Jaime Escalante

Yesterday Jaime Escalante, who you may know as the teacher who's life and work were the basis of the movie "Stand and Deliver" passed away.    He was a proponent of seeing the potential in all students and helping students see the potential in themselves.  He also stressed to his students the import of something he called "ganas" which is something like "desire that makes a person take on the difficult challenge".  He inspired his students in ways all of us could should wish to emulate.

T.S. Hall

ACS Meeting Final

To wrap up on the Spring National ACS meeting (yes, it ended last Thursday), I will make some general comments.

I am not sure what the official attendance was, but I suspect that it was lower than usual.  Other than the first morning, the exhibit hall was not particularly crowded.  Even the book vendor booths were open compared to the usual crowds.  Of course the book vendors seemed to have brought less books than usual.  I also noticed that some vendors were gone Wednesday morning when I went through.

The talks I went to were generally very good.  There was only one where I could not understand the speakers accent to the point where I had to just go by the slides.  It was interesting that some groups appeared in force over the week.  I think the entire Smith group from St Andrews came from Scotland to present.  Over the course of the week I got a very clear picture of that group's work, which I found interesting.

I did find myself thinking that the organizers from each division might offer a service to the attendees by suggesting a pre-meeting reading list of articles that might bring those from the hinterlands up-to-date on the hot areas that will be covered at the meeting.  I certainly was glad that I have been reading a lot about organocatalysis lately and wondered if I would have found the meeting as enjoyable had I not.

An ACS meeting his like that old fashion activity of leafing through a paper journal.  I pick up new useful stuff and doodle about my own projects in the margins when something does not capture my attention.  I still find it a useful activity, luddite that I am.

T.S. Hall

Pre-Spring Break Lecture

Being in the middle of spring-break season and with Easter on the horizon I make my annual admonition to my students on the proper use of spring-break.  To this end, I tell them of a 18 year old student of organic chemistry at the Royal College in London who used his Easter Break to undertake in his parents home the synthesis of a compound of great importance to the health of his nation and the world.  He failed to synthesized the drug, but discovered a compound that would change the world.

Of course I am speaking of William Henry Perkin.  The drug was quinine and the compound he discovered was mauve or aniline purple.

I point out to my students that young Perkin quit school, against the advice of his faculty mentor, and started a dye works, where like today's internet entrepreneurs, he became extremely rich.  So rich in fact that he retired at age thirty-seven to devote the rest of his life to the study of organic chemistry.

Of course the dye industry begat the modern synthetic pharmaceutical industry and modern organic chemistry, so Perkins 1856 Easter-Break serves as the model of what the break should be.  Kind of makes the bellybutton shots most student have planned seem like a wast of time, doesn't it!?

T.S. Hall

ACS Meeting 3

Going to ACS meetings during the semester requires getting others to cover your classes and labs.  At PUI/MCU campuses this generally means calling on your colleagues.  As the Expo closes at noon today and I need to grab up my thank you gifts before noon.  Do any readers have suggestions for good things to bring back.  What's the oddest thing anybody brought back to thank you for giving an exam or teaching a class?  I already have a propeller beanie from CEM and Nerf football from Frontier Scientific, a bunch of pens and coasters.

T.S. Hall

ACS Meeting 2

Monday - I spent the morning in New Reactions and Methodology and the afternoon at the Corey Award Symposium.  The morning contained  more chemistry of the organocatalysis, inimium ion, and allyl palladium chemistry variety they appears to dominate the sessions I have been to. Of course the Corey talks were much the same.

Eric Jacobsen gave a nice talk on his group's work.  It gave a sense of the thought process, challenges, insights, and overall path of the development of the work his group has done over the last 10-15 years.  He showed mechanistic rational and application to synthesis in a nice balance.  In a symposium, where there is no question period this is nice.  His talk stood in contrast to some I have seen at the meeting which are a litany of examples of a reaction observed in the first five slides.

In Charette's talk, he may have provided me with a solution to a major nagging problem in my own work.  Unfortunately the solution is not new, the basic chemistry having been published a few years back.  Back in the olden days I would leaf through paper journals when I had a few minutes to kill and would often find new and useful chemistries I might have missed if I just scanned the abstracts.  Now I have mainly find such gems at department seminars or at local symposia and at ACS meetings.

Well, back to the afternoons talks.

T.S. Hall

ACS Meeting 1

It has been a while since the last post.  Primarily because, in addition to the pre-spring break rush I was preparing for the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco.  But, I got the exam to be given in my class written and my talk prepared and was off to SF on Saturday morning.  My hotel has internet access, but it is so slow that until this morning when I got up at 6 I was unable to really get much interneting done. So, lets begin reporting.

Sunday: I attended the Aromatic and Heterocycles talks in the morning and New Reactions and Methodology in the afternoon.  The morning talks were very diverse in nature which created an interesting situation where the audience appeared to be having trouble connecting to many of the talks.  Often there were no questions after the talks.

I may be odd in my opinion but, when I give a talk I want questions.  For me, the point in presenting my results is to elicit feedback.  If you can't think of a question because my logic is impeccable and the work so complete that there is nothing left to do, stand and applaud while shouting "genius" and throwing wads of cash.  (Sorry, slipped into my fantasy life for a minute there.)  My point is that it disappoints me to spend the time to craft a talk only to be met with crickets afterward.  I felt sorry for those this happened to.  Of course, I couldn't think of a question since their work was so far from my experience that I was not sure I really appreciated the material, which goes back to the diversity of talks issue.

One interesting PUI/MCU issue that came up was a speaker who lamented the lack of some final data to make his case.  He noted that he is performing much of the multistep synthetic work himself and had not had the lab time to complete the final steps.  I am with you brother!  As organic chemistry has matured the skills necessary to create new science just don't come from the one-year organic lab.  By the time students have the skills to move a synthesis forward they are leaving.  This means that we faculty must step into the lab.  With our schedules and responsibilities getting something to publication requires heroic effort.

A recent seminar speaker commented to me that in her MCU organic faculty are the only faculty who still go into the lab.  Everyone else just has there students do the work.  She suggested that we are all crazy, killing ourselves trying to be laboratory scientists in an environment which clearly doesn't match our needs.

I will leave you to think about that, as I need to head to this mornings sessions.  More from the ACS meeting when I can get back on the web.

T.S. Hall

And I want a Pony

On Thursday students, parents and faculty across the nation marched to protest cuts to public education funding and increasing tuition.  In one report I heard of students who handed a letter to the system chancelor demanding increased class sections, decreased class size, more faculty, decreased tuition, and no new taxes.  What I can't understand is that no one asked for a pony too.

Our society in general has reached a point were we act like children who have no conception of the cost of things, and that if we individually don't pay someone else is going to have to.  It doesn't make a difference if we talk about health care, education, or infrastructure, we refuse to admit that if we want something it will cost us to get it and to get something of quality.  I certainly feel that we as a society should be investing in our future wellbeing by investing in education.  At the same time, we must acknowledge how pays.

On a similar vein, the University of California system recently did a survey of their undergraduate students and discovered that the students in the physical sciences spent an average of 15.1 hours per week on out-of-class academic work.  This means that they are spending one hourSomehow this does not discourage my students from complaining that my course it too much work.  Again, one must wonder about our willingness to invest in our individual or societal future.

Any argument for education funding, health care funding or any other public funding becomes a false argument when the individual making the argument suggests that they individually should give no more, but should get more.  If we can't come up with better arguments we shouldn't be arguing at all.

T.S. Hall

Watching what we say

A faculty member at East Stroudsburgh University in Pennsylvania has been suspended for comments she made on her Facebook page.  Her own page settings made the comment to her Facebook friends private, but when received by her Facebook friends, whose pages were not private, the comments were public.

While the university is concerned about there "brand" and what they perceive as a threat to students, this case demonstrates how we faculty are never out of the public eye and must watch what we say and do.  Many of us have had the experience of going into a local bar only to find a student or former student who must come up and ask us what we are doing there as if they just discovered a nun in a bordello.

Interesting that the converse does not apply.  If the university suspended every student who made an exasperated threat on me after getting back a graded exam, I could hold the last few classes of the semester in my closet of an office.  But, I recognize hyperbole when I hear it and thankfully so do my students.

I write this blog under a nom-de-plume and have thought about if I really need to.  Would the English Department faculty really attack and put me on trial for crimes against the written word?  Would my writings be used against me if I should again pursue a Chairperson position?

T.S. Hall