When I teach the Chemistry 1210 class, Principles of Chemistry, I'm training professionals, or those who want to become professionals. Professional chemists, doctors, physician's assistants, and others who in their careers will be making independent decisions and be responsible for making the right decisions. In other words, I train those who must think.

The problem I encounter is that one sixth of my students, now up to one third post COVID, refuse to think or even try. They won't try homework at all. Admittedly homework in my class is harder than others, as I don't gamify or incentivize homework. I tell them that if they see a problem for the first time on an exam they won't do well on the exam. One third of my students respond, as I've mentioned, by not trying at all. And I'm okay with that. If student's don't want to think, it's best they are not running a chemical plant, or diagnosing our health problems. (There is a YouTube channel for the United States Chemical Safety Board, the USCSB, who informatively figure out what went wrong with chemical plant disasters, almost always the fault of someone at the plant who should have been thinking; and my wife and I have been the victims of some years-long misdiagnoses by doctors and psychologists who were not skilled at thinking.)

My big question has always been, how did these students become so averse to thinking? In the fifth grade I became a thinker, and have always been one; that's where I realized I knew more about science than my teacher did. For decades I thought thinking was a consequence of aging and wondered why everyone could not easily do so. (That was probably my autistic viewpoint kicking in before I knew I had an autistic viewpoint; it's where the "auto" in autistic comes from: whatever I experienced in life must be what everyone else experienced.)

So what did I do differently before fifth grade that contributed to my being able to think?

I read.

I read a lot of simple books (Sobel's Encyclopedia Brown books, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, for example), tried some harder ones (The Hobbit), and had one bad foray into very difficult books (The Silmarillion). I got into science fiction short stories (hard scifi by Clarke and Asimov was much preferred over the softer stuff by Bradbury). I was always reading. 

I read in part because relating to other people was difficult and following a story in a book was a more certain way of learning about people that didn't involve my getting things wrong and being embarrassed by it. I also read because I liked what it did to my brain. I liked the new ideas, and thinking about what they meant. (I still do. I've been stuck for days on a single page of Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb where he describes the role of belief in the science philosophy of Michael Polanyi. Every time I reread the underlined paragraph to see where I was my brain lights up with the possibilities of what it means, and I find myself crafting seminars on the topic.) 

This morning I read a piece by Gerwinder where he posits that it's writing that makes one a thinker. He's right about that, but I managed to become a thinker primarily by reading. I write this blog to help my thinking, to make a proper argument from the scramble of thoughts and opinions I hold. I also write in a journal, and in a private diary, thought not as often. All my good stuff is here in the blog.

So, back to my students. How can I get them to start thinking? Or is it a lost cause at the University level? Those who will not read aren't going to start now, and if you haven't read you can't start writing without demonstrating you're a total prat. My solution thus far, arrived at by years of experimentation, is that I am exactly what rumor says I am: a gatekeeper who expels the non-thinkers from careers of responsibility. I manage a "weed-out" course. For that one-third, anyway. My real job is to get the remaining two-thirds to start thinking like a scientist, mostly by describing the behaviors of matter, find a theory that explains the observations, and then give them synthetic questions where the theory must be applied to explain the behavior of matter in an unfamiliar situation. Some students, maybe a third of them, really wake up to the challenge and find they can thrive in a challenging environment. They deserve to become doctors, dentists and PAs. The middle third go on to have decent careers working for a boss, I suppose. Answering my question from the opening of this paragraph, I can't. It's too late to take a university student who avoided reading and writing and have them start thinking in a class where we have far too many other things we need to do. They can find classes at any university to do those things, but it delays graduation, puts them out of sync with their cohort (and subsequent loss of friendship with fellow students), and messes up their university transcripts ("dirty" transcripts have a harder time getting into professional programs than "clean" and quick ones). (By dirty transcripts I mean those with failed classes, retakes, high-school courses, and longer-than-four-year B.S. degrees.)

My advice to students in elementary school: start reading one hour a day for the rest of your educational time. Then follow Gerwinder's advice and write one hour a week. Up the hours in junior high, and again in high school. Then the world is yours.

Richard Rhodes with one of the best books ever written.