TRURO SCHOOL ASSOCIATION
THE TRURONIAN
Jim Clark (TS 1974 - 1997) Old Truronian Teacher and Chemguide creator
Jim Clark taught chemistry at Truro School between 1974-1997, latterly becoming Head of Department. Although Jim retired from teaching in 1997, he has continued to be a source of inspiration and help for students not only in the UK but all over the world, writing several chemistry textbooks and via his website: Chemguide. Chemguide is designed as a tool to assist 16–18-year-old chemistry students and is estimated to be used by almost every A-Level chemistry student in the UK, with around 1.4 million visits a month worldwide. In this article, Jim tells us how his idea for Chemguide grew because of the one-toone teaching support sessions he gave to A-Level students at Truro School. Notes from the Chemistry Lab 1974 – 1997 I was asked if I would like to write a ‘potted history’, so here it is. I was born, brought up and went to school in Falmouth, went to Cambridge followed by teacher training, and then taught chemistry at several schools before ending up in Truro in 1974. There is nothing remotely interesting in any of this, and it feels a little like writing my own obituary. So, I’m going to give you some snippets of life in the chemistry department at that time instead. Chemistry is a practical subject. At school level, chemistry is, above anything else, a practical subject and a potentially dangerous practical subject at that. Only a handful of students starting at the age of 11 will go on to read chemistry at university. More will need chemistry for medicine or biology, but the majority will forget all the chemistry they ever knew soon after leaving. What they will be left with are practical skills in handling fragile equipment and potentially dangerous materials including household things like bleach, oven cleaner, paint stripper and weedkiller. So, you start at the beginning of the first year with students who may never have been allowed to do anything remotely dangerous at home and teach them over a very short time how to handle fragile equipment and potentially harmful situations safely and confidently. You can’t do this with demonstrations – it must be hands-on. Colour and music At one stage our excellent lab technician, Pete Seymour (still a lab technician at Truro School), decided he was bored with his white lab coat and tie-dyed it a sort of green-blue colour (I hesitate here, because my wife and I rarely agree on where something is on the spectrum around turquoise). Consequently, I chose to have one tie-dyed quite a strong pink. Somewhere around the same time, I decided that I needed some music in the lab. Supervising class practical sessions needs total concentration so that you know everything that is going on in every corner of the lab, but if the practical is all running smoothly, this can get quite boring, particularly if what they are doing is rather routine. So, I spent some spare money on a tape player, amplifier and speakers and started playing classical music from my collection at home. This started with A-Level groups and then moved down to GCSE groups and even occasionally to a third form group. Chamber music worked best because it is clearer; large orchestral pieces echoing around in a big lab just sound ‘muddy’. You mightn’t expect this to appeal to teenagers, but it did, and if I forgot to put it on, they invariably reminded me. What it did was make the whole lab experience feel calm and civilised. Occasionally a senior member of staff would show parents and potential students around the school, and they would be ushered into the lab with me in my pink lab coat, music playing, and everyone absorbed in the music and what they were doing. One parent told me later that it was this experience that decided them on sending their daughter to the school.
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