Thomas Mallouk

Let me tell you a true story. Early in my career, I was a terrible teacher. Student evaluations in my freshman chemistry course rhymed my surname (Mallouk) with “nuke.” Students in my first graduate course asked me, “Is this midterm exam for this course?” Like many a bad teacher, I was talking to myself during lectures, and forgetting that even for me, learning chemistry had been like learning a foreign language: bewildering at first, and second nature much later on. It wasn’t until I learned to teach as my Spanish teacher did—engaging my students in a two-way conversation—that things began to turn around.

In introductory chemistry courses, our students arrive on the first day of class with a broad range of ability, background, and commitment to learning. It is hard to gauge the level at which to pitch these courses to serve this diverse group. Surprisingly, in my experience, the best way is to set high expectations. The effectiveness of that approach is illustrated in a comment from a senior student who took my honors general chemistry course in the fall of his freshman year:

“Though I am not a chemistry major—nor am I really a chemistry buff—I truly enjoyed your chemistry class. It was incredibly challenging—to this day, the most difficult course I have ever taken—but it instilled in me a drive to excel in every subsequent class. In large part, I believe I owe my success here to you and your incredible enthusiasm for teaching.”

While this comment came from a talented honors student, I receive feedback of similar flavor (that my course was tough, but worth the effort) from students in my mainstream general chemistry courses, my sophomore-junior inorganic chemistry course, and my graduate course in electrochemistry. Teaching chemistry at a challenging level seems like asking for trouble, but it works for me. So how can we make it work for our students?

First, we must acknowledge that we work for them. They or someone who loves them is scrimping or going into debt for their privilege of attending our lectures and taking our exams. My students have bought from my employer the equivalent of three opera tickets per week, and we’re not talking about the cheap seats! Being mindful of this value proposition has helped me focus on delivering a well-organized course, being more available to my students, and thinking creatively about how to make the course work for them. 

Students can rise to the challenge of a hard course and feel proud of what they have accomplished, but to do so they must work to succeed. The most important role of the instructor is to enable that success. Success means different things to different students. For some, success is mastery of the subject (and an A), and for others it is passing a course they have failed or dropped before. In either case, we must respect the challenges that our students have and give them plenty of practice in learning our foreign language. 

Practice makes perfect. In science, we learn by solving problems and by asking questions. Lots of them. Students in my introductory courses never have a day off from chemistry. They have a reading assignment and a Canvas quiz due the night before every lecture and they do problem solving in their recitation sections every week. My lectures are punctuated by many clicker questions. Students also text me questions anonymously on my old flip phone during class, and we stop the lecture to answer them. They use Ed Discussion to seek help from each other, from me, and from their TA on particularly challenging problems. This constant barrage of Q and A helps to pin down concepts and problem-solving methods, so that the students are well prepared for their exams.

Writing. In all but my largest courses, I give students a significant writing assignment, usually based on an original library research topic. Writing exercises some skills that problem solving can’t, especially synthesizing knowledge from a broader range of sources and forming and expressing one’s own opinion. The students help improve each other’s writing through an anonymous peer review system, and in upper level and graduate courses they give a poster or oral presentation to the class on their findings. In general chemistry and inorganic chemistry, this gives the students whose forte is not algebraic problem solving a chance to shine. It gives me confidence in the “bottom” of the class and gives them confidence in themselves. Several years ago, my inorganic chemistry class had a semester-long collective writing project in which they produced a sophomore-level, public domain textbook aligned with the materials chemistry focus of the course. This textbook, available online at https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Inorganic_Chemistry, is a resource that we add to every year in the course. Both the students who created the original version and those who have since improved it have had good things to say about the experience of writing and using the wikibook, and it is now in use at several other colleges and universities.

Staying off-balance. I gained an interesting perspective in my former position at Penn State, when, for reasons having to do with the availability of lab space, I was “drafted” by the department of biochemistry and molecular biology. My research is in inorganic and physical chemistry, and I had never taken a course in biochemistry, but was asked to teach it. Needless to say, this was a learning experience, and my students and I learned together. As a beginner, I was impressed with the preponderance of jargon in the textbook, and I made lists of those vocabulary words for my students to master before the exams. Who knew that there was a difference between a proteoglycan and a glycoprotein? Did you know that one lubricates your knees and the other decorates your cell membranes? As a non-expert, it was easier for me to see where the trouble spots were with the material. I made up mnemonics for facts that needed remembering and contrived classroom demonstrations to teach about left- and right-handed helices, protein folding, cooperative binding, cellular signaling, and Michaelis-Menten kinetics. The interesting thing was how well it went when it was all new to me, so I try to stay a little off balance and introduce something new, even in courses that I have taught many times before. 

Be fun, be interesting, be inspiring. Chemistry class can be a lot of fun, both for the student and the professor. Lecture demonstrations are informative and are a wonderful opportunity for theater, especially when there is some chance, however small, that the professor may die during the demonstration. I also convey, through my own experience in research, that chemistry is a living science. Students want to know if what I’m talking about will be on the test, sure, but they are also interested in the connections between science they learn and societal problems such as energy, health, and the environment. I am enthralled by these connections myself, and my students respond well to my enthusiasm for chemistry.

Thomas Mallouk, Vagelos Professor in Energy Research, is the chair of the department of chemistry. He joined Penn’s faculty in 2019.

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This essay continues the series that began in the fall of 1994 as the joint creation of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Lindback Society for Distinguished Teaching. 

See https://almanac.upenn.edu/talk-about-teaching-and-learning-archive for previous essays.