For all of my more than 50 years as a college student at Haverford and Harvard and a chemistry professor at  Reed College, Harvard College(summer school), Carleton College and The Evergreen State College I have been imbued with the topical approach to teaching chemistry. During my tenure as a faculty member at The Evergreen State College we developed what I thought was the ideal way to do this in a team taught course. At Evergreen, classes for students during their first two or three years are team taught. We call them coordinated study classes. In these classes the faculty teach nothing else and the students take nothing else. My favorite was an introductory coordinated study class taught by a chemist, a physicist, and a mathematician. (The approach to laboratory work in this class was described in Tabbutt, Frederick D.; Kelly Jeffrey J.; Cole Robert S.; Barlow, Clyde H.; Middendorf, Donald V.; J. Chem. Ed., 1989, 66, 940-943.). Titled Matter and Motion, which is also the title of a book by James Clerk Maxwell, the class allowed me to teach calculus-based introductory chemistry without having calculus as a prerequisite. In organizing the program I could ask, for example, the mathematician that ordinary differential equations be introduced by the fifth week and integrals by the second week of winter quarter. Similar requests could be made in physics. For me the class was an ideal symbiotic introduction to the physical sciences based on a topical approach. Matter and Motion was a sophomore offering because all first year students were expected to take a broad-based introductory coordinated studies program their first year. Called core programs, these typically involved four to five faculty with an enrollment ceiling of 20 to 25 students per faculty member. As in other coordinated studies programs these were full time for all involved. The faculty taught nothing else and the students took nothing else. In order not to impose any restrictions on the topics covered, core programs could not serve as a prerequisite for programs to follow. So each faculty team had no constraints on content.

As my teaching career was nearing an end, I devoted three years to a core program entitled Water. The chemistry content of the program was described in a paper I wrote as I was completing my teaching of it (Tabbutt, Frederick Dean; “Water: a Powerful Theme for an Interdisciplinary Program”, J. Chem. Ed., 2000, 77, 1594-1601.) There were four faculty: a chemist, a geologist, an environmental policy faculty member and a marine biologist. The focus of the program at the beginning of the year was on the policy and science associated with the Nisqually River: a river that flows from a glacier on Mt. Rainier to Puget Sound. It is the only river in the United States that starts in a National Park and ends in a National Wildlife Refuge. Since the topics covered by the four faculty have to connect to one another, an introductory text, like the one used in  Matter and Motion would not have been appropriate. It occurred to me that the Nisqually River could serve as a vehicle for gradually introducing students to topics in chemistry. When the river emerges from the base of the glacier, little chemistry has yet had a chance to develop. But as it wends its way to Puget Sound the chemistry becomes increasingly more complex. So I wrote a set of notes to do this. By selecting an appropriate sequence of phenomena, topics in chemistry could be gradually introduced. I was careful to only introduce as much of a topic as was needed to explain the particular phenomenon being examined. While it was tempting to use the phenomena as an excuse to introduce the topic completely, I tried to avoid that. One complication became apparent early on. Natural systems are more complex than those that we typically deal with in the laboratory. For example, while the aquatic chemistry we carry out in the laboratory employs deionized water, natural aquatic systems contain dissolved carbon dioxide. So the natural system analog to DI water is a dilute solution of carbonic acid.  In addition, natural systems are open systems in terms of carbon dioxide. Upon completion of my tenure in the Water program I returned to teach Matter and Motion for what would be my last time to teach an introductory, majors class before retiring. While I enjoyed the breadth of the Water program, my heart was in the Matter and Motion class. However, as that class was nearing an end, a disturbing fact was beginning to emerge for me. The students in the Water program, most of whom would never go on in chemistry, had a deeper understanding of the topics we covered in Water than the Matter and Motion students were gong to have of these topics. The disturbing conclusion that was becoming clear to me was that students were more energized to learn chemistry to understand a system than to learn chemistry to understand chemistry. That a systems approach could be more effective than a topical approach was in conflict with the way I had learned and taught chemistry for 50 years. I would never have used a systems approach to teach chemistry to majors. Yet, clearly, the non majors in the Water program, some of whom did take Matter and Motion, were better prepared in upper-class courses.

I also began to wonder if the timing of the coverage could be a factor. In a topical approach, when the chapter on thermodynamics is completed, so is the topic. In the systems approach students introduction to a topic was spread out since the evolving system did not require a complete understanding all at once. For example, it takes three chapters devoted to the river system to develop thermodynamics and, occasionally, an already developed topic has to be “reused” later on. Could the more gradual system approach allow the mind to organize a topic more thoroughly? I had no assessment results or pedagogical data to confirm these impressions. My conclusions are based on purely intuitive views.

I decided that the concept was important enough to justify creating a textbook using this strategy.  So I began the revision of the set of notes which had not been created with this in mind and expanding it to cover much more than what had been intended originally.   The water system, by itself, was not comprehensive enough to cover all of the topics needed.  It occurred to me that, by following the flow of energy from the sun, a similar approach could be used which would cover the missing topics.  Anticipating from the outset that it would be difficult to convince others, particularly publishers, of a systems approach, I began with the creation of a “print-ready” version of the text to provide an actual sample of the final work.

There is an additional dimension to the text that I felt created a depth of understanding that was more obtainable from a printed page. So the book also contains experimental and theoretical explorations in each chapter that are interactive computer-based visual exercises that allow students a deeper understanding that can be achieved by just reading about it.  Each chapter has at least one exploration which are best carried out by a team of two students.  Most of the explorations are created in a manner that each team will obtain different numerical results. The 19 explorations represent 3 GB of memory on the DVD that also contains the 737 page book.