CURRENT WORK · CLASSROOM RESEARCH · PEDAGOGY

Current Experiments

Doing experiments live: Everyone is learning. Everyone is teaching.

Willow Bark Project

One of our current experiments begins with willow bark and a question that has existed
in chemistry and medicine for centuries: how can naturally occurring compounds in a
plant be separated, transformed, and connected to molecules that students already know
from everyday life?

The project is still in progress. Students have worked through extraction, separation,
observation, and the practical difficulties that appear when a the real sample behaves
differently from what I originally expected. Salicin, the active compound in willow bark is a glucoside. Due to it’s high polarity (many -OH groups), it is very soluble in the aqueous phase. We tried extracting using Ethyl Acetate, but it seems most of it still remains in the “tea.”

The goal of this lab is not simply to arrive at a final, purified product. The goal is to understand why certain steps work, why some steps did not work as expected, and how the chemistry changes
when the starting material is a complex biological mixture rather than a clean bottle
of reagent.

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Why This Belongs in a High School Chemistry Classroom

High school chemistry can easily become a collection of isolated skills: dimensional
analysis, electron config, bonding, IMF’s, concentration,
reaction types, and stoichiometry. Each of those ideas does matter, but they become much
more powerful when students can see them all together inside one case study.

This willow bark project gives us a reason to revisit ideas across the curriculum.
Solubility becomes more than a definition. Polarity becomes more than a diagram or calculation.
Separation techniques become something we try physically rather than vocabulary words.

That is important because science is rarely organized into neat chapters outside of
school. A real chemical problem does not announce, “Today you are doing Unit 3.” It asks
you to use whatever you know, identify what you do not know, and figure
out how to move forward.

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Teacher-Student, Student-Teacher

This approach is strongly influenced by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I first read this while mentoring my sophomore/junior peers in film photography as a senior in high school.

Freire challenged what he called the “banking” model of education, where the teacher
is treated as the owner of knowledge and students are treated as empty containers
waiting to receive it. In higher-ed research, the distinction becomes less rigid;
teachers (PI’s) and (grad) students investigate the world together through dialogue.
However, this isn’t easy to find in high school environments.

Freire describes a classroom in which the teacher is also taught through dialogue;
while students, even as they are being taught, provide instruction and guidance. The responsibility for
learning becomes shared rather than flowing in only one direction. This does not mean
that the teacher has no responsibility or expertise. It means that expertise should
not require pretending to be infallible.

My students often correct me (ie…salicin & saligenin). Sometimes I write something incorrectly on the board. Sometimes a student notices a detail I missed. Sometimes an experiment produces a
result that does not agree with what I expected. I am not always correct, and I do not
think pretending otherwise makes me a better educator.

In those moments, the classroom becomes more scientific, not less. A student who can
challenge an idea, defend an observation, or show me that I overlooked something is
participating in the same process that scientists use with one another. The point is
not to protect the authority of the teacher. The point is to get closer to what is true.

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Who Gets to Sit at the Table?

There is another reason I care about this kind of classroom. Schools, universities,
laboratories, and professional spaces can easily reproduce the same social habits
students already recognize everywhere else: who is “in,” who is “out,” who gets heard,
who gets invited to the table, and whose ideas are treated as legitimate before they
have even spoken.

Sometimes it is no more sophisticated than the lunch table. If you are already part
of the group, you are included. If you are not, you are expected to prove that you
belong. Academic spaces can become just as club-like when credentials, titles, social
familiarity, or access to the right people become more important than curiosity,
effort, evidence, and the quality of an idea.

I do not want my classroom to reproduce that structure. A student who is curious should not need to engage in the lunch-table shuffle in order to be considered worthy enough to do science.

Freire’s critique of rigid teacher-student hierarchy matters here because education is
not only about transmitting content. It is also about deciding who gets to participate
in producing knowledge. A dialogue based classroom asks students to become co-investigators
rather than passive recipients.

As an educator, I have to remain willing to learn. In order to do this, my students have to be given the freedom and trust to get their hands on the equipment, satisfy their curiosity, and teach from what they observe. Otherwise, we are not really doing science together.

Experiment in Progress

The willow bark experiment is still developing. We are continuing to evaluate what we
collected, what our observations mean, and which next steps make the most chemical
sense. Some ideas have worked better than others, and that is part of the value of the
project.

I want students to leave chemistry understanding that science is not a performance in
which the teacher already knows every answer. It is a process of asking better questions,
testing ideas, revising explanations, and being willing to admit when the evidence tells
us something different from what we expected. We are all in this together.

October 5th, 2026