Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   SellaTheChemist (sellathechemist@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Mar-2026 04:13:17 JST SellaTheChemist

   Interesting view from Peter Atkins at the RSC Historial Group - don't tell students that there's a lot of hard maths in chemistry. He argues that there's not a lot of real mathematics. There are a lot of physical ideas that are underpinned quantitatively. Tell students instead to focus on the ideas, and that the maths is easy and will follow.
   Lovely account of the growth of PChem in the last 50 years, in part illustrated by acronyms used in his textbooks. Fascinating.

   • Embed this notice
     SellaTheChemist (sellathechemist@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Mar-2026 04:13:15 JST SellaTheChemist

     in reply to

     • HGourlayUCL

     @HGourlayUCL I think one of the most important things we should resurrect and develop is the idea of solving problems by estimation; the Fermi approach. It is a skill for life that needs to sit alongside making up solutions and concentrations.
     It's not very sexy but you can take articles out of the newspaper every day and try to make sense of chemistry, physics and more just by running some arithmetic and powers of ten.
     Accuracy and precision can then follow further down the road.

   • Embed this notice
     HGourlayUCL (hgourlayucl@mastodon.education)'s status on Thursday, 12-Mar-2026 04:13:17 JST HGourlayUCL

     in reply to

     @sellathechemist Do you think the high school curriculum would do better to focus on concepts? Leave the maths to the maths teachers and programmes, and have chemistry (or in my case physics) teachers focus on the chemistry (or physics)? #chemistryeducation #physicseducation

     Kermode repeated this.