348 Journal of Chemical Education

_Vol. 87 No. 4 April 2010

_pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc

_r2010 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.

10.1021/ed800146x Published on Web 03/09/2010

Chemical Education Today

Organic Chemistry in the High School CurriculumLaura E. Slocum and Erica K. Jacobsen

Each of us has our favorite topics within the chemistrycurriculum. Frequently we teach these topics with more enthu-siasm and often look for new ideas related to these topics toinclude in our classroom. Perhaps most obvious of all, to ourcolleagues at least, we gravitate toward talks that focus on ourfavorite topics and tend to center our own conference presenta-tions around these topics as well.

One of my passions is organic chemistry, and when I firststarted attending conferences, two years into my teaching career,I would usually go to at least a few of the organic talks because Iwanted to stay in touch with the field. That early in my teachingcareer, I never considered teaching organic chemistry at the highschool level, primarily because I did not know any school that wasoffering it at that level. Then, a couple of years later, another highschool teacher asked me this question, “I am teaching anIntroduction to Organic Chemistry next year. What do youthink of this?”

Honestly, I thought that teacher was crazy to take on acourse like this with high school students. Four years later, I wasgiven the opportunity to become one of these teachers myself andhave been for the past eight years, and I love it! The school where Iteach is a college-preparatory school, andmany of our students areinterested in preprofessional majors in college. Organic chemistryis often one of the most challenging courses for preprofessionalmajors, and I see the opportunity to have an introductory organicchemistry course at the high school level as being a huge plus forthem when they get to college. For example, students in myorganic course learn nomenclature, basic chemical reactions, andinfrared (IR) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectro-scopy. Not only do I teach an Introduction toOrganic Chemistrycourse, I also teach an Introduction to Biochemistry course. Thenumber of high schools that are adding these types of courses totheir science curriculums appears to be on the rise based onwhat Iam hearing from colleagues at conferences and via e-mail.

Teaching these two courses (Introduction to OrganicChemistry in the fall and Introduction to Biochemistry in thespring) is my favorite part of the school year. Why? Unlike thefirst-year general chemistry course that has a set of national andstate standards that have to be followed, and Advanced Place-ment (AP) Chemistry that has a set curriculum too, these twocourses are truly mine. I get to cover in the curriculum andlaboratory what I want to include. If the students in a particularcourse have a special interest, I can guide my topics to align withtheir interests or even add or delete a topic.

Presently, I only teach these courses every other year,alternating with AP Chemistry, because of the smaller size ofmy school. I am not aware of any research on the impact thesetype of courses have on student performance once the studentsattend college, but many of my students have returned andexpressed great thanks for having had introductory courses likethese in high school, especially the preprofessional students.

In particular, they felt it gave them a “head-start” in organicchemistry.

An Indiana colleague talked about his organic course at theHoosier Association of Science Teachers, Inc. (HASTI) con-ference in February 2010 (1). He described not only the topicsthat he covers in his class but also the laboratory experience thathe provides for his students. The piece of his presentation thatreally spoke to me was the stories he shared about the impact thiscourse had on his students. Courses like this open new opportu-nities for us to try new ideas and teaching styles in our classroom.

In this issue of the Journal I read about several new teachingideas, specifically linked to teaching organic and biochemistry,that I found especially appealing. Davis-McGibony addresses theidea of using the jigsaw technique to facilitate student learning inregard to protein sequencing (DOI: 10.1021/ed8001144). I hadnever heard of the jigsaw technique and my students strugglewith protein sequencing in biochemistry, so this article gave me awonderful idea to try in about six weeks when I get to proteins.Though I am done teaching organic for this year, I have addedseveral articles from this issue to my organic chemistry coursefolder for next time. One is Follows's article (DOI: 10.1021/ed800127w), with an Internet source he shares that contains amolecular puzzle similar to a word search (Figure 1) and with adescription of how teachers can create these for use in theirclassroomwith organic molecules. Another article is Angelin andRamstrom's game, Where's Ester? (DOI: 10.1021/ed800129r).Both of these articles have some wonderful, nontraditional stylesof homework and molecular structure re-enforcement that I liketo use in my classroom.

Two Upcoming BCCE Symposia

This summer, the 21st BCCE conference will be held at theUniversity of North Texas from August 1-5 (2). Among themany symposia of interest to high school teachers, I'd like tohighlight two that I am looking forward to.

