You want another classroom experience?
Sure.
A teacher in a junior high was teaching, among other things, a science class.
One part of that was chemistry.
And one aspect of Chemistry is the Periodic Table. Well, that wasn’t her specialty, so she asked me to explain it to the kids.
What is it?
You probably know that a table packs a lot of information into a small space. Instead of going on and on with one sentence after sentence, once you know how to read the table you have all the information.
Okay.
Well, chemistry is all about the elements — carbon, hydrogen, and so forth — and the Periodic Table puts all the info about the elements into a small space.
Looks complicated.
Each square in the table has numbers that tell you something about an element. And its placement in the table means something too.
And you could explain that?
I wasn’t too sure when the teacher first asked me. After all, I hadn’t even thought about it since Freshman Chemistry back at Bucknell. That was like a half century ago. And the Table now is more complicated because they’ve discovered more elements since I was in school.
But?
But I managed to talk my way through an explanation. All I could do was hope I was getting through to them.
Maybe one of the kids became a chemist.
Yeah. Dream on.