As a graduate assistant, I am expected to teach. Fine. This semester’s assignment is teaching an organic chemistry lab. Now, these are kids who have made it through at least one year of general chemistry lab.
I need to share the following incident:
Student: Uh…Synth?
Me: Yeah?
Student: Uh…I spilled acid on myself.
Me: …what kind?
Student: Umm, the concentrated hydrochloric.
Me: Why are you standing there?!?
After rushing the student to the sink and getting him washed off, I stopped to ponder. Okay, everyone has accidents. But my group of students are CHEMICAL ENGINEERS. This is supposedly a reasonably good undergrad school. But, seriously, we had a BIG safety lecture at the beginning of the semester. As they do before EVERY lab class.
I’m worried. America, it seems, is definitely losing its scientific edge. One burnt student at a time.
Anyone else have any thoughts on the future of humanity? Are people just getting worse, or am I overreacting?
Nah, people have always been stupid. Yes, it will end up getting us all killed one of these days, but what are you gonna do? No use worrying about it. All you can do is try your best to stir up your students’ intellectual curiosity.
I work as a Research Assistant and our lab routinely has undergraduate students working part-time. Some students are a joy to work with, some are are strain. I can tell students - undergrad and higher - every bad outcome I’ve seen because of not following the rules (The Super-Ovulation hormone injection in the foot is my favorite) and there is a minority that has to learn the hard way. :rolleyes:
Hang in there. Think of it as evolution in action.
One of the biggest issues I have with students in the lab is with appropriate clothing. We use a wide variety of scary shit - acids, radiation, toxins, etc. The Rules state that everyone in the lab should wear closed-toe shoes, long pants, and long shirts (no mid-drifts showing). Years ago, I had to show a student how to do injections in mice. She showed up wearing sandals. I objected to her footwear and she said that everything would be fine. While I was injecting a mouse, it kicked and the syringe got away. It rolled across the counter, fell off the edge and into the student’s foot! :eek: :eek:
“Oh my god! What was in there?”
“A Super-Ovulation cocktail, these mice are egg donors.”
“You mean this stuff makes them super-fertile.”
“Yep.”
“Do you think any got in me?”
“I wouldn’t take any chances if I were you.”
I’m not too worried about this. It’s just that a lot of students seem to lack curiosity and motivation. They just want to “get an A and get out.” I try to relate the experiments we’re doing to whatever the student is interested in, from biology or physics, to current events. But it doesn’t seem to help. Maybe that’s the most frustrating part. Science is supposed to be more interesting.
I go to school part-time as well as work in the lab full-time. College has a nack for sucking all of the fun out of a subject. Once I learned that my life is not dependent on my GPA, I was able to enjoy things more. That realization didn’t hit me until I was in my mid-twenties. ::shrug::
It’s just that Chemistry isn’t practical. The field is advancing well beyond what can be easily taught in such a short period and still be interesting.
A comparison is trying to teach MS-DOS and why it was so important in the computing world. We have moved so far beyond it alot of the wonder gets taken out of “Look, we can save files on this piece of metal!” Says the student: “So? I’ve done that for years”. Find me something exciting in chemistry that I can do myself and find useful.
I think part of it can be the mindset of “nothing bad can happen to me!”; part of it can be the “yeah, yeah, they’re just overreacting with this safety talk - have you seen the MSDS for salt!?!?!”
Both of these can be addressed by having a hands-on portion to the safety talk. A little drop of hydrochloric acid here, a little drop of sodium hydroxide there. It’s kind of like teaching little kids to respect it when you say “Don’t touch that, it’s hot!” Not stopping them in time once when they reach to touch the hot stove door does wonders for their learning curve.
As an aside, stupid things are comitted every day by students in other fields as well. I remember one of my friend girls in Engineering who dropped a weight on her foot in the middle of one of those 3 day long soil consolidation tests.
There is nothing interesting or motivating about going into a lab knowing what you are supposed to do, how to do it, and what happens when you do it. That’s not even science, it’s technical training. The only interest I ever had in labs was in being the first one out the door. Then I did a summer of research where what I studied and how I studied it was up to me. That’s where the interest and motivation came in.
While there is still great debate over the issue, I’m intrigued with the generational theory that predicts a great number of kids in college and just entering the workforce right now are part of a group of kids produced by the so-called “helicopter parenting” style. What this means for you is that they’re pretty great at following directions in the moment, but have little to no initiative to handle things on their own, and they simply don’t know how to take responsibility for their own actions. Their whole lives, their parents have swooped in to save them from themselves - didn’t do your homework because we were out late? That’s okay, honey, I’ll write you a note. Slept in late? That’s okay, honey, I’ll sign you in the doctor’s visit log at school. Got into a fight? Oh no she di-int, it was that nasty little Johnson brat who started it! Dropped an anvil on her foot? Where’s the number for my lawyer, dammit, and why are anvils made so heavy?!
