Teaching Evolution

As it is spring and near the end of the semester I have been cleaning up my office, and organizing the books.  A collector of chemistry texts, my collection included books dating from as early as the 1790's.  My organic chemistry specific texts date from the 1870's.  

One of the things that I find most generally interesting about organic texts spanning the last 130 years is how alike they are.  Sure we have more figures and color pictures, but the basic approach is very similar.  The functional group approach appears to have been used since organic chemistry became a unique subject.  Hot topics come and go in texts, usually associated with Nobel Prizes.  (Some day I will determine the number of years to appearance and the half-life of a Nobel Prize based on the coverage in an organic text.  It might make an interesting piece for the Journal of Chemical Education or the Bulletin for the History of Chemistry.)  The only major change in my opinion was the introduction of mechanism into the texts, which in spite of some notable efforts has never really caught on as the fundamental organizational feature of textbooks.  

This brings me back to the point of these musings, evolutions in teaching are very slow.  Part of this is because we tend to teach the way we were taught.  You can add to this the reluctance of text publishers to invest in texts which fundamentally diverge from what is already in the marketplace.  This can be a good thing in that radical sudden changes in a system generally lead to mutated entities that lack the features necessary for long term survival.  Slow mutation leads to smaller evolutions some of which are beneficial and get incorporated into the species.

There must be some evolution though.  Change is all around us and if we don't evolve we will be left behind.  This is increasingly evident in the STEM fields, where decreasing numbers of students come into the career path.  There are many reasons for this, but our modes of teaching contribute to the problem. 

With the radical changes in higher education ahead, owing to funding issues and moves toward distance learning, now is the time for organic chemists to rethink the organic curriculum from scratch.  Since we do tend to teach the way we were taught I trust that the changes could be fundamental but not radical.  If we don't evolve we risk our own future.

T.S. Hall