Oh, I want to ask folks here a question, in connection with a project I've been thinking about off and on the last few months. the question is...what do you think, in general, about the subject of #chemistry?
and I mean, _any_ thoughts at all. I want all the answer. think chemistry is the worst subject you had in school? let me know about it! do you think it's a dismal, second-rate science? that's cool too. if you think it's interesting chiefly because you get to set things on fire, I want to hear that as well :p
@stuxnetsource not coincidentally I'm also into cooking ^^
@kara_dreamer I think of Mr. Genari, my eleventh grade chemistry teacher. He was very old, looked like Ben Franklin and used an old-style overhead projector for his notes.
@srol was he any good? like, I've had a pretty cool 11th-grade chem teacher but he actually wasn't that great at teaching XD
@kara_dreamer I'm not sure whether it was he wasn't a very good teacher or that I had undiagnosed sleep apnea at the time and was constantly falling asleep in his classes.
@srol depends on whether you stayed awake in _other_ classes perhaps...
@kara_dreamer It was always a problem, but he was at a disadvantage for a few reasons. His was the first class of the day at 8:05 and by this point I had been awake since 6 to catch my bus.
And also, back then, I didn't have much confidence when it came to math and science and tended to write them off as classes I would do poorly in compared with the humanities.
@srol ah, gotcha. yeah, I'd say "bit from column A, bit from column B" there...I'm guessing he was a bit of a droner, too.
@kara_dreamer One thing I remember very clearly from the class (which was in 1999(this is important)), he was teaching us about what moles are, in the scientific sense, and then he said "We're about to celebrate a new mole-lennium."
@srol oh GOD...I swear that every high-school chem teacher has to crack at least one pun on "mole". I ought to do a podcast episode just on "mole", which is such a weird word and concept in chemistry. I find myself wondering how well most novices grasp the purpose of the "mole" as a unit, or whether maybe they think it's just some arbitrary chemistry thing that makes no sense
@kara_dreamer that sounds like a great storytelling podcast! I'd love to hear it once it's up <3
@kara_dreamer
I think it's really funny, you can make every molecules possible an do everything you want. One other fun things about it is "mesomèrie" (i don't know the english word, sorry ^^" ), learning that everything is moving and not just statics is quite beautifull I think. Most of all, I love to learn new things and chemistry is one of the subjects i'm still learning at school as for now ^^ (and it gives me good marks °^° )
@Louise Oh! I believe that "mesomèrie" is likely equivalent to the English term "resonance", which has a rough synonym in the now obsolete term "mesomerism". So it would refer to the way in which the electron distribution of a molecule can be thought of as the combination of a number of different "resonant structures", e.g. in between these two structures for the nitrite ion, NO₂⁻ https://witches.town/media/1bHO1MNoLXOPlmPO0Hw
@kara_dreamer
That's it !!
Quite hard at the begining to learn but It's fun to know that everything is moving in the universe, event at atom scale :3
@Louise I think it's pretty fascinating stuff. that's all chemistry is, in way, the dance of electrons. (I feel that this very simple fact sometimes gets bizarrely obscured when chemistry gets taught)
@kara_dreamer I started my college career as a chem major!
It didn't last long.
It turns out I had a really amazing teacher in high school that made me THINK I loved chemistry. In fact I just loved the way he taught it. I still have a hearty respect for it as a science but it was absolutely not for me.
@witchfynder_finder huh! rather sorry to learn it didn't "take". what ended up not working out (presumably in college?)
@kara_dreamer Basically I was just in over my head. College-level courses were too fast for me to keep up and by the time I realized how much I was struggling it was way past the half-way point of the semester and already too late to course-correct. I somehow muddled through Chem 1 but only lasted a few weeks in Chem 2 before I realized how lost I was and switched majors.
@witchfynder_finder honestly, chemistry is so badly taught to undergrads that I think you can safely blame the curriculum and not yourself. and there's a sink-or-swim attitude in some chem departments
@kara_dreamer Yeah, it was definitely like that. My professor wrote a note on one of my tests that I needed to see him, but I didn't get that test back for, like, 2 months so that wasn't much help...
