SOAPS CAN TEACH YOU CHEMISTRY! (THE REAL KIND, NOT JUST THE OOOOH, THOSE TWO BETTER GET TOGETHER SOON KIND)

Coming off this Monday's roundtable discussion about the benefits of soaps to society (listen to the entire thing here), I read the below story in MIT's Technology Review Magazine (yes, I have very diverse interests: Soaps, skating, musical theatre, education, economics, theoretical physics... Check out my earlier post on soap operas and Schrodinger's Cat, here):

For two years between college and graduate school, Mala Radhakrishnan, PhD '07, taught high-school chemistry in San Jose, California. To help her students grasp some of the trickier concepts, she used analogies based on a ­familiar medium: the soap opera.

Her descriptions of atoms and molecules that fall in love and cheat on each other helped her students learn chemistry and even inspired them to create a chemistry-themed mural, which they titled One Half-Life to Live.

Radhakrishnan, who had begun writing poetry the previous summer, took a cue from her students' mural and wrote her first chemistry-themed poem: "As the Magnetic Stir-Bar Turns."

Read the entire piece, here.

There's also a cool video tying both ideas together at: http://youtu.be/xhOtKurHayo