The first is a symposium that was started by Esther Freeman,Survivor Skills for 1st to 5th Year Chemistry Teachers, at the19th BCCE. The symposium is designed to allow experiencedteachers to offer themselves as role models for novice teachersand other educators seeking to improve and fine-tune theirclassroom instruction and management skills.

The second symposium is Views from the Classrooms ofConant and Regional Award Winners. In this symposium,attendees will have the chance to meet and benefit fromaward-winning teachers, as well as find out more about how tonominate a teacher for one of these awards and how each awardselection process works.

As youmake your own summer plans, be sure to put the 21stBCCE on your calendar. All of us at the Journal are really lookingforward to seeing you there.

edited byErica K. Jacobsen

Editor,JCE Secondary School Chemistry

Laura E. SlocumAssociate Editor,

JCE Secondary School Chemistry

r2010 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.

_pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc

_Vol. 87 No. 4 April 2010

_Journal of Chemical Education 349

Chemical Education Today

Erica's Take on the Issue

With the move to copublication of the Journal of ChemicalEducation ( JCE), various nuts and bolts items that you may havebecome used to in the past are receiving updates. These includeitems such as how to submit manuscripts, the citation of articles,JCE's Web site, and subscription rates. Information about theseupdates appears regularly in the print Journal and on the Web,but this “nuts and bolts” information bears repeating.

• ACS Paragon Plus, JCE's new online submission system, is openfor business and ready to receive your manuscript at https://acs.manuscriptcentral.com:443/acs (accessed Feb 2010). Theplatform requires a user ID and password; if you have previouslyauthored or reviewed for JCE, you may already be registered in thesystem. Instructions for this situation as well as for new users arelisted at the site. If you are a high school author and have submittedamanuscript using the new system, please sendme an emailmessage(jacobsen@chem.wisc.edu) to let me know how it went. Do youhave any tips for others as theynavigate the system for the first time?

• The Especially for High School Teachers columns published sofar in 2010 have included information that may look a littlecryptic: digital object identifier numbers, also called DOIreferences. For example, the articles that Laura mentions aboveeach have a DOI number listed after it, replacing the pagenumber references you used to see. It is a unique identifierconnected to the article and is a way tomanage content. You canuse it to easily find articles on the Web site at http://pubs.acs.org/journal/jceda8 (accessed Feb 2010) through a special DOIsearch (see the DOI tab in the yellow search box on JCE's homepage).

• JCE's High School Chemed Learning Information Center(CLIC), the portion of our Web site designed especially forhigh school chemistry teachers, is currently undergoing updates.As I write this, you can find CLIC in two places, both in itsoriginal form, http://www.jce.divched.org/hs/ (accessed Feb2010), and at least partially migrated to its new location andplatform at http://pubs.acs.org/page/jceda8/clic/index.html(accessed Feb 2010). I look forward to the improvements thatare underway as staff work towardmaking it an evenmore usefultool for busy teachers.

• I've saved the best (in my opinion) for last. 2010 subscriptionrates have been released. All high school teachers are eligible forthe new, reduced rate of $25 a year. This includes print issuesmailed monthly along with full online access to both the JCEWeb site content and the special CLIC site. As before, the Website still offers access to past JCE issues since its beginning in1924. You do not need to be a member of the AmericanChemical Society or the Division of Chemical Education toreceive this great deal. Simply contact ACS Publications usingthe contact information listed at http://pubs.acs.org/page/jce-da8/subscribe.html (accessed Feb 2010).

Secondary School Featured Article

5 Montes-Gonz�alez, I.; Cintron-Maldonado, J. A.; P�erez-Medina, I. E.; Montes-Berríos, V.; Rom�an-L�opez, S. N. A StickySituation: Chewing Gum and Solubility. JCE Classroom Activ-ity #105. J. Chem. Educ. 2010, 87, DOI: 10.1021/ed800135j.

Literature Cited

1. Hoosier Association of Science Teachers, Inc. 40th Annual Con-ference. http://www.hasti.org/2010conference.html (accessed Feb2010).

2. 21st Biennial Conference on Chemical Education. http://www.bcce2010.org/ (accessed Feb 2010).

Figure 1. “Molecular search” puzzle for organic molecules.