Designing a Classroom to Make Everything in Chemistry Normal

Designing a Classroom to Make Everything in Chemistry 'Normal'For me, the magic of Chemistry is to bring all the 'normality' in my life into Chemistry class. Science is about making sure that what we can see with our eyes, we can also get out of the room. And one way to make sure that we are always able to do that is to design the classroom around the Chem teacher.Normality in the classroom is hard to achieve, but I think I have done a good job of it, because it was kind of a shock for me when I moved to an online chemistry course. In the beginning, I would hear stuff about how students are isolated and not getting any real interaction. One day, I got to thinking about the 'normality' in this type of environment, and I started to get excited.It turns out that to design a classroom for chemistry students to live in is relatively easy. It was one of those things that just sort of clicked for me and made sense. At first, I wondered if there really was any reason to consider these things , but the more I thought about it, the more the math just made sense. I am thrilled to be a part of this work at getting normality in Chemistry class.Normality in chemistry class is hard to find, since so many people want the same thing, which is as much 'normality' as possible. I did some research to try to get some idea of what normality might look like. I began to realize that many of my classmates were sitting in chairs that were fairly stationary, except for the person at the front of the room. I began to understand why that is, but it wasn't until I visited an online chemistry course that I found out that there was nothing normal about that arrangement. It doesn't make sense to have a stationary teacher and a passive student.Normality is the way it is, where all students participate in the lessons, which makes it easier for both parties. Since this was not the case in the teacher's chair, it made sense to move the desks closer together to create a closer sense of interaction b etween all students and to move the teacher to the front, which created the opportunity for a more active chemistry class.For those who may be wondering, normality in Chemistry is not about getting high scores on tests. It's about making sure that everyone is interacting with the teacher, even if they are not taking it seriously. You can only learn from the teacher if you have something to say or to learn from, and this is something that can't be measured, only experienced.Normality in Chemistry class is something that is hard to replicate, as long as it is designed correctly. For some reason, I feel that these concepts should be easy to do, but they really aren't, which is why I think this whole notion of making Chemistry class 'normal' is great.I hope that you will take the time to examine the concepts of normality in Chemistry and share them with your friends and classmates. It really can make all the difference.