Tag: Chemistry

  • Alabama high school requirements now allow students to trade chemistry for carpentry

    Alabama high school requirements now allow students to trade chemistry for carpentry

    BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — In a corner of Huffman High School, the sounds of popping nail guns and whirring table saws fill the architecture and construction classroom.

    Down the hall, culinary students chop and saute in the school’s commercial kitchen, and in another room, cosmetology students snip mannequin hair to prepare for the state’s natural hair stylist license.

    Starting this fall, Alabama high school students can choose to take these classes — or any other state-approved career and technical education courses — in place of upper level math and science, such as Algebra 2 or chemistry.

    Alabama state law previously required students to take at least four years each of English, math, science and social studies to graduate from high school. The state is now calling that track the “Option A” diploma. The new “Option B” workforce diploma allows students to replace two math and two science classes with a sequence of three CTE courses of their choosing. The CTE courses do not have to be related to math or science, but they do have to be in the same career cluster. Already, more than 70 percent of Alabama high school students take at least one CTE class, according to the state’s Office of Career and Technical Education/Workforce Development.

    The workforce diploma will give students more opportunities to get the kind of skills that can lead to jobs right after high school, legislators said. But there’s a cost: Many universities, including the state’s flagship University of Alabama, require at least three math credits for admission. The workforce diploma would make it more difficult for students on that track to get into those colleges.

    The law passed in 2024 alongside a spate of bills aimed at boosting the state’s labor participation rate, which at 58 percent as of January remained below the national rate of 63 percent. Simply put, Alabama wants to get more of its residents working.

    Alabama is giving high school students a new pathway to a high school diploma: fewer math and science classes in exchange for more career and technical education courses. Credit: Tamika Moore for The Hechinger Report

    The new diploma option also comes at a time when public perception of college is souring: Only 36 percent of U.S. adults have a lot of confidence in higher education, according to a 2024 Gallup poll. Just 43 percent of Alabama high schoolers who graduated in 2023 enrolled in one of the state’s public colleges the following fall.

    “The world of higher education is at a crossroads,” said Amy Lloyd, executive director of the education advocacy nonprofit All4Ed and former assistant secretary for the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education at the U.S. Department of Education. “Americans are questioning the value of the return on their investment: Is it worth my money? Is it worth my time?”

    Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free newsletter on K-12 education.

    One recent afternoon in Huffman High School’s architecture class, a few students in bright yellow safety vests were measuring a wall they had built. At the end of the semester, the project will culminate in a tiny home.

    Lucas Giles, a senior, started taking architecture his sophomore year as a way to “be able to fix things around the home without having to call other people,” he said. The new workforce diploma option won’t apply to him since he’s graduating this year, but he said he likely would have opted for it to fit more architecture classes into his schedule — that is, until he learned it would make it harder for him to attend college and study engineering.

    “I wouldn’t have the credits,” Giles realized.

    Students who earn a workforce diploma and end up wanting to go to college after all can enroll in community colleges, or aim for state colleges that have less stringent admissions requirements, said Alabama education chief Eric Mackey. The key to the new diploma will be ensuring school counselors are properly advising students, he added.

    “That’s where the counselor comes in and says, ‘If you want to be a nurse, then yes, you need the practical stuff at the career tech center — taking blood pressure and trauma support — but you also need to be taking biology, physiology, chemistry and all those things, too,’” Mackey said.

    Because the diploma only makes sense for a specific subset of students — those who do not plan to go to a four-year college that requires more math or science and who cannot otherwise fit CTE classes in their schedule — counselors have a huge role to play in guiding students. As of 2023, there were 405 students for every counselor in Alabama’s public schools, well over the recommended ratio of 250 to 1.

    Mackey said the state added career coaches in recent years to ease the counseling workload, but in many districts there is just a single coach, who rotates among schools.

    Samantha Williams, executive director of the nonprofit Birmingham Promise, fears the workforce diploma may shut off students’ options too early. Birmingham Promise helps students in Birmingham City Schools pay college tuition and connects them to internship opportunities while in high school.

    “Do you really think that all of our school districts are preparing students to know what they want to do” by the time they’re in high school, Williams asked.

    Williams also worries that lower-performing students might be steered to this diploma option in order to boost their schools’ rankings.

    Students who opt for the workforce diploma will not have their ACT test scores included in their schools’ public reports. Legislators decided that schools should not have to report standardized test scores for students who did not have to take the requisite math and science classes.

    “The concern a lot of people voiced was ‘Hey, isn’t everyone just going to place the kids who are underperforming in the workforce diploma so their ACT scores don’t bring down the whole?’” Williams said. “There’s a strong perverse incentive for people to do that.”

    Speaking to the state’s Board of Education last fall, Mackey warned the “furor of the state superintendent will come down on” anyone who tries to redirect students toward the workforce diploma because of low ACT scores.

    Related: What happened when a South Carolina city embraced career education for all its students

    At Headland High School in rural Henry County, Alabama, every student takes at least one CTE course, according to Principal Brent Maloy. The most popular classes, he said, are financial management and family consumer science.

    “We don’t force them in — everybody registers themselves, they pick their own classes,” Maloy said. “But there’s just about a zero percent chance that a kid’s not going to have a career tech class when they graduate.”

    The school has hosted information sessions for parents and students about the new diploma option ahead of next school year. In a poll of rising juniors and seniors, 20 percent said they would like to pursue a workforce diploma, and another 30 percent said they might be interested. Maloy is anticipating about 25 percent of students will actually opt in to the pathway.

    Most graduates of Headland enroll in a two-year school after graduation anyway, Maloy said, and the workforce diploma won’t hinder that. But the high school has only one counselor for its 450 students, and making sure students fully understand this diploma pathway — and its limitations — is likely to add pressure and extra responsibilities on counselors with heavy workloads.

    Students hold up the wall of a tiny home they’re building in a career and tech architecture class at Huffman High School in Birmingham, Alabama. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report

    “There’s so much pressure on our secondary counselors already just to make sure that all of the boxes are checked before graduation. It’s going to put an extra box for them to check,” Maloy said.

    Ultimately, state businesses and industries want this change, said Mackey, who started his career as a middle and high school science teacher.

    “They were saying, ‘We really need students with skills over, say, calculus,’” Mackey said. “That doesn’t mean some students don’t need calculus — we want to still offer those higher math courses and higher science courses.”

    But, reflecting on his own experience as a high school science teacher, “I can tell you that every student doesn’t need high school chemistry,” Mackey said.

    The chamber of commerce in Mobile, Alabama, is one group that advocated for the workforce diploma. Career tech classes are a good way for students to better learn what they want to do before graduating high school, and they are also an avenue for students to get skills in high wage industries prevalent in Alabama, said Kellie Snodgrass, vice president of workforce development at the Mobile Chamber.

    Less than half of high school graduates in the region end up enrolling in college after graduation, Snodgrass said, and only 20 percent of high-wage jobs in Mobile require a college degree. A large chunk of jobs in the state, and in Mobile in particular, are in manufacturing.

    “It’s terrible when a student goes away to college and comes back and can’t find a job, when we have thousands of open jobs here,” Snodgrass said.

    In an emailed statement, Trevor Sutton, the vice president of economic development at the Birmingham Business Alliance, said the diploma option was a “win for the state of Alabama” that would allow students a chance to learn both “hard and soft skills like communication and time management.”

    Related: States bet big on career education, but struggle to show it works

    At least 11 states have embraced policies that give students flexibility to use career tech courses for core academic credits, according to a review from the Education Commission of the States.

    Like Alabama, Indiana also made changes to its diploma requirements in 2024. After more than a year of public debate, the state created three graduation pathways that are meant to lead to college admissions, the workforce, or enlistment in the military. Those changes will be effective for students in the class of 2029, or current eighth graders.

    Having industry buy-in on career tech programs is important, said Lloyd with All4Ed, because most students will need either an industry or post-secondary credential to land a job with a comfortable wage.

    “The reality is a high school diploma is not enough in today’s labor market to have a guaranteed ticket to the middle class,” Lloyd said.

    The problem, Lloyd said, is most K-12 industry credentials have little use to employers. Only 18 percent of CTE credentials earned by K-12 students in the U.S. were in demand by employers, according to a 2020 report from the Burning Glass Institute.

    The key in Alabama will be ensuring students are going into career pathways that line up with job demand, Snodgrass said. Out of the more than 33,000 CTE credentials Alabama high school students earned in 2023, only 2 percent were in manufacturing, which is one of the state’s highest need areas.

    Still, attitudes toward high school CTE courses — once largely thought of as classes for students who struggled academically — have improved significantly over the years. And many schools offer CTE programs like aerospace, robotics or conservation that could help students get into high-demand undergraduate programs at universities.

    “We’re increasingly blurring the lines between what has been historically siloed in people’s minds in terms of career education versus academic education,” Lloyd said. “Those are very often one and the same.”

    Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath at gilreath@hechingerreport.org

    This story about Alabama high school requirements was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter

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  • Q&A With Authors of Chemistry First Edition for GOB Courses

    Q&A With Authors of Chemistry First Edition for GOB Courses

    Reading Time: 6 minutes

    Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background (current title, professional milestones, professional history, education, research works, hobbies, etc.)

    Tiffiny D. Rye-McCurdy: I am a lecturer in chemistry and the Administrative Manager of the Academic Success Center at The Ohio State University at Marion, where I assist students in learning concepts of chemistry and biology both inside and outside the classroom. I currently teach GOB chemistry, general chemistry, organic chemistry and biochemistry. Prior to this position, I taught general chemistry as well as introductory biology courses. I received a B.A. in biochemistry from Ohio Wesleyan University and received my Ph.D. from The Ohio State University Biochemistry program. I am involved in community outreach as the co-coordinator of Ohio State Marion’s science and engineering camps for high school and middle school students. I enjoy visiting local parks with my family and gardening in my free time.

    Ryan J. Yoder: I am an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University, serving the regional campus in Marion, OH. I previously taught GOB chemistry at Marion before joining the full-time faculty in 2013. I currently teach organic chemistry lecture and laboratory courses in addition to serving the campus and university community. I received my B.A. in chemistry from Ohio Wesleyan University and received my Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. I mentor undergraduate research students at Marion and Columbus. I am also currently pursuing chemical education research. I live in central Ohio with my wife and two children where I enjoy family time, travel, cooking, golfing and following sports from around the world.

    Tell us about the GOB course at OSU Marion. What are the most rewarding aspects of teaching the class and the biggest challenges?

    Tiffiny: The most rewarding aspect of teaching the GOB course is getting to show brand-new college students how basic chemistry relates to their health and physiology. In other general chemistry courses, we never get to emphasize the connection between chemicals and their extensive roles in the human body, and I think that delays student interest in chemistry until much later in their academic careers.

    The biggest challenge is that, in covering general chemistry, organic chemistry and biochemistry in one semester, the breadth of knowledge you must communicate is vast. To complicate things, the majority of my class consists of first-year students who may not have developed college-level study habits yet.

    How has the GOB course changed over the past few years? How have you adapted your teaching to reflect those changes?

    Tiffiny: When I taught this course in 2015, it was a scaled down general chemistry course with an introduction to functional groups and a side of biochemistry at the very end. Now the course gives students a foundation in the core concepts of general chemistry, an extensive dive into not only functional groups, but their physical properties and chemical reactions, as well as an extensive coverage of biomolecules and how they all tie into human nutrition and metabolism. It’s very different from the course it used to be!

    Ryan: These developments are influential to the way we wrote the book itself. Since it’s an integrated text, students learn about concepts early on that show up again and again in different contexts in later chapters, which helps reinforce core concepts. For example, the textbook teaches students about molecular shapes, polarity and intermolecular forces in the first third of the book. Then we talk about those intermolecular forces and how they affect the physical properties of organic molecules, learning about them again when we discuss how attractive forces are responsible for the 3-D structures of biomolecules like DNA and proteins.  We believe this approach is the most appropriate to balance the tremendous breadth of the course while going into enough depth for faculty to be able to teach students these fundamentals of chemistry properly.

    How has your work at OSU Marion influenced your work on Fundamentals of Chemistry for Today: General, Organic, Biological Chemistry? What is distinctive about the text? Do you have any suggestions for instructors getting started with the text?

     Tiffiny: Despite our differences, Ryan and I are both very methodical in our teaching approaches. We incorporated our teaching pedagogy into this text by presenting a cluster of related concepts, followed by an example problem which is solved step-by-step to show students a logical way to break down more complex problems, and show them the thought process. We follow these in-chapter worked examples immediately with a Learning Check to reinforce what the students learned, allowing them the opportunity to build those critical problem-solving skills.

    Ryan: This text not only breaks down complex problems with a step-by-step approach, but the importance of the chemistry is constantly being shown with real-life examples of how it relates to the world around us. Not only is this evident in the way we introduce the concepts themselves, but we also provide extra features throughout each chapter to highlight connections between the chemistry we’re learning and the larger world. We begin each chapter with a Career Focus feature, to show our students that not everyone in health care is a doctor or nurse.  And, in fact, many of the topics we cover in each chapter are directly related to a variety of careers in health-related fields. Also, throughout each chapter, we have several Health Connections and Environmental Connections to make the material come even more to life.

     How does WebAssign connect to your text? How do you use it in your course? Do you have any suggestions for professors getting started with WebAssign?

     Tiffiny: WebAssign for Chemistry, Cengage’s online learning platform, serves as an excellent tool for instructors to create graded assignments using a mixture of end-of-chapter and learning check exercises. I currently use it to assign homework to help students understand the concepts taught during lecture, and next semester I will use it to create extra review assignments (outside the hard-copy review packets I provide now).

    Students love the Practice Another feature, which allows them to do a similar problem to those assigned. In fact, sometimes my students do those first to ensure they understand the concept before getting graded on their assignment. They also like the Ask Your Teacher feature, which allows them to ask me a question on specific problems and helps me see where students are struggling to understand when they are on their own. Lastly, WebAssign will soon include videos of Ryan and I working through specific exercises, showing how to approach each problem in a stepwise manner. These will be a great resource that students can watch in addition to the lecture with their own instructor.

    How do you see this text deepening students’ engagement with chemistry and fostering more active engagement with core concepts? What is the most significant takeaway students will carry with them after using this textbook?

    Tiffiny: I think tying general chemistry to our physiology really helps students connect to the material, when they might otherwise “zone out.” I really think students will have a basic, introductory understanding of chemistry in the body that they can build on when going into a science education or health and medicine field.  Examples include conversion in the context of medical dosages, pH in the context of blood buffers, dilutions in the context of medication, REDOX reactions and the role of electron carriers in cellular respiration, how glycolipid antigens determine our blood types, the central dogma and chemicals that serve as micro and macronutrients.

    Ryan: I think, in general, students who use this text will see how all of chemistry is connected to itself and how chemistry is connected to their broader world. On that latter point, I believe it’s critical that we included such cutting-edge technologies as COVID vaccines and CRISPR, which are sure to be a part of the health care landscape well into the future. Seeing chemistry in action through such relevant advancements and challenges will allow for more active engagement with the rest of the material. I think the way we scaffold the later organic and biochemistry material also gives students the best opportunity to carry that relevant knowledge further into their academic and professional journey.

     

    Tiffiny D. Rye-McCurdy is the Administrative Manager of the Academic Success Center and a lecturer in chemistry at The Ohio State University at Marion. Dr. Rye-McCurdy currently has a rotational schedule teaching GOB chemistry, general chemistry and organic chemistry. Prior to this position, she taught biochemistry and introductory biology and physiology courses. She received her B.A. in ACS-certified biochemistry from Ohio Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University Biochemistry program.

    Ryan YoderRyan J. Yoder is an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University, serving the regional campus in Marion, OH. Dr. Yoder previously taught GOB chemistry at Marion before joining the full-time faculty in 2013. He currently teaches organic chemistry lecture and laboratory courses in addition to serving the campus and university community. He received his B.A. in chemistry from Ohio Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. Dr. Yoder mentors undergraduate research students at Marion and Columbus, examining protein-ligand interactions toward therapeutics against threats from chemical weapons and cancer.

     

    Interested in “Fundamentals of Chemistry for Today: General, Organic, and Biochemistry,” 1e by Tiffiny D. Rye-McCurdy and Ryan J. Yoder for your chemistry course? Check out this title now.

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