Why Does My Kid Hate Chemistry? What I’ve Learned From Students Who Call It The Worst Subject Ever
The fluorescent lights in my classroom were already buzzing loud enough to give me a headache last Wednesday, and I was shoving graded quizzes into my bag to head home when Lila slung her neon backpack over my desk and slumped into the plastic chair across from me. She’s the 8th grader who stays after every Friday to help me repot seedlings for the school greenhouse, gets A’s in biology and English, and spends her free time making homemade lip balm to sell to her friends. She tapped her notebook with a chewed-up pencil and said, deadpan, “Am I the only one who thinks that chemistry is the worst subject to ever exist?”
I didn’t laugh. I hear this at least once a semester from kids who are otherwise engaged, curious learners. Last year it was Jake, who built his own gaming PC from scratch and still swore chemistry was just a bunch of made-up rules designed to fail people. The year before that it was Mia, who wants to be a pediatric nurse and cried after her first chemistry quiz because she thought hating the subject meant she’d never reach her goal. I used to panic when kids said this, back when I first started teaching. I’d launch into a speech about how cool chemistry is, about how it’s everywhere, and they’d just nod and zone out. Now I just push the half-eaten granola bar on my desk toward them and ask them to tell me why it feels so terrible.
Lila flipped open her notebook to a page covered in crossed-out coefficients and random element symbols, half-erased so hard the paper tore. “It’s just all random,” she said. “Why does oxygen have to be two atoms stuck together? Why does iron rust but gold doesn’t? There’s no reason to any of it, they just tell you to memorize it and if you forget you get a bad grade. It feels like they’re just making it up to trick me.”
That’s the part most people miss, right? It’s not that kids are bad at chemistry. It’s that most of us throw the shorthand at them before we show them what it’s actually describing. We start with symbols and equations before we connect any of it to the stuff they care about. I nodded at Lila and asked her about the peppermint lip balm she brought in last month. How do you decide how much beeswax to put in versus coconut oil? She shrugged and said “Too much beeswax and it’s hard as a brick, too much oil and it melts all over your pocket. I just use the ratio that works.” I told her that’s stoichiometry. That’s exactly what all the equations she’s struggling with are: just writing down that ratio in the scientist shorthand. She blinked, like she’d never thought of it that way.
I’ve been doing this long enough to have picked up a few small, easy things that help, that any parent or teacher can do without a chemistry degree or a big budget. The first one is don’t dismiss their hate. When your kid comes home saying chemistry is the worst thing ever, don’t say “it’s not that bad” or “you just need to study more.” The concrete thing to say instead is, “It makes total sense that it feels that way right now. A lot of the stuff they teach first doesn’t feel real.” That takes 10 seconds, it validates how they feel instead of pushing them away, and it opens the door to talk more instead of shutting them down.
The second thing is tie it to what they already love, and you don’t have to be an expert to do it. If your kid is into gaming, it’s the chemistry that makes the lithium battery in their controller work. If they bake, it’s the chemistry that makes baking soda fluff up cookies and yeast turn dough into bread. If they love doing makeup, it’s the chemistry that makes gel polish harden under UV light. Next time they’re complaining about homework, just ask one question: “What do you do for fun that this could be related to?” That’s it. You don’t have to solve the problem or explain the science. Just asking shifts their mindset from “this is stupid homework” to “wait, this might actually matter for something I care about.” A couple weeks after my conversation with Lila, we did a small activity where she mapped her lip balm recipe to the chemical compounds she was actually mixing, and she didn’t suddenly get every question right, but she stopped seeing the equations as random tricks.
The third small thing is let them ditch the shorthand when they’re confused. If they can’t wrap their head around atoms bonding, let them draw two little circles holding hands instead of forcing them to write the symbol. Symbols are just a shortcut for grown scientists, they’re not what chemistry actually is. A lot of kids get stuck on memorizing the symbols and forget what they stand for, so drawing it out takes the pressure off and helps them see the actual idea.
Last week Lila turned in her latest stoichiometry worksheet. She still got three out of ten problems wrong, but she wrote a tiny note in the margin next to the ratio problem: “This is basically my lip balm recipe, cool.” She still says chemistry is her least favorite subject, and she still complains about it when she stays after to help with the greenhouse. She still plans to study botany in college, and she’s okay with the fact that she has to get through a few more chemistry classes to get there.
I still get kids coming to me saying chemistry is the worst subject that ever existed. I don’t tell them they’re wrong anymore. I don’t promise them they’ll love it if they just try. I just ask them what they love, and we go from there. Some days it clicks a little more, some days it doesn’t. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean they’re bad at science, and it doesn’t mean they’ll never have a career that involves science. It just means chemistry is confusing and abstract at first, and that’s normal.
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