Brittany Thomas, the student editor.

(I can see a brigade of administrators fanning out through the school raiding classrooms and ransacking desks and bookbags. But that’s just for dramatic effect.)

An administrator commeted that

“We have a responsibility to the public to do the right thing, [… ] We’ve got 14-year-olds that read the newspaper.”

(emphasis mine)

Sounds like something pretty terrible went into that student newspaper, eh? Here it is.

The Oak Leaf’s birth control article listed success rates for different methods and said contraceptives were available from doctors and the local health department.

Wow.

I saw an article in CNN’s education section today: Stem cell scientists headed to Singapore to continue research

Copeland and Jenkins are famous for discovering a way to accelerate the identification of cancer-causing genes in mice. Scientists hope to advance this discovery by using embryonic stem-cell cultures to build models of leukemia, lymphoma and other cancers. If researchers can learn which genes are mutated in cancer, they could possibly develop drugs to block mutations.

At Singapore’s Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, any of the couple’s discoveries would first be patented and used in Singapore.

By stifling scientific research in this country, are we setting ourselves up to be leapfrogged by everyone else?

Back when I was in school, one of my English teachers would mention that, when writing, we should be careful about connotation – the meaning implied by a word or phrase – versus denotation – the direct meaning of the word or phrase. When we talk about science, we’re usually aware of communication problems caused by jargon (hardly unique to science), but we sometimes forget about connotation and denotation. This causes confusion, and nowhere is it more apparent than the debate over biological evolution.

Now I teach chemistry and not biology. But I do teach the scientific method and basic scientific language at the beginning of my intro chem course. One of the things I do is to simply ask students what they think that a scientific theory and a scientific law are, and how they’re similar and different. This is probably a pretty good approximation of what Joe Average thinks when he hears all this talk in the media about theories of evolution.

Let’s hear from some students! (Ignore some of the questionable English – some of these students are nontraditional students who may also be taking remedial English courses at the same time as this class.)

Theory is what need to be known from the past and law is the way of order that experiments should go.

A law is truthful and a theory is untruth.

A scientific theory is just an observation whereas a scientific law has already been proven to accurate.

Theory is when you have no proof of, but you feel that your theory is feasible. Law is proven, theory isn’t proven, an explanation to try to explain.

A theory is an idea without explanation.

A law has been worked out a lot of times and is true, a theory is not. A theory is a guess.

Now we science folks are thinking of a rather specific meaning when we talk about a theory – an explanation of a set of facts that is agreed upon by most scientists and that has been supported and tested by many experiments. But when we talk to people with no science knowledge, our audience thinks something else entirely. So the moment a well-meaning biologist begins to talk about the theory of evolution to a non-science crowd, the crowd immediately begins thinking “this isn’t really true – otherwise he’d have called it a law”. The word “theory” has a pretty bad connotation outside of the scientific community.

What to do? Other than making darned sure that the audience knows what you mean by using the word “theory”, I’m not sure. Perhaps “scientific explanation” might be a better term for a public talk. It gets the point across without using a loaded term.

In the meantime, I’m trying to do my part. Hopefully, my intro chem students come out of the class knowing what a scientific theory is. And maybe they learn some chemistry, too. 🙂

One thing I’ve noticed in my introductory chemistry classes is that students who have trouble with the class almost invariably have real troubles with math. It’s not always that they are completely unable to do math – hand some of them an equation to rearrange in terms of x and they can do it with no trouble. The problem is that these students don’t connect all that math stuff they learned in math class to anything else. In short, they don’t know that numbers mean something.

Case in point: One of the first things we go over in introductory chemistry is the concept of significant figures – the idea that when you write down a measured number, you should write it in such a way that the person reading the measurement knows how good of a measuring device was used to get the number. When you calculate with these measured numbers, your calculator often starts adding on extra digits, making the numbers look more impressive than they actually are – meaning that you need to round the numbers after doing the caclulation to reflect that.

(Example: Punching in 10.0 / 3.00 on a calculator gives you 3.333333333333333 … But the measurements really aren’t that good, and should be rounded to the same number of figures that the original measurements were known to. So the answer is rounded to 3.33 .)

Rounding should be no trouble for a college student, right? Wrong. Students can round to the nearest whole number with no problem. They can also usually round off to the nearest tenth or hundredth without much difficulty, though they are prone to merely chopping off the number rather than actually rounding – so 4.59 becomes 4.5 rather than 4.6 . But having them round to a place bigger than the ones place and all hell breaks loose.

Let’s say you estimate the cost of a project for your home, adding the estimated costs of all the parts of the project together. You come up with a total of $2576.08 . Now since this is all estimation, you decide to record the estimate to the nearest hundred dollars. You round off at the hundreds place and write down an estimated total of $2600. You don’t make those zeros in the ones and tens place go away and write the estimated cost as $26, because that would be silly – right? You’d never be able to walk into Lowe’s and buy $2600 worth of materials for $26. Yet this is precisely the mistake that altogether too many students make. They have an idea in their heads that rounding is the chopping off of numbers, and by golly they will do it – no matter whether the answer they get makes any sense or not. They don’t know that the numbers that they calculate have a meaning, and they don’t check their answers to see if they make sense.

Now these students don’t actually misround the money example I gave above (or at least I hope they don’t), but they do make exactly the same mistake with things like masses, volumes … well, anything else except money.

A typical example goes something like this. A student calculates the mass of a chemical that should be produced in a reaction. Their calculator gives them a bunch of extra digits, and they need to round the answer. Let’s say the student gets a mass of 106.75730235 grams, but the student needs to round the answer to two significant figures (that’d be the tens place in this number). The student writes down a mass of 11 grams as their answer instead of a mass of 110 grams. Yet I bet that not a one of the students that do this would accept $11 from me as a full payment if I owed them $110!

I wish I knew what to do about this. I show them examples – including the money one above. I show them the different masses in the laboratory. Some of them do figure it out, but there are a few who just can’t seem to learn that rounding isn’t just taking an axe to a number. What’s more disturbing to me (since many of these students want to go on to become nurses) is that some of them also never realize the mistake they’re making since they never check their calculations.

My wife calls it "learning in silos" – where students don’t transfer what they learn in a class to, well, anything else. They understand that dollars are represented by numbers and that the numbers mean something, but they don’t transfer that to grams. Or liters. Do we not tie numbers early enough in the schools to real things? Or do we turn math into a video game by making students use TI-83 calculators all the way from high school?

The new Kansas science standards have been posted. It looks like it’s the same as the working draft I read yesterday.

Maybe I’m missing it, but news articles on the subject say that Kansas has "redefined science". I don’t see that. I just see Kansas ignoring good science and substituting bad science when it comes to biology.

Which is worse – redefining science to include nonsense or not being able to see that nonsense is not science?