We got the first of these kids in as employees while I was still in retail management, and I found it painful. You simply couldn’t go over a list of closing duties and expect them all to be done four hours later. You had to say, “Hey, Scott, why don’t you sweep the tile now?” And then be prepared to walk him to the broom closet and place the broom in his hands. And he’s sweep really, really well, but 20 minutes later, you better suggest mopping, because he won’t move on to the next task until you tell him to. Again, these kids have been in daycare and preschool since age 2 or 3, and are used to waiting patiently without making a fuss until the person in charge tells them what to do next. And gods forbid something actually goes wrong, they just freeze with a deer in headlights look and wait for Mommy (or me) to come fix it.
I understand WHY, but it still drives me batshit insane.
I did a BSc in chemistry. On of my practicals involved synthesis with some organic cyanide compound. I could find my way to the Solution A and B blindfolded before I opened the fume hood.
One of my friends (fairly bright) was boiling Sulfuric acid for her experiment. When it started getting out of control, she realised she needed to get it off the heat in a hurry. Did she move the bunsen - no. Did she kill the gas feed - no.
She picked up the beaker - before realising that if the contents were boiling, the beaker was probably hotter than her fingertips could cope with.
Dropped beaker and acid/scalding burns on her hands and the front of her legs - nothing on the face - she was very, very lucky. Took months for the burns to heal.
it’s easy to blame the “helicopter generation”–but there were kids like your Scott 35 years ago too. (I was one of them at my first McJob)
I don’t think it’s a “helicopter parenting” thing–I think it’s just a natural part of modern life.
Maturity, and developing social skills has been getting delayed for 4 generations now. In WW II, many 19 year old soldiers were married, and 19-20 was an age that most people held “real” jobs which they intended to keep till they retired.
And it is very self-selecting: those kids who drove you crazy in retail management were working at minimum wage jobs for a reason–that’s all they are capable of doing. The ones with initiative weren’t working at broom-sweeping jobs–they were organizing scout troops, or running their own ‘businesses’ (i.e. lawn mowing, babysitting, anything where they could be their own boss)
I think that part of the OP’s problem is that organic chemistry classes, at least in my institution, are dominated by pre-meds, for whom it is a requirement and not something they’re necessarily interested in. The people who took the course out if interest are in the minority.
Normally, I’d agree, but we’ve set things up so the labs are divided by fields of interest. This allows experiments to be tailored to a particular group. Also, about half of the semester is spent doing something much closer to actual research–things that don’t necessarily have a “right” answer, and some labs that don’t have an answer at all.
This also lends itself to noticing the “helicopter parenting” aspect. Someone comes up to me and asks why this experiment didn’t work, so I say something along the lines of, “Well, I don’t know, but have you thought about trying X, Y, or Z?” And the response is almost always “but that’s a lot of work!” or “well why didn’t you tell us to do that first!”
There might be another reason – sometimes people get the deer-in-the-headlights reaction in response to some sort of major, major problem. There was a thread some time ago discussing similar reactions to the phrase, “Fuck, dude, you’re ON FIRE!”
Just an observation that I know of at least one clueless wonder back in the early 70’s that did various silly things in high school and undergraduate labs and survived, namely me. I certainly don’t believe I was unique in that regard. I distinctly remember rotting holes through shirts many times, getting acid (very small amounts, mind you) on my skin - I did have the common sense to rinse it off quickly (but VERY briefly, none of this “rinse it off for 10 minutes” nonsense), and various fun “extra-curricular” experiments. Maybe it’s good I went into computing!
So, maybe there are a lot more clueless wonders now, but they certainly existed back then.
I was making a super-concentrated NaOH solution once when I worked at a state lab. For those of you who don’t know, dissolving NaOH is very, very exothermic. It produces tons of heat. Also, another name for the stuff is lye, and it’s what makes soap slippery.
So I was adding the stuff to the water, got inattentive (I’d done it a thousand times before,) and looking back, I noticed that the water had boiled and the solution was erupting out of the 2 liter Erlenmeyer flask. At that point, I took complete leave of my senses and reached out to grab the flask. I immediately realized I was burning myself, and reflexively eased my grip, whereupon the super-slippery flask slid out of my grasp like a bar of soap, and shattered on the lab bench. Two liters of boiling, concentrated NaOH flew everywhere, and soaked my skin and clothes. My jeans and T-shirt dissolved readily, and I had severe burns.
