My Daughter Called Chemistry the Worst Science Subject — Here’s What Actually Helped
The first time I heard it, my daughter Maya was standing at the kitchen counter with her chemistry textbook open to the periodic table. She wasn’t even looking at it. She was staring at the wall, one hand wrapped around a cold mug of tea, the other pressed flat on the page like she could push the whole subject away.
“Chemistry is the worst,” she said. “Like, not even close. It’s the worst science.”
I was kneading dough for pizza night, flour up to my elbows, and I remember thinking: This is going to be a long year. Maya is a freshman. She loves biology — she can talk for hours about ecosystems and cells. She did fine in physical science in eighth grade. But chemistry had been a problem since October.
“Okay,” I said. “What happened today?”
“Nothing happened. We just did the same thing we do every day. Mr. Delgado put a problem on the board, showed us how to solve it, erased it, and then put up another one that looked exactly the same but wasn’t. And I just sat there like I’d never seen a number before.”
That sounded familiar. I remembered my own high school chemistry class — the feeling of watching the teacher move chemical equations around like furniture in a dollhouse while I was still stuck on which plastic chair went where.
So that night, I listened. That was the first useful thing I did. Not fixing, not explaining, not saying “you just need to pay attention.” I listened to her describe the exact moment the class lost her.
It wasn’t the lab stuff. She loved the lab — the Bunsen burners, the little popping sounds from the hydrogen tests. It wasn’t even the concepts. She could explain what an atom was, what a covalent bond was, well enough to pass any quiz. The trouble started with the math. Specifically, molar mass. Then stoichiometry. Then the word problems that didn’t sound like science at all — they sounded like riddles in a language she didn’t speak.
“If you give me a recipe, I can double it,” she said. “Why can’t I do this?”
That was the clue. And honestly, it took me a while to understand what she was really saying.
Chemistry doesn’t introduce new ideas the way biology or physics does. It takes the things you know — counting, measuring, combining — and translates them into a completely foreign symbolic system. It’s not just a science class. It’s a language class, a math class, and a reading comprehension class all at once. And for most kids, the problem isn’t the chemistry. It’s the abrupt shift in how they’re expected to think.
Maya’s teacher, Mr. Delgado, was actually a good teacher. He was patient and organized. But he moved fast. He’d been teaching chemistry long enough that the symbols were second nature — an “H₂O” was as instantly meaningful to him as the word “water.” Maya was still sounding it out.
Here’s what I started doing differently, and I want to share it because it made a real difference.
First, I stopped telling her to “try harder.” That phrase has never helped anyone in the history of education. Instead, we sat down with an assignment and I asked her to narrate her thinking out loud as she worked through it. She only made it two steps in before she said, “Wait. Is this Al₂O₃ or Al₂O₃?” She couldn’t read the subscript numbers. She’d been writing them wrong in her notes for three weeks. That was the entire block. It wasn’t that she couldn’t do the math — she couldn’t read her own handwriting.
Fix number one was embarrassingly simple: a reminder to always write subscripts in a different color. Literally. She started using a blue pen for the numbers below the line and a black pen for everything else. A week later, her quiz score went from a D to a B. Not because she got smarter, but because she could finally see the problem.
Fix number two came from a conversation I had with Michelle, a mom who teaches middle school science. She suggested I stop using “chemistry” language at home entirely for a while. Run with the kitchen analogy.
“When you make pancakes,” she said, “there’s a ratio. Two cups of flour to one cup of milk. If you want more pancakes, you double both — you don’t just add more flour. Stoichiometry is exactly that. It’s about ratios, not numbers.”
I tried this with Maya. I didn’t say “stoichiometry.” I showed her an actual recipe — the pizza dough I was making. I asked her to scale the recipe up to eight people. She could do it instantly. No panic, no tears.
“Okay,” she said. “So why is the chemistry version so hard?”
“Because the chemistry version wraps the same logic inside a foreign alphabet,” I told her. “But the logic underneath is the same. You already know how to do this. You just have to translate.”
That was a turning point. We started making “translation sheets” together — not flashcards, but a kind of glossary she kept in the back of her notebook. On the left side, the chemistry term or symbol. On the right side, what it actually meant in plain English. “Mole” was her biggest hang-up. The word made her think of an animal. She had memorized the definition — 6.022 × 10²³ — but it never meant anything to her. So we wrote: “Mole = a specific number, like ‘dozen’ but much bigger. It’s how chemists count particles too small to see.”
That helped. So did a move Mr. Delgado accepted easily when I asked if he could slow down on the whiteboard work. He started leaving problems up longer before erasing them and giving students a printed copy to write on. Many teachers will do this if you ask kindly and frame it as a request for “different access,” not criticism of their style.
Now, what remains hard? The labs. Not because Maya doesn’t enjoy them, but because the lab reports require a specific, formal format that she finds confusingly rigid. She’ll do a perfect experiment, then lose ten points on the “Discussion” section because she didn’t phrase things the way her teacher expects. That’s still a struggle. I haven’t fixed it. I’ve just started asking her to write the discussion section as if she were explaining the experiment to her grandmother over the phone — casual, plain language first, then strip out the emotion and insert the technical terms where they belong. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s better than staring at a blank page.
Here’s what I haven’t done: I haven’t told her chemistry is actually fun. She doesn’t believe me, and honestly, for her, it might never be fun. And that’s okay. The goal was never to make her love chemistry. The goal was to help her stop spending every night in tears over a subject that was difficult for her. That’s a quieter kind of win.
There are still bad nights. Last Thursday, she had a test on gas laws, and I watched her daughter push formula sheets around the table, asking the same question five different ways: “But why is the temperature in Kelvin?” I didn’t know. I looked it up with her. We learned it together — you need a scale that starts at absolute zero, because gas volume and temperature are directly proportional and negative temperatures make the math collapse into meaninglessness. “Okay,” she said. That was it. She moved on.
And I think that’s the real insight. Chemistry is the worst subject for a lot of kids — not because it’s objectively awful, but because it demands so many different skills at once. It’s hard to find the exact point where a student is getting stuck when the subject involves memorizing symbols, interpreting word problems, applying math, and understanding physical processes all in the same thirty-minute block.
So if your child calls chemistry the worst, don’t argue with them. Agree with them — then start asking what, exactly, is making it so bad. Ask to see their notes from class. Ask them to talk through a problem out loud. You don’t need to be a chemistry expert to catch the moment where they can’t read their own writing or where a tiny, confusing word like “mole” throws the whole system off.
I won’t pretend we’ve made it to the other side. Maya still sighs heavily every Sunday night when she packs her binder for the week. But it’s the sigh you give when there’s something tedious to do, not the sigh of someone drowning. For right now, that feels like enough.
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