Rationale
I am a teacher that loves creating new things and performing new tasks. However, I feel that the curriculum in the school district of Philadelphia really keeps chemistry teachers boxed into traditional chemistry that skims over applications. When I examine the curriculum and the textbooks, I realize that it is nearly identical to what I learned in school 15 years ago. As a teacher of a new generation of students, I feel obligated to teach students new ways of doing things. I believe it is a huge disservice to my students to offer them the exact same curriculum that I had in high school, when the truth is that they deserve better. If I am not living up to that task, then my university degrees and professional accomplishments carry no weight or power because I have not attempted to impart even a fraction of my professional learning experiences to the next generation of high school students. Failure to impart these experiences means that I am actually sending my students back in time to a darker past instead of advancing them towards a brighter future.
Some laboratory experiments will always be considered the classics, such as the flame test lab and electrical conductivity of salts, which establishes a foundation for understanding. However, if science is advancing and the laboratory experiments in high school remain unchanged, then students will always be living in the past. As I am entering into my third year of teaching chemistry, I have not found a way to meaningfully teach students about physical and chemical changes and chemical separation techniques. Oftentimes, food is used as examples, but unless my students are cooking for their younger siblings at home, many of them actually cannot relate to physical and chemical changes found in cooking. For too long, chemistry teachers have stuck with the familiarity of melting candles, heating of sucrose, and the frying of eggs that these examples have numbed the students’ fascination with chemistry. Thus, it now becomes my responsibility to give them an authentic kitchen chemistry experience, rather than a list of fragmented objects and activities.
Lately across the US, the police brutality against African Americans have developed into the Black Lives Matter Movement. One of the things that this unit hopes to accomplish is to provide a context that will teach and motivate students toward a solution to the Black Lives Matter movement that begins with them, and not with a protest. Since the inspiration for this unit springs from George Washington Carver, I will use him as the example that students should follow if they want to experience liberation. In short, George Washington Carver did more than just invent uses for peanuts; his labors in the lab produced reasons for poor black farmers in the south to plant crops that were deemed useless. By creating a demand for those crops and their byproducts, farmers saw the opportunity to escape financial oppression. Thus, I want my students to see that in order to climb out of oppression, then one of the most valuable tools to shift an entire society of people out of oppression and into freedom is to use creativity. If students want to see a powerful demonstration of being delivered from the curse of police brutality, then African Americans should reconsider how their creativity is used. In my personal opinion, I find that that our creativity has only served to entertain people via the music industry, yet our influence in that stream of society still leaves us disrespected and dehumanized.
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