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Chemistry Teaching - Pain and Pleasures
I went into chemistry teaching for totally the wrong reason; I loved chemistry. At 18 I looked on a career in a chemical company as a prostituting my knowledge and wanted no part in it. After 10 years teaching I had developed into an excellent teacher who was highly thought of by teachers, students and parents alike. The transition from a 22 year old walking disaster area was a slow one. When you start teaching you have to go back and relearn all the stuff you did at school, but never really understood. You only realise that you don't really understand it 200% when you have to answer questions and explain it to a class of students. In my first few years teaching exam classes I used my old school notes. I gradually became familiar with the syllabus and made my own highly detailed notes. These were used very little because I was becoming increasingly familiar with the exam syllabus and with the sorts of questions that came up on the exam. I learned to make it up as I was going along. I had a few near misses with experiments that went wrong. I only did the thermite reaction inside once! I had a few run ins with argumentative students and parents. I still enjoyed chemistry teaching. Being a teacher can be incredibly rewarding. If you are enjoying the teaching and the students are enjoying the learning a positive feedback loop develops. The more the teacher enjoys it, the more the students enjoy it, the more the teacher enjoys it ... School chemistry teaching is a matter of organisation, minimising movement around a crowded laboratory, having eyes in the back of your head and taking in what 16 pairs of students are doing, all at the same time. I sometimes compare maths and chemistry in the way that students learn. Maths is like driving down the motorway; you think you know it all, then you see one bridge over the road and realise that there is a bit more that you don't know yet. Chemistry is like flying through clouds. You see very little, then there is that magical moment when you come out of the cloud and you see and understand everything and how it all fits together. I witnessed one of those moments in the classroom once. A student who had been struggling with basic concepts for a year and a half got this strange look of wonderment on her face. I swear I could hear gears clicking into place as her mind suddenly put it all together. From that point on she understood everything we had done and was leaping ahead as we were covering new concepts. That minute was the best minute of my life in the classroom. |
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