'Students took turns rolling the dice, and whatever the number on the dice was the mass of whatever they landed on. Renae Crossing made up a game for her students called Moleopoly.

I once spotted a student singing it quietly during an exam. I joked that the song was from the album “19.89 mol” after Swift’s album “1989.” Stoichio, stiochio!” (We used the ratios in a chemical equation, the mass of something we had weighed, and the mass of it given in the periodic table to calculate how much we could make of something else in the equation.) “Gotta find the moles, moles, moles, moles, moles,” I sang in 2016 to my class, to the tune of “Shake it Off.” “Then you use the ratio, o, o, o, o, to find moles of the unknown, known, known, known, known. (It’s called stoichiometry, and one of the ratios we talk about is known as the molar ratio.) Taylor Swift came in handy teaching a key use of the periodic table: calculating how much of something you have not in grams but in the ratio of atoms themselves! “Cat-ions are paw-sitive,” we would write on the board, introducing formal vocabulary through the familiar. “Chuckers and scoopers” was what my mentor used to say when first introducing cations and anions, referring to what they had done with electrons, until the formal vocabulary stuck. Elements aren’t best learned in isolation. No, you have to play to know chess, see how the pieces interact. You don’t introduce the six pieces of a chess board and leave it at that. Years into teaching, a typical lesson came to have practice, strategic explanations and questioning, and a demonstration or experiment. We got to know the characters of the periodic table and their combinations like you get to know a person: introductions, questions back and forth, and experience over time. “I just want to know you better, know you better, know you better now,” sings Taylor Swift. The students wanted to be doctors, nurses, physios and ambos (physiotherapists and paramedics, in Australian speak), so with an elective called Pre-med, we took 15-year-olds on field trips to learn about health careers as varied as the elements themselves. Many of our students were from working-class families in an urban growth corridor. The first school where I taught was one of the most multicultural schools in the entire country. 'Nice time to be a chemistry teacher! I circled the previous gaps on the printed periodic table, stuck it on the board, and drew the new elements on the board to welcome them,' she said. The whiteboard in Renae Crossing's classroom in 2016 when four new elements were added to the periodic table. And by the time we knew that these trends are explained by protons and electrons, the whole thing had found its perfect order: boxes one to 100-and-something, for the name of an atom that has 1 proton all the way up to now 118 of them. It had rows with increasing mass as you go across. The periodic table conjured by Mendeleev had columns with elements that behave similarly. His sleeping brain saw what his waking brain had been stretching to solve. After days of thinking, the story goes, he collapsed into sleep, and he had a dream in which those cards flew into an arrangement of columns and rows. He had made cards, one for each element, with information about each one.

The modern periodic table, as it happens, was made by a teacher.ĭmitri Mendeleev was doing what teachers do: We make stuff to try to help students see things anew. It is a tool for you, and I am going to teach you how to use it.” “The periodic table is your cheat sheet,” I tell new chemistry students. Number 104 already is taken by Rutherfordium, and chemistry is already exciting it doesn't need to be dressed up.īut this shirt is special to me: It’s a goodbye present from a high school student in a class I especially enjoyed teaching. I don’t usually like this sort of gimmick. The gray T-shirt says, in large, friendly letters, “Ah.” The letters are in a rectangle with number 104 at the top, and below them is the name of what we assume to be an element: It says, “The element of surprise.”

Periodic table atomic number 114 group