3.  An exploration of some “21^st century skills”:  Collaboration and Creativity.

In which I consider the loud noises surrounding 21^st century skills and the advantages and disadvantages of teaching collaboration and creativity in schools.

CPD is an acronym that I’ve only encountered since becoming a teacher in 2014.  The teaching profession loves an acronym.  And over use of the word profession, too.  I still find it a little odd that teachers are the only people who develop professionally, and continuously, throughout their working lives.  Back when I was a corporate scientist we went to conferences, meetings and training courses (all CPD in teacher speak). 

I went on a lot of training courses.  Some were of a technical, scientific nature (highlights being the Bristol University Spring School in Colloid Science, 1997 and Emulsion and Suspension technology, run by researchers from Purdue University, Indiana in Amsterdam, 1998).  Others were shorter 1 or 2 day courses run by external consultants: ‘managing projects’ (essentially a decoy for encouraging highly trained and specialised scientists to spend all day moving task bars and milestones around in Microsoft project); ‘stepping up to supervision’ (essentially a decoy for really getting inside yourself and working out your Myers-Briggs profile – I’m an ENFP, in case you are interested – and how to manage the sixteen different ‘types’ of people) and ‘interview skills’ where I quickly learnt that becoming even more aggressively extravert to draw blood out of an introverted stone was never going to work, ‘Toby, to build relationships with people who have a very different character profile to you, you have to become less like you and more like them.’  This was a very useful, and rather difficult, lesson to learn and I’m pretty sure I haven’t mastered it, and probably never will – but at least I’m aware. [This raises an important red herring for exploration later, should we as teachers be more focussed upon raising awareness, about highlighting important information and less concerned with making knