Concreteness

As a theorist, I’m very comfortable thinking abstractly. I believe this has helped me gain expertise in my field, evidenced by being able to “see” the deep features when problem-solving, and not be distracted by surface-level features. I also believe that one of the biggest challenges of being a teacher in my area of expertise is the curse of knowledge. I cannot “unsee” the deep features of chemistry, but neither can I bestow my mind’s-eye-sight to the novice. It’s not a concrete gift I can give.

 

My job is to help move students along the path from novice to expert. I’m trying to help students see chemistry the way I do. I have a limited amount of time to carry out this task. Similarly, my students have a limited amount of time to learn a body of material before they take the final exam that assesses their knowledge. My strategy is to make sure students know definitions and problem-solving protocols. Then we go through several different examples where I try repeatedly to point out the common deep structure of the problem even though the surface features are diverse. One challenge is baseline knowledge. The expert has tons of it; the student has little. When you don’t know much, you can only grasp in vain at the surface features that seem more concrete, even though they are less important for solving a problem.

 

I’ve been wondering if, over the years, my theoretical bent has quietly asserted itself more and more in my pedagogy, favoring the abstract over the concrete. Yes, I do want students to be able to think abstractly. This is particularly important in chemistry where understanding what is happening in the tiny nanoscale regime requires abstract imagination. We can’t see atoms or wavefunctions or chemical bonds or dipole attractions. Chemists are always imagining what is invisible to the naked eye, because the heart of chemistry comes from making and breaking chemical bonds. I talk about balls and sticks and springs and waves. I ask students to imagine such entities. I draw graphs. I write equations. I try to include real-world tidbits of chemistry in the mundane that’s all around us. I find myself excited just thinking about such things. But they are all still in my mind’s eye.

 

Do the students see things the way I do? They can tell that I’m knowledgeable and enthusiastic about what I’m teaching (evidenced by comments in student evaluations). But this doesn’t mean they are learning how to think chemically. Humans haven’t been around for long, and for most of human evolution, learning has been visceral. Concrete. Physical. Not so much in the abstract realm. I think I need to bring more concreteness to the teaching and learning of chemistry, and counter my strong bent towards the abstract. Not that the abstract is unimportant – it’s still vital! – but to do better in helping novice students learn chemistry. The best science writers who are able to convey complex ideas to their novice readers employ the visceral in their language. Blood and guts and more. Your mind’s eye is not the only think activated. You can almost feel, smell, taste even though you’re just scanning words on a page. There’s a concreteness to it.

 

How will I remind myself to keep working on this? Over time I am likely to revert back to emphasizing the theoretical and abstract. Maybe I need a (small) concrete block. A physical brick might be sufficient. I could muse more about this topic, but instead maybe I should take the good first step of getting up off my chair and away from my computer and locate said concrete brick.