Sam slammed his pencil down on the kitchen table. “Chemistry is the worst subject in the world,” he announced, pushing the worksheet away. I glanced at it: a list of unbalanced equations, chemical names that seemed to go on forever, and a small note from his teacher about a unit test on Friday. Two problems were attempted. Both were wrong.
I didn’t have a great response. I remembered sitting in my own high school chemistry class, staring at the periodic table like it was a cryptic crossword puzzle. The teacher talked about moles and molarity and bonding, and I nodded along, smiling, while the whole thing washed over me. In my mind, chemistry was just math with different uniforms. The fact that Sam was struggling felt less like a surprise and more like tradition.
So I did what I usually do when I don’t know an answer: I asked him to show me what he was actually supposed to do. He sighed and picked up the pencil, tracing a problem with the lead. “You have to make the same number of each atom on both sides. But then this coefficient thing changes the other numbers, and I just can’t keep track.” He showed me the equation: something like H₂ + O₂ → H₂O. He knew it had to balance. He just didn’t see why.
I didn’t give him a chemistry lesson. I didn’t know how. Instead, I got up and walked to the kitchen cabinet, pulled out a box of baking soda, and handed it to him. I took an empty glass, filled it with vinegar from the pantry, and asked him to add a spoonful. He did. It bubbled over, and he wiped his hand on his jeans, annoyed. I asked him what was in the glass now that wasn’t there before. He shrugged. “Bubbles. Carbon dioxide, maybe?”
It’s a start.
Later that week, I talked to a friend who teaches physical science at a nearby middle school. She said something that stuck with me: “Chemistry is the worst because it’s the first subject where kids are asked to work with unseen things.” Math is numbers. Biology is plants and animals. Physics is motion and force—you can drop a ball, you can see the speed. Chemistry deals with atoms and molecules, things you can’t see, and then expects you to memorize rules about how those invisible things behave. It feels arbitrary.
She also said something else. Most parents and teachers try to fix that by using analogies—like comparing atoms to Lego bricks or cookies. In her experience, that helps for about twenty minutes, then hits a wall. Kids eventually ask: “But why is it like that?” and an analogy only goes so far. The better approach, she said, is to spend more time on the phenomenon first and the symbols later. Let kids mix baking soda and vinegar and witness the reaction. Let them rust a paperclip in saltwater. Then, once their hands and eyes have gotten the idea, introduce the equations as a way to write down something they already saw.
I tried that with Sam the next night. I found a short video of a rusting nail, then one of a real combustion engine working. We talked about why iron turns brown and flaky, and why fuel burns rather than just sitting there. It ended with him asking a question I hadn’t heard from him in a long time: “But why does it do that?”
Not “how do I pass the test?” but “why.”
We still couldn’t balance the equations on his worksheet. The next morning he took it to his teacher and asked for extra help after school, something he’d been too embarrassed to do before. I don’t know if the teacher had time for that, or if she pointed him to a website, or what happened. He came home with the worksheet essentially complete, though I’m fairly sure he copied a few answers from a classmate. But he also described what the teacher had done: she dissolved sugar in water and evaporated it in a pan, showing that the sugar came back. “It was still there the whole time,” he said. “It’s like, dissolved isn’t gone.”
That helped more than my vinegar trick.
There is something about chemistry that resists the usual parenting strategies. You can’t show someone a conservation of mass with a bow and ribbon. You have to trust that the invisible world follows rules even when you can’t see the evidence right now. It’s hard to be patient with that when you’re fourteen and already suspect the universe is arbitrary.
We haven’t fixed anything, of course. His grade is still somewhere in the C range, and I still can’t help him with the math part. But we’ve changed one small thing: we’ve stopped treating chemistry like a subject to be conquered and started treating it like a language for describing ordinary things. When he makes scrambled eggs, I ask him if the protein is chemically changing, and we argue about whether heating it is the same as breaking bonds. When he sees rust on a bike, he rolls his eyes and says “oxidation,” but he says it correctly. He hasn’t fallen in love with the subject. He still says it’s the worst. But now he says it with a kind of tired familiarity, the way you complain about a friend who’s difficult to hang out with but still shows up.
I suspect that’s about as good as it gets for chemistry. It’s not going to be everyone’s favorite. It asks a lot of you—abstract thinking, mental modeling, a willingness to accept that you can’t see the thing you’re studying. But the moment the invisible becomes something you understand rather than just memorize, the worst subject turns into just a hard one. And hard is okay.
Sam’s teacher still hasn’t assigned a lab that involves fire, which he’s upset about. But I notice he’s started carrying the periodic table in the front flap of his binder instead of buried at the bottom. He tells me it’s because he needs it for class. I don’t really believe that. He tells me he’s still going to ask to switch to physics next year. He probably will.
But the baking soda and vinegar are still in the kitchen cabinet, and sometimes, when I’m cooking, I see him glance at the glass on the counter, like he’s checking whether something invisible might still be happening. I think that’s enough for now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Sam slammed his pencil down on the kitchen table