The Model Kit

I’ve had a project idea on the back burner for some time for an in-class module centered around a Socratic dialogue. The idea is that a student volunteer would interact with me as I delivered the lesson (I had the mechanism of second order nucleophilic substitution in mind). I want to turn a passive lecture into an active dialogue. The inspiration to use dialogue as a didactic tool I owe to my advisor, who put me on to Galileo’s classic Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, where Galileo defends the heliocentric Copernican view of the cosmos against the ancient geocentric Ptolemaic view by way of a fictional dialogue between the characters Salviati and Simplicio (you can guess who defends which view by their names).

I’ve experimented with teaching dialogues before. Several years ago I wrote a loose script where I explained the surprising role of entropy in driving both the hydrophobic effect and the spontaneous folding of proteins through a conversation with a skeptical interloper who pushes back and asks tough questions. As in Galileo’s dialogue, we both make our case to an initially neutral third person who stands in for the audience. Two friends from a philosophy circle I belonged to played these other roles and together we performed it as an optional extracurricular event open to my organic chemistry students (three students out of two hundred showed up to watch it, bless them).

My interest in developing Socratic dialogue for organic chemistry was rekindled and took on new urgency due to the unfolding A.I. crisis in education. There is an administrative push underway to reconfigure education into a crash course to train students to effectively prompt ChatGPT for answers and dress up and regurgitate the output. Driven either by a desire to ride the trend or by fear of being left behind, many instructors are acquiescing and ceding their teaching role, becoming glorified assistants to the A.I. The irony is that A.I. is effectively replacing the mental work of both teacher and student. In my view, this is as misguided as a trainer advising their client to send a robot to the gym to do the workout instead of them. It’s a confusion of roles. Instead of teaching students how to prompt an A.I. to effectively explain scientific concepts, we should be prompting the students to create their own explanations.

At its best, the Socratic method succeeds by turning the student into the teacher. They must be supplied with the building blocks of knowledge and a sound theoretical blueprint that shows how it all fits together, and this is the teacher’s job. But the student must synthesize this knowledge into a framework that makes sense to them. They must be able to convey it to others, receive critique and reevaluate. The teacher can help with a leading question here or there, but the student must realize the connections for themselves. This work cannot be outsourced to a third party.

I’ll be honest and admit that as much as I detest and resent A.I., I’m finding its ability to stochastically extrude explanations of scientific concepts to be more impressive with every climate-melting model update. Maybe this means that it will replace me eventually. Apparently, there will be a new “study mode” feature for ChatGPT that will throw back some Socratic questions at the user. It’s as if they realized and are trying to correct for the fact that their replacement for a teacher also replaces the student. But the student can never be replaced; there is no education without a learner. We need to make sure that we are prompting the learners, giving them feedback to improve their output and build their reasoning capacities, and not simply preparing them to manage their impending replacement.

***************************************************************************

A few prompts I gave to my students at the end of this semester:

Draw me a four-panel comic explaining the SN2 reaction mechanism using curved arrows. (quite a lot of theoretical knowledge is contained in this deceptively simple looking mechanism, from structure-reactivity relationships to molecular orbital theory to chemical kinetics and the transition state theory, to molecular geometry and chirality. Incidentally, when I was young I used to draw cartoon character versions of protons and electrons, imagining them as the Autobots and Decepticons of the atomic world.)

Come up with a workflow to explain the process of predicting the major product of the reaction of 2-chlorohexane with sodium ethoxide in ethanol at 55 degrees Celsius. The workflow should address how to predict reactivity, regioselectivity and stereoselectivity, if applicable. Write this in the style of Hunter S. Thompson. (because why should ChatGPT have all the fun?)

And finally, Write a poem in the style of Emily Dickinson explaining how many HNMR signals will appear for cyclohexanol and why. (just trolling them a little at this point.)