Teaching enthusiasm

So this whole teaching thing really is taking over my life. It’s stunning how much time you need to put into getting the material ready for what turns out to be all of one hour and fifteen minutes of class. It’s also really interesting to see how the enthusiasm I show for a subject changes the students reception of the material.

This past week has been exemplary in that regard. I’ve been teaching electrochemistry. Electrochemistry sucks. I hate electrochemistry. I’m convinced that electrochemists don’t really know what they are doing, but it’s too confusing to anyone else to figure out that they are just doing a lot of hand-waving so we just let them get away with it. So it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I wasn’t really chipper about having to teach my students how to do electrochemical analysis.

What I notice on Tuesday though was that my students were just dead. I knew that I was sucking it big time with my presentation of the material and I felt pretty bland but I never expected them to be even further out of it. It really took me a day or so to realize that the problem wasn’t the material itself, it was my presentation. I had gone into it with dread rather than being excited to present the work and they seemed to sense that.

So for Thursday’s class I decided I needed to pick things up a bit. After all, I can’t really stand being stuck in front of 30 bored people for that long every day. So since we were dealing with redox chemistry I decided to try and find a neat reaction that I could use to intro the subject and at least grab some of their attention. Well, after thinking about it for a bit I realized that one of my favorite reactions is a redox reaction. The combustion reaction of thermite is technically an oxidation and a reduction, but the really cool part is that it become flaming liquid metal. I actually had a couple of pictures from some fun I had camping back in grad school, but here’s a video of some Brits playing with the stuff:


Now if only I could do demos like that in the classroom without causing the building to be evacuate my class would surely be the most popular one on campus.