Convinces high school students chemistry is easy
Frank Cardulla of Glenview, Ill., will be honored on March 28 by the world's largest scientific society for over three decades of showing his high-school students how chemistry, as he says, "really is one of the easiest classes in school." He will receive the James Bryant Conant Award in High School Chemistry Teaching from the American Chemical Society at its national meeting in San Francisco.
"It absolutely makes me crazy to encounter people who think that chemistry in high school is hard," began Cardulla, who recently retired after 34 years at Niles North High School only to return to the classroom at nearby Lake Forest High School. "It's simple, logical, and involves processes of thinking that we use naturally in our everyday lives."
Cardulla's approach is guided by common sense. Instead of encouraging use of algorithms to solve chemistry problems by rote, for example, he tells students to stop and think first what the numbers are really saying.
"Once they truly, deeply understand what the numbers mean, they've conquered the quantitative part of chemistry," he said. "The rest is a handful of basic concepts, and learning how to apply them to a myriad of different topics and problems."
"To walk into Frank's classroom is to walk into what we all want classrooms to be," wrote Niles science and math director Dale Vogler in his letter of nomination. For example, "He videotapes his classes each and every day. This way, a student who is absent can take the tape home and not miss anything."
Cardulla differentiates understanding and simple recall, and he teaches his students to do the same. "I might ask why you can hammer metals into thin sheets. Some student will almost always proudly say 'because they're malleable.' But then if I ask what malleable means, all they can say is 'you can hammer it into thin sheets.' Just because you know the name for something-anything-doesn't mean you understand it. People can trick us with that."
The James Bryant Conant Award in High School Chemistry Teaching is sponsored by Albemarle Corp. of Baton Rouge, La.
A nonprofit organization with a membership of 161,000 chemists and chemical engineers, the American Chemical Society www.acs.org publishes scientific journals and databases, convenes major research conferences, and provides educational, science policy and career programs in chemistry. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.