education
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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
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I recently bought a chessboard so that I can play against my young daughter and we can learn the game together. In a previous essay on chirality (right/left asymmetry) I used the example of boxing to describe the possible combinations of two chiral objects. Looking at my new wooden chessboard, it occurred to me that
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In the physical sciences, experiments are designed to potentially falsify some hypothesis, which is an educated guess about some state of affairs in the physical world. Philosophy, in contrast, proceeds by way of thought experiments. A thought experiment is some imagined situation or puzzle that is designed to test the boundaries of a definition, a
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Life isn’t fair, is it? No one consulted us teachers and educators before launching these large language models that would effectively break many parts of education as we know it. And now it’s our responsibility to fix things, to rebuild and rethink, because no one else could do a good job of it. So, where
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I decided to call this blog The Model Kit because the way that I have come to approach teaching organic chemistry is to begin with these simple physical molecular models and to teach the subject in a similar way as an artist learns to draw by observing an object. Learning organic chemistry is often compared
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At 45 years of age, I’m looking back and reflecting on the fact that I’ve spent most of my adult life in academia. I’m not sure whether I should find this surprising. I feel like I’m suited to it, but things could have turned out very differently. I always did exceedingly well on standardized tests,
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At the time of this writing, in 2025, it has been a little over a decade since legislative programs started popping up in various states to promote STEAM education. “STEAM’, the incorporation of arts into ‘STEM’ (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics), was as much an admission as a new concept. It was an admission that something
The Model Kit 