cross sections magazine / winter 2016 19
It was an ordinary Thursday afternoon on Crossroads’ 21st Street Campus, but something quite remarkable was happening on the second floor of the new Science Education & Research Facility. Curiosity abounded in the classroom named after the chemist Marie Curie as juniors in Miranda Guenther’s Crossroads Advanced Studies (CAS) Organic Chemistry class were engrossed in extracting caffeine from tea bags, using the concept of polarity that they had just learned.
Caffeine in its purest form is white, the students discovered, but their extracted matter would be slightly yellow due to the tea’s color. To harness the substance, the young scientists separated caffeine from water, isolated it into isopropanol (rubbing alcohol) and then evaporated it, leaving behind a solid crystal of caffeine. Nothing to it, right? “We boiled it a little too hot, so it’s kind of powdery now instead of crystallized. But that’s OK,” said 11th-grader Jake Praglin. “Once you make a mistake in your experiment, you write about it in the report, so you give the reader an idea of what went wrong and why,” added fellow 11th-grader Leo Yablans. “It’s kind of like self-evaluation. It’s a setback, but you learn to live with it.
Last year in regular chemistry, many mistakes were made.” Even with a few hiccups, these 16and 17-year-olds are excelling in the most advanced science class offered at the School—the equivalent of a sophomore college course in a notoriously difficult subject. Challenging, invigorating courses like these are now the norm in the 25,000-squarefoot facility that has housed the Middle and Upper School science programs since September.
“Now I’m open to the whole playbook of organic chemistry,” teacher Miranda reports. “I can do whatever labs I think can demonstrate the concept best, that would be the most fun, that would give students an experience to really help them connect the textbook with something they could actually see and do.” The addition of a fume hood room, equipped with safety devices that increase ventilation, has prompted Miranda to explore advanced
Q. What do estrogen, testosterone, caffeine and Monarch butterfly pheromone have in common? A. Their molecular structures are all depicted in the restroom tiles of the Science Education & Research Facility.