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Hello,
I've been trying to find some sort of article or reading about why it is important for high school students to take chemistry in high school...unfortunately, I haven't found anything online yet. Does anyone have an article or something similar to this that they could share?
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My students are always wanting to know how it applys to them. Make it relevant in their daily lives. If they are aware it is used everyday in some form it will be a start for them.
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I know that this is not specifically Chemistry, but this video gives students a good explanation of why science is important in general. www.whyscience.co.uk
You could also ask students to be reflective about their lives and try and find something they use in their lives that is NOT based on chemistry. Ex. Toothpaste, tap water contains Fluoride, food chemistry, preservatives, anything plastic, rare earth metals used for electronics, soaps, gasoline for vehicles etc. I mean, you literally cannot breathe without chemistry. This small article from ACS sums up that chemistry is everywhere!
http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/everywhere.html
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As a pre-service teacher I may be wrong on this, but I feel like the best way to get your kids excited about chemistry for the upcoming semester AND to impart a feeling of relevance is to share your own experiences and excitement for the subject. Making them read an article on the topic right off the bat is bound to turn people off to the subject (I know it would have for me at that age). If you just work to play the part of Chemistry hype-man, it might work better than any amount of supplementary text.
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Diane Bunce: Training the next generation of scientists
I love her distinction between a lecturer and a teacher
When Bunce isn't training a new generation of scientists in her classroom, she also makes chemistry more accessible to the general public through entertaining holiday lectures about the chemistry of Thanksgiving, St. Patrick's Day and more.
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Chemistry is an incredibly fascinating field of study. Because it is so fundamental to our world, chemistry plays a role in everyone's lives and touches almost every aspect of our existence in some way. Chemistry is essential for meeting our basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, health, energy, and clean air, water, and soil.
Online India Education
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The NIH puts out a number of good magazines/booklets that I use in my classes. This one is called 'Chemistry of Health' and some interesting articles. You can also order a class set of booklets.
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I like to tell my students that they will learn three things of relevance in my chemistry course.
They will learn some of the secrets of the universe. They will learn why the sky is blue, how soap works, what cooking does, and how to read the names of big, scary ingredients on packages. They will learn how to neutralize acids, how to handle dangerous or unknown chemicals, and how tiny atoms really are. This is stuff that is useful for everyone, even if only a little.
I will also teach them how to solve problems. Even if they end up solving completely different problems when they are older, having the ability to tackle a new problem is an incredibly useful skill to have no matter where they end up.
Lastly, I teach the language of chemistry. Most people never need to actually DO any chemistry, but they might need to hire a chemist, or even talk to poison control about some chemicals. In those instances, the more you know about chemistry the smoother your conversation will go. And some of those conversations need to go smoothly!
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I agree that the best way to explain the relevance of Chemistry to students is to have them discover how Chemistry impacts their daily life. Each Monday I require my students to write a short journal entry explaining one way they experienced chemistry over the weekend. I encourage students to ask questions in their entries and told them my goal is that as they learn new concepts throughout the year, they can answer their own questions.
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My students always ask the question of why it is important to them. I really like all the ideas that are posted. These are things I will definitely have to share with my students. Great ideas :)
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A great resource to make chemistry fun is the ACS education webpage
http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education.html
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While I don't have any suggestions as to articles, I will say that the study of Chemistry is important because it provides training in a way of critical thinking. My students find this to be difficult but I have had some return from their first year of college and thank me for teaching them how to think through a problem; that is how to approach the solving of a problem in a logical manner.
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Trained as an environmental scientist, I can't imagine too many things we do that don't involve chemistry. Chemistry affects us intimately, right down to the plastic water bottles that we drink from, the chemicals in the air we breathe, and the food we eat every day. Most students don't ever really think about the constituent chemistry of the chips they had for lunch, or what the effect of allowing a bottle of water to heat in the car. Not to get preachy or anything like that, is there some way to get your students to do a bit of analysis of what they ingest, and what side effects some of those compounds have on their bodies and health?
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I just love The Royal Society of Chemistry website
http://www.rsc.org/learn-chemistry
There are great real world connections
You might also consider subscribing to Chem 13 news
https://uwaterloo.ca/chem13news/
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