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A Seat at the Periodic Table
- University Press of New England
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96 are trying to be funny for our sakes. How much more wonderful it is when a professor makes us laugh because his world is odd, his steps sometimes unsure, his glasses eternally lost upon his head, the toilet seat propped under his arm. I have heard it said that nostalgia is a form of protest. And I suppose it is, because I feel a longing for something I once had and that I now miss. I realize that one cannot hire a new professor because he or she is eccentric, but what’s sad is that hiring committees no longer overlook eccentricity in their constant striving for institutional fit. Perhaps this is because eccentricity has become conflated with liability. The only hope, then, in the current social climate, is for eccentricity to rise to the level of a disability that would have to be accommodated. Then these colorful people would have a fighting chance and colleges and universities would be presented with opportunities to become more interesting places again. o p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p aseatattheperiodictable Introductory biology texts traditionally begin with basic chemistry and from there move on to the cell and then to whole organisms, ending with ecology and evolution. There is some logic in this small-to-big approach, this crescendo of themes. I take a different tack. I begin with a discussion of evolution (the big picture), because I believe that students need a context in which to couch the rest of the course information. Only after I have dealt with Darwin—and after it’s too late for my students to drop the course without penalty—do I take up the gauntlet of chemistry, an area my non-majors generally dread as A Seat at the Periodic Table p 97 a result of bad high school experiences or assumptions about its difficulty. Truth to tell, I love teaching the chemistry section. Compared to the ifs, ands or buts of biology (nerves cannot regenerate, except in certain instances when . . . ), chemistry is constant, symmetrical , and mechanical. If you can build a tiny helium atom, then you can use the exact same building blocks to construct an outsized uranium atom. Just like Legos. Why is it important to teach chemistry at all in a biology course? Because many biological processes are understandable only in terms of chemistry: molecular genetics, photosynthesis, the transmission of nerve impulses, immunology, diffusion, osmosis , and on and on. Chemistry, in short, is a plinth supporting the soaring column of biology (or, to appropriate Frost, biology is a “pinnacle to heavenward / [that] signifies the sureness of the soul,” thanks to the reliability and consistency of chemical laws). But chemistry, in turn, has its own cornerstone—a systematic list or chart of the pure substances that make up not only the earth, but, so far as we know, the rest of the universe as well. This list or chart is called the Periodic Table of the Elements. If chemistry were a republic conceived in logic and dedicated to the proposition that everything in the universe is made up of the same “stuff,” then the periodic table would be kept in a glass chamber filled with nitrogen (element #7) for all its citizens to revere. Alas, science is more detached and dispassionate than this, and, in a biology course at least, the periodic table seldom receives the emphasis and accolades it deserves. I spend an entire lecture on it. When I first project an image of the periodic table of the elements for my students, there is a low, collective groan of discontent when they behold all those symbols and numbers. Before I can get a word out of my mouth, someone, usually a smart aleck in the back row, speaking for the entire class, preempts me with, “Do we have to know all of those?” (There are over one hundred elements.) And even before I can say, “No, [54.224.52.210] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:05 GMT) 98 p i , t e a c h e r but . . .” there is a follow-up groan, as if they were Vikings being ordered to row faster. “Jeesh,” I lament. “Give me a break.” And then I lapse into one of my New Jersey stories, which soothes their discontent. When I was a kid I had my own laboratory in the basement of my family’s Jersey City home. I whiled away many...