If a man could ascend to heaven and get a clear view of the natural order of the universe and the beauty of the heavenly bodies, that wonderful spectacle would give him small pleasure, though nothing could be conceived more delightful if he had but someone to tell what he had seen. Archytas of Tarentum I am very lucky to have a job which allows me to spend as much time as I want reading and thinking about chemistry. My goal, which I pursue in my general chemistry and inorganic chemistry courses, is to help my students understand chemistry so that they can get as much pleasure out of it as I do.
Chemistry is the most wonderful, but also the most difficult, science to learn.
In the laboratory chemists watch pieces of red metal dissolve in a colorless liquid to produce a blue liquid and a poisonous red gas. But we try to understand what we see by using a very abstract language to discuss things atoms, molecules, ions, and electrons which we can't see. I am very interested in designing classroom experiments, not just demonstrations, which help my students understand chemistry. As coordinator of the general chemistry program I am also responsible for developing experiments for our general chemistry laboratory. I've put together a pamphlet, Some Lessons from the Great Copper Experiment , which uses the phenomena observed by my students in lab as the basis for learning types of reactions as well as difficult chemical ideas like relative reactivity.