I harbour no ill will towards the science, though! I think it's wonderful. I just don't want to be one of the people...doing it. =P
@witchfynder_finder that's cool! I'm so into it that I almost don't mind that I'm not one of the people doing it *wry chuckle*. well, I _do_ mind a bit, but I've gotten so much enjoyment out of chemistry over the years anyway
@kara_dreamer Chemistry is an amazing field to study, do research and learn how molecules "work". It's the mother of all Sciences, where physics, biology, microbiology, textile sciences and mathematics intersects.
However, Scientists and especially Chemists are grossly undervalued in the world of today. In other words, your pay is less, the job prospects in Chemistry are limited and quite bleak, tbh.
@fatboy and that's why I work in a factory *chuckles* it was the best I could do after my failure to get an actual lab job outside of school with my chem degree.
@kara_dreamer I mean, it was neither my favorite or least favorite subject in school? In college I took one semester of "advanced" freshman chemistry and promptly avoided the field forever, because wow am I not cut out for the lab work or the math required, but I have no ill will towards it.
That said, I did at first assume you were talking about interpersonal chemistry, because that's just where my head's at these days.
@listelian lab work is a sticking point with a lot of folks, I daresay. it doesn't help that there's maybe a bit too much emphasis on it. I mean, I _love_ the stuff, don't get me wrong, but a lot of the introductory lab work that gets taught is stuff that a lot of chemists are never going to have to do in their professional lives. and some things that get taught were more or less even when I was a high schooler, like old-fashioned qualitative inorganic analysis.
@kara_dreamer My problem was just that I wasn't finicky enough to get the expected results. Or that I wasn't willing to redo experiments enough time to get reliable results. Or something alone those lines.
I loved chemistry when I went to school (one of the easiest A's I've gotten). I love cooking too!
@kara_dreamer i think it's interesting, but it was definitely the most difficult-to-grasp branch of science i've ever tried to learn judging by how much i struggled with it back in high school
@kara_dreamer
I find chemistry super-interesting, I'm just sad I never was properly taught how it all interacts with physics (“quantum chemistry”) and with biology and AAAAAAAAAAAH.
Instead, I ended up finding it boring at school, and self-teaching myself a hodgepodge of things.
I think my next “project” will be reading “Endless Forms Most Beautiful” by Sean Caroll, which is a book on evolutionary development biology (“evo-devo”).
Speaking of which: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqReeTV_vk&list=UUTev4RNBiu6lqtx8z1e87fQ
@kellerfuchs it's my firm belief that chemistry is one of the worst taught major subjects in school, with a scrambled mess of a curriculum that seems almost a holdover from the turn of last century when chemistry wasn't even fully organized as a discipline yet. Organic chemistry is especially badly taught, top-heavy with nomenclature that hardly anyone needs to know, even chemists (like, they've got computer programs that handle that shit now) and memorizing reactions that nobody uses any more
@kellerfuchs like, if I taught organic chemistry, I'd put it into a biological context right away, because 9/10th of the students who are compelled to take O-chem are probably doing it because they're going into a biological or medical field, not because they're going to become organic chemists (who can't get jobs any more anyway)
@kara_dreamer
Yeah, that's definitely very true.
In prep school, I think the one science subject I disliked more than organic chem was... chemical thermodynamics :-/
To be fair, the whole way I was taught physics and chem was pretty heavy on being able to solve the problem on the exam fast, and I had lots of problems with that since I couldn't wrap my head around the “fast and loose” math one was supposed to use, so while I was still interested in the domain, I lost interest in the lectures.
@kara_dreamer
It was a bit better during (under)grad studies: I was in a CS curricullum but we had a couple of mandatory physics classes, and some of them were /amazing/.
No chemistry anymore, though :(
@kara_dreamer It's...a thing that exists? There's a lot of weird shit you can do with it, a lot of which I don't know about. But it seems cool!
@kara_dreamer It's fascinating, but I found it impossible to get a grip on at school. Interesting because I was good at physics and biology and now work in health.
@kara_dreamer I freely acknowledge the usefulness and power of the discipline. However, like math, chemists seem to delight in making their discipline as obscure and difficult as possible.
@kara_dreamer I think it is rather interesting. I might have perused it more if I didn't have a bigger interest in computers. I had a good teacher in high school and picked up on it fairly quickly. Was the only one without a lab partner as well and still kept up without trouble.
@kara_dreamer Well i love cooking, and cooking is just tasty chemistry. So im a fan.