Teacher puts chemistry into motion with poetry
By Stephanie Bertholdo Bertholdo@theacorn.com

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."