Teacher puts chemistry into motion with poetry

JANN HENDRY/Acorn Newspapers WHAT RHYMES WITH 'ELEMENT'?--Larry Walker, who teacher AP chemistry at Calabasas High School, combines science with the muse to help his students remember difficult theories. Teaching chemistry in high school is difficult, but using poetry to help students understand the difficult subject matter seems to help.

At Calabasas High School, chemistry teacher Larry Walker has developed a unique method to teach science and make it stick. Walker uses poetry to convey complicated chemistry concepts.

In a unit about "Covalent Network Solids (CNS)," Walker used the following poem to bring home his point: Rubies and diamonds and    feldspar so plain, are very unlikely to melt           in a flame.    With atoms assembled  in bunches of millions,  electrons in doubles are  shared by the zillions.    Geometries structured      in patterns 3-D,  they're solid and gemmy    and hard as can be. But together with softies like    talc, can you guess, how all can be lumped in the group 'CNS'?

"I'm always looking for something different," Walker said. "(Poetry) was the least logical thing to do, so I decided to hop on it."

He encourages his students to write their own poetry as a study aid.

Scott Salomon, an 11th-grader, is enthusiastic about Walker's teaching methods. He said using poetry makes science fun. He wrote a poem about the chemistry of scuba diving:        One day, a man decided              to scuba dive      Unfortunately, he didn't            make it out alive  Because he came up too fast    and the nitrogen amassed And he had no chance to survive

Walker said his teaching techniques have resulted in a higher percentage of students passing their exams.

Walker's goal is to increase the number of students entering science careers. There's a nationwide shortage of science candidates, he said, and biotech firms, research companies and other scientific industries are "desperate" for employees.

At Calabasas High, students vie for Walker's classes. "We've had a lot of kids go into science," he said.

Walker taught concepts on the origins of life through a poem called "The Beginning":          Edwin Hubble with          telescopes nightly,            peered at the light            from the stars, And saw that the colors were        red-shifted slightly,  the more so if greater afar      An astronomer-priest, one        Georges Lemaitre, then stated the reason one day:        "The universe rang      with a great big bang,    and redder means faster        and farther away"      Then Wilson and Penzias, thirty years hence, with radio      waves of limited sizes,      proved that the Big Bang          idea made sense,      And they were rewarded      with twin Nobel Prizes

Student Jacob Schwartz tackled the concept of electronegativity in the following poem:        E-lec-tro-neg-a-tiv-i-ty  can't be pronounced easily        It's how much an atom              likes to bond  And put another electron on! An element that just won't bond            has a name like        neon, argon, krypton    The other one is helium, because its valence shell's full      With electronegativity,          life is never dull!

"Any technique you can use that keeps people interested makes it fun for kids," Walker said.

"If it's fun for both of us, more learning will go on."