Professor Irving Epstein was recently interviewed about teaching introductory chemistry by the HHMI Bulletin in a story titled Better Living Through Chemistry (Class):

I remember the first time I went to my doctor and mentioned that I teach college chemistry. He cringed a little and said, “Oh, that almost kept me out of medical school.” Like my doctor, many students take their two years of required chemistry, breathe a sigh of relief, and then go on with their lives and don’t look back.

Students today also have many distractions to draw them off course—Facebook, Twitter, blogs. I suspect they tend to have less time to devote to their studies in high school, and when they get to college they don’t know how hard they’re going to have to work.

We need to reach out more to these students. We can’t expect them all to love the beauty of the subject for its own sake. We can, however, lure them in by showing them that chemistry is relevant to the things they’re really interested in—like life sciences, medicine, or environmental issues. Once we’ve gotten their attention and they recognize that it’s useful to understand how chemistry works, we can also convince them that it’s fun and interesting—maybe even worth tweeting about […]

You can read more at the HHMI Bulletin.