Tricotomania and more

Another suggestion from Becky, who has linked to some great reviews. Enough to entice me to buy the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments by Robert Bruce Thompson. (I’ve linked to the publisher’s site because there is a sample chapter there.) Now that I have it, I thought I would let you know about some of the things that have struck me now that I have the whole thing. I’m not sure if these were not mentioned in the other reviews or if I just didn’t notice them.

First of all, I think this is going to be a great resource for high school chemistry. I know I’m getting ahead of myself here, but the book claims to be all the labs you need for whatever level of high school chemistry you are going to do. I’ll need other texts to go with it to give the theory and whatnot, but the labs are usually the hard part. And it is about serious labs, not imprecise, kitchen-table approximations. Now, sometimes the latter are going to be fine, but I think it is good to have a real choice to do things precisely and properly. And I know that the lack of “proper labs” is something that makes many people seriously consider sending their kids to school for high school.

Others have mentioned the extensive introductory chapters covering safety, equipment, chemicals, basic techniques, etc. These are indeed impressive. All the information you need to make good choices based on your needs and budget. That includes the implications of your choices for things like accuracy and whether that is likely to make a difference for your purposes. In addition, in the lab descriptions themselves, there is a list of “substitutions and modifications” letting you know the implications of substitutions for this particular experiment. Very helpful.

There is also a very useful, and detailed, discussion (pages 5-7) of how to keep a proper lab notebook, making the connection between even introductory laboratory chemistry and practices in industrial and academic labs. I did chemistry up to 2nd year university level and don’t remember having this kind of guidance. A friend who is a biochemistry professor was once lamenting the state of her graduate students’ ability to keep good lab notebooks. It seems to me that this is a potentially very important practical detail that it is good to learn early. (Habit training, as we know, is invaluable.) A well kept laboratory notebook would also be a good thing to include in a portfolio for university admission.

The presentation is not post-modern and funky (à la DK books) but very modern and rectilinear. Now if that doesn’t suit your learner, maybe this is a problem, but I’ve met at least one mom whose kid really requires less distraction on the page. This isn’t designed as a “make chemistry fun” book. It is designed to help people discover how fun chemistry is for themselves. No fancy wrapping. Just good, plain, easy to read, uncluttered text. Boxes to set of important things like materials lists, cautions, side explanations, optional activities, and comments from the author’s advisors. Doing the actual experiment involves following linear text, often set out as a series of numbered steps. Sample tables for recording data are included, as are review questions. The introductory chapter suggests actually reproducing these in your (hardbound) laboratory notebook.

From the point of view of a parent, the information on pages 2-4 is invaluable. The author arranges the experiments in groups according to what kind of course you are following. And suggests the amount of time that should be alloted for chemistry labs. Those few pages really impressed me. I really felt like this made the book much more useful. Given my experience so far with the government curriculum guidelines and the textbooks I’ve looked at, I really like the fact that someone lays out some specific guidelines that don’t require a lot of between the lines interpretation.

There is a list of 15 experiments that would support a general chemistry course for those not going on in sciences. Although he doesn’t use this terminology this suggests to me a “general” course as opposed to a “university prep” course. Suggested allocation: weekly 60-90 minute lab sessions. He says that some might take more than one session so I guess maybe 20 total sessions. And you’d want to have a session all on safety and basic techniques, I’m guessing.

For those who want a full two years of high school chemistry, the second year being the AP chemistry course (or equivalent), he lays out the lab sessions that would be allocated to each year. In my mind this would be the “university prep” course. Suggested allocation: 90 minute to 2 hour lab sessions twice a week or a 3 to 4 hour session weekly, with the 2nd year being at the top end of that. There are 36 experiments in the first year of this course and 28 in the second. Very helpfully, for those who will actually be taking the AP exam, there is a table relating the experiments in the book to the list recommended by the College Board for the AP Chemistry exam (22 experiments).

I really like the fact that I can open the book to pages 2 and 3 and have a clear outline of a basic course, an advanced introduction, and a “further topics” course. Maybe all we ever do are the 15 basic experiments. But at least I know what kind of coverage that gives us. And we can do them properly, keeping a proper lab notebook.

So this book is going on my shelf. And anyone even considering homeschooling through high school should seriously consider getting a copy for their shelf, or at least borrowing it from the library to help make your decision. We won’t be ready for it for a couple of years yet, but I might dip into it for more rigorous descriptions of some of the experiments in Fizz, Bubble, and Flash. I’ve already discovered that we could use a bundle of pencil leads as an electrode rather than one, which might have saved us some frustration when we last tried to use that book. I will also use it as a reference for safety, techniques, and general guidance on buying equipment and chemicals.

Looking at this book and skimming the Ontario high school curriculum guidelines again, I realize that they start with a periodic table based course in the early years. So I am probably going to go back to my earlier plan (that never got executed) of doing that kind of course using Fizz, Bubble, and Flash for experiment suggestions, along with a bunch of other related books (many of which were also suggested by Becky at one time or another). Then in a couple of years, maybe we’ll try the general course suggested by Thompson.