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While most teachers can competently relate requisite subject matter to their students in standard lecture and laboratory formats, this type of instruction often is deemed lacking from the student's perspective. Many recent contributors to this Journal have echoed just this point (1). Particularly with students below the collegiate junior level, more than traditional lecturing often is required to be an effective teacher. One technique that has met with success within the chemistry department at William and Mary is the use of popular fiction to enrich the classroom experience. In the past several years, Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles (2), Dorothy Sayers' The Documents in the Case (3), and James Watson's The Double Helix have been assigned and discussed in general and organic chemistry courses.
Along these same lines, the recent release of the blockbuster movie version of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (4) offers a particularly ripe opportunity for chemistry educators. The following relates how this novel has been used for the last three years to provide the focus for summative discussions among gifted high school students participating in a state-sponsored, science-intensive summer program. Adaptation of the approach related here should allow similar usage in chemistry classes from the high school to intermediate-college level, and I predict your students will be as excited and intellectually stimulated by the science in this book as were mine.
The most recent Virginia Governor's School for Science programs have been held at the College of William and Mary as a cooperative venture between the School of Education and the science departments at the College. Students participating in this program, which is residential in nature and covers a four-week time span, are placed into one of five primary areas of study: astronomy/physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, or geology. Of the 200 rising high school seniors who were selected on a statewide merit basis for this program, approximately 40 were assigned chemistry as their primary course of study. Each weekday these students spent six hours in an instructional environment with chemistry faculty. Their instruction was broken down into a morning session of lecture/demonstration/discussion activities (4 h) and an afternoon session devoted to formal laboratory activities (2 h). The instructional content of chemistry's program focused primarily on topics in organic chemistry...