What is the point of Chemistry?

[MealDealDreamz]

Genuinely asking. I understand that it is essential for life and those that excel at science will love it. But my child is currently cramming for tomorrow and I'm looking at it thinking what really is the point of all this? My child will go into more business and languages subjects at A level hopefully. They like biology and physics but they asked me this morning to help them understand why Chemistry is so important. I just could not explain...

You are joking, right?

A lot of GCSE-level chemistry is about symbol manipulation ("this ion is 2+ so it will try to grab two minuses to make a stable molecule"). It's kind of the Lego (or Minecraft) of school subjects. It develops logical skills that can be very useful in other fields like IT.

Have any of you actually looked at a chemistry GCSE paper recently? How often do you use this below when thinking about the limescale on your taps or cooking or gardening? You don’t because it’s pointless.

I may not think precisely about valency and so on, but I do think about acids and alkalis and how they interact in cooking and cleaning, and definitely which mineral deficiency is turning my rose leaves yellow. I don't need the full chemical equations, but I know it's what lies behind things, and I could look things like that up online if I wanted to. And my mind is sufficiently curious that sometimes I might, if it's not busy thinking about the etymology of some word or when we first started using a particular industrial process or the syntax for a shell script or the metre in a poem. My life doesn't generally need all that stuff, apart from the shell script, but I'm fine with thinking about all these things, because life is much duller otherwise. And if I hadn't been to school I wouldn't have gained even a basic knowledge about much of it. And maybe knowing nothing except completely functional stuff is fine,but it would take a lot of colour out of life. Science and literature and art and maths and language and humanities and ... everything, everything links together in one way or another, because we live in amazing, complex, beautiful world. Education helps us see that, as well as being useful.

It seemed to me when I was doing O and A levelslevels that some people struggled because it was the subject which combined fact, experiment, that sort of logic, a bit of maths with more abstract ideas - but that’s why I loved it.
My career has been writing scientific software, I’d never thought about it in those terms but the coding side came pretty easily.

At 13, when selecting your options, teens may think they know what they will 'need' for the rest of their life, but they don't. They don't know what will enthuse them later. So GCSEs give them a 'general' education about a lot of things so they have a broad base for future learning.

I know why helium balloons are safer than hydrogen. I know why things rust.
I know how to move a heavy object, and why some things are more prone to topple over.
I know why leaves go brown in winter and why biological washing powder works only at certain temperatures.

Science underpins a lot of modern day life. It is important everyone is given the opportunity to at least try to understand it.

So? What if any of your friends had wanted to become scientists? What about if they’d had that yearning later in life? What if they decided to be scientists aged 14, having taken the decision to quit science? Limiting opportunities for young people is not a road I want to go down - shame on you that you do. It’s not about the application, in adulthood, of specific bits of knowledge gained during GCSE - it’s about giving YP choices in adulthood.

I’m quite stunned tbh that a degree educated paramedic and midwife don’t have GCSEs in science btw. I assume they entered the professions before they needed degrees?

Maybe it has got dull and boring since my day,
www.labnews.co.uk/article/2097418/national-curriculum-biggest-threat-to-practical-science-in-schools-warns-survey

I don't agree that science or math are irrelevant. I am happy to agree with anyone that science and math are taught very poorly (due to poorly thought out curriculums, and NOT the fault of teachers), and that a focus on teaching a very shallow understanding of a multitude of topics within each of these areas is doing students a disservice.

If I had my way, secondary science students would spend the bulk of their science time in a lab, engaged in practical investigations, and doing deep dives into a limited range of topics. That would allow students to have a far more realistic idea of whether pursuing a science-based career was for them or not. It would also equip them with skills that could be translated into any environment - research, investigation, data assessment, etc.

A greater focus on cross-curricula studies would also be beneficial. For example, writing a science report requires science, math, English (and depending on the particular investigation) even some history or geography.

Imagine if, students did a lab experiment, then their English teacher taught them how to write the science report, and the maths teacher taught them how to assess the data, and calculate results? And if the history teacher talked about the history behind the science? End result would be students who had a very solid grasp on key concepts, rather than fleeting (and possibly irrelevant) knowledge about many.

@ScienceDragon

A greater focus on cross-curricula studies would also be beneficial. For example, writing a science report requires science, math, English (and depending on the particular investigation) even some history or geography.
Imagine if, students did a lab experiment, then their English teacher taught them how to write the science report, and the maths teacher taught them how to assess the data, and calculate results? And if the history teacher talked about the history behind the science? End result would be students who had a very solid grasp on key concepts, rather than fleeting (and possibly irrelevant) knowledge about many.

YES! That would be so much better than our fragmented way of teaching.

I remember spending a full term learning about rocks in Geography and then another full term learning about rocks in Chemistry - lots of overlap, but also lots of contradictions that were very confusing. I thought at the time that it would have made sense to teach both "subjects" together, it would have saved time, and made the links so much clearer and easier to understand.

Physics and tech could work well together i.e. torque, forces, friction, lubrication, in "resistant" materials, and electronics in systems design, heat & pressure in cooking etc. Physics and biology could work well together with, say, the eyes where currently the eye is taught in both subjects, but in different ways, for different reasons, and the diagrams that students need to learn are different, so again, confusing when different diagrams of the same organ show different components. Also torque, forces etc when looking at muscles in biology.

Such things are often obvious to adults with life experience, but to teenagers, different concepts/ideas are often "silo's" by a young undeveloped brain so they don't automatically see the links and relevances.

Personally, it was years after I left school that it suddenly dawned on me that metals were rocks, and that substances like iron was exactly the same "iron" in your body than it was in the ground or converted into a lump of steel. Blatantly obvious now, when I look back, but during school years, I genuinely thought that iron in the body was something completely different from iron in the ground. That was after having been "taught" about rocks in geography and chemistry, iron in chemistry and biology etc.