Why Does My Kid Hate Chemistry? What I Learned As A Mom And Former Teacher When My Teen Said It’s The Worst Subject Ever
Last Tuesday, I was wiping pasta sauce off the kitchen table and grading 8th graders’ lab reports at the same time, when my 10th grader Mia slammed her chemistry textbook down hard enough to make her half-empty lemonade slosh over the side. The cover, plastered with a grumpy cat sticker that says “I <3 nap time,” bounced against her water bottle. “Am I the only one who thinks chemistry is the worst subject to ever exist?” she yelled, dropping her head into her crossed arms.
I almost did the thing I’ve seen so many new teachers and well-meaning parents do: jump in to defend chemistry, tell her it’s not that bad, that she just needs to study longer or pay more attention. But I stopped. I’ve heard this exact line from hundreds of kids over 12 years teaching high school science, and Mia wasn’t asking for a pep talk. She was asking if she was weird for feeling this way. So I pushed the plate of leftover garlic bread across the table, mopped up the lemonade with a paper towel, and said, “Nope, you’re definitely not the only one. Most kids I’ve taught think that at first.”
I asked her what exactly was driving her crazy that night. She pushed her worksheet toward me, every other line highlighted in neon pink, full of questions about covalent bonds and pH ratios. “It’s all just random rules,” she said. “Why does carbon bond four times? Why does a 1 on the pH scale mean more acid than a 6? No one explains why any of this matters, it’s just stuff I have to cram for the quiz tomorrow.”
She wasn’t wrong. Most introductory chemistry curricula are backwards. We start with all the abstract definitions and rules before kids ever get to see why the rules exist. When I taught 9th grade, we had to spend the first three weeks going over safety training and district-mandated syllabus work before we could even set foot in the lab, so kids spent a full month memorizing terms before they ever saw a reaction bubble over or change color. That’s exactly what’s happening to Mia this year: her first hands-on lab isn’t until next week, so all she has right now is worksheets and flashcards.
I thought about the things Mia spends her free time on, and it hit me that she already interacts with chemistry every single day, she just doesn’t connect it to the class. She’s been obsessed with skincare for a year, spends half her allowance on sheet masks, and yells at me for using the same bottle of drugstore face wash for three years straight. “Wait,” I said, “remember when you told me I couldn’t use your new cleanser because my old one had the wrong pH? What do you think that pH means?”
She looked up, confused, like I’d just asked her to recite the periodic table backwards. I said, “That’s the exact pH scale you’re highlighting right now. The reason my face wash dries out your skin is because it’s more alkaline, which is the high end of that scale. You already use this stuff, you just don’t call it chemistry.” Then I remembered the sourdough she bakes with her grandma every other weekend. “When your loaf didn’t rise last month, that was a chemical reaction: the yeast eats the sugar and makes carbon dioxide that puffs up the bread. The water was too hot, so it killed the yeast, so the reaction never happened. That’s chemistry too.”
She sat up a little, erased a wrong answer on her worksheet, and grumbled that it still didn’t make her want to memorize carbon’s bonding number. But she kept talking through the problems, instead of just shutting down. That’s when it clicked for me, after all these years of teaching: when kids say chemistry is the worst subject ever, it’s almost never because they’re bad at it. It’s because it feels disconnected from every part of their life. Unlike math, which they use for counting concert ticket money or figuring out game stats, or biology, which talks about their bodies or their pets, chemistry often feels like a made-up set of rules that only exists inside a textbook.
You don’t need a chemistry degree to help with this, whether you’re a parent or a new teacher. The concrete thing that works, that takes all of two minutes, is just this: first, don’t brush off their frustration. Tell them straight that it’s normal to feel this way, that most people do. Then, instead of jumping in to tutor them, ask one simple question: “What’s something you do outside of school that this would matter for?” If they’re learning about solutions, ask them about the Gatorade they mix for soccer practice. If they’re learning about oxidation, ask them why their bike rusted over summer break. You don’t have to know the right answer, you just have to help them pull the concept out of the textbook and into their world. For teachers, it’s even simpler: push your first big vocab quiz back a week, do a simple messy lab first. Let kids test the pH of their own soda and energy drinks before they memorize what pH is. It’s a small shift, but it changes how kids see the whole subject.
Mia got her quiz back last Friday. She got a B-, which is better than she predicted, and she taped it to the fridge next to her cross country medal. She still complains about chemistry every time we sit down for homework. Last night she called the mole concept “the stupidest made-up thing ever invented” and I don’t blame her. She still thinks it’s the worst subject most days. But she doesn’t ask if she’s the only one anymore. She knows she’s not. And that’s half the battle, isn’t it? We don’t have to turn every kid into a chemistry major. We just have to keep it from feeling like some impossible thing that only other people get.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Does My Kid Hate Chemistry