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Faculty ProfileGary Kolks
Education:
I am very lucky to have a job which allows me to spend as much time as I want reading and thinking about chemistry. My goal, which I pursue in my general chemistry and inorganic chemistry courses, is to help my students understand chemistry so that they can get as much pleasure out of it as I do. Chemistry is the most wonderful, but also the most difficult, science to learn. In the laboratory chemists watch pieces of red metal dissolve in a colorless liquid to produce a blue liquid and a poisonous red gas. But we try to understand what we see by using a very abstract language to discuss things – atoms, molecules, ions, and electrons – which we can't see. I think the only way to make the gigantic intellectual leap between chemistry lab-world and the chemists' mind-world is by seeing, and then talking about, experiments which illustrate chemical ideas. I am very interested in designing classroom experiments, not just demonstrations, which help my students understand chemistry. As coordinator of the general chemistry program I am also responsible for developing experiments for our general chemistry laboratory. I've put together a pamphlet, Some Lessons from the Great Copper Experiment, which uses the phenomena observed by my students in lab as the basis for learning types of reactions as well as difficult chemical ideas like relative reactivity. In addition to course development I am interested in the chemistry of flames, the history of the periodic table, the chemistry of photography, and simple bonding models (see L.C. Allen, J.F. Capitani, G. Kolks, and G.D. Sproul, ‘Van Arkel-Ketelaar Triangles' J. Mol. Struc., 300, 647-655, 1993). Contact Information:
Page last updated: October 2005 |
