Chemical Education Today

www.JCE.DivCHED.org • Vol. 84 No. 1 January 2007 • Journal of Chemical Education 31

Commentary

Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative…?by Catherine Hurt Middlecamp

Ozone depletion. Nuclear waste. Acid rain. People askme, “Why do you talk about all this negative stuff in yourchemistry course? Doesn’t this just reinforce the idea thatchemistry is the problem?”

Let me first say, “guilty as charged”. I do engage stu-dents in the study of these topics. In fact, my list of such“negative” topics is quite lengthy. Truly, one of my passionsin life is to teach chemical principles through real-world issues.These issues are complicated and, at times, even a bit ugly interms of what happens to people and the land on which theylive. Thus, it is not surprising that colleagues express con-cern, perhaps wishing that I would portray chemistry (andof course, chemists) in a more favorable light.

In the past, I tended to brush comments about negativ-ity aside. But by so doing, I missed the chance to address theunderlying issues. Why should we teach “negative” topics?What can they offer us and our students? And what mightbe their inherent value to our profession? Such questionssurely warrant closer attention.

Interestingly enough, it was Robin, a graduate studentin sociology, who helped me to better answer questions suchas these. We chatted at length one evening. At the outset, Iconfessed to her that I really didn’t know much about whatsociologists did or studied. Not being put off by my igno-rance, Robin started with the basics. “Sociologists study so-ciety,” she said. “We usually study the problems in society,because by studying them we can hope to learn somethingand make a difference in people’s lives.”

“You deliberately study the problems?” I asked. “Whyyes,” she responded. “And of course. The problems are byfar the most interesting part. We learn by studying them, andthen later we hope to apply our knowledge to make the worlda better place.” “Oh my,” I thought to myself. I don’t knowif Robin could tell how many light bulbs were flashing inmy head, but truly I hung on her every word. As the eveningstretched on, we explored the significance of this seemingly“negative” content.

As I further reflect on what we do as chemists, I notethe inherent paradox. The chemical sciences truly have trans-formed human existence for the better. We offer people manybenefits: clean drinking water, methods to diagnose and treatillnesses, fuels for local and global transportation, capabili-ties for computing, and materials one barely could have imag-ined decades ago. Yet at the same time, we inadvertently haveharmed the biosphere. Chlorofluorocarbons still persist in thestratosphere, photochemical smog exacts its toll on humanhealth, and water supplies, once clean, in some cases no longerare potable. Our dramatic successes have been accompaniedby serious losses and occasional tragedies.

As we teach, we can embrace this paradox. Just as Robinroutinely studies complex and sometimes ugly problems in

sociology, likewise our students need to study similar onesrelating to chemistry. Just as students in sociology get ener-gized by studying the real-world difficulties, so can ours.Through this study, our students—majors and non-majorsalike—can find issues worthy of engagement both in theirstudies and over the course of a lifetime.

Difficulties and failures also present excellent teachingopportunities. Henry Petroski, a civil and environmental en-gineer from Duke University, has written extensively on theimportance of studying failures. For example, Petroski pointsout that “success masks failure” (1). The more confident weare about how well something (for example, a Freon, tetra-ethyl lead, nanoparticles) is working, the more likely we areto miss that something else is going awry. Petroski speaks tothis and related issues in his most recent book, Success ThroughFailure (2). Thus if we can utilize the teaching opportunitiesthat failures present, our students can glean wisdom from themistakes of the past.

As we bring our difficulties and failures into the class-room, we must give our students the intellectual space toconsider questions that may be personally relevant to them.These include “What do I care about?”, “How can mywork make a difference?” and “What career path should Ipursue?” In allowing our students to explore such ques-tions, we enable them not only to see that our professionneeds a wide variety of talents, but also that it requires thesetalents to remain viable.

Back to the title song (3):

You’ve got to accentuate the positive,

Eliminate the negative,

Latch on to the affirmative,

Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.

In truth, the negative merits our attention. And the gray areasof in-between are precisely where the intellectual action is. Idon’t want our students—or our profession—to miss out onthis action.

Literature Cited

1. Dean, Cornelia “Engineering a Safer, More Beautiful World,One Failure at a Time,” New York Times, May 2, 2006.

2. Petroski, Henry. Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design;Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2006.

3. Lyrics by Johnny Mercer, “Accentuate the Positive,” 1944.

Catherine Hurt Middlecamp is in the Department ofChemistry and in the Integrated Liberal Studies Program, Uni-versity of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI 53706;chmiddle@wisc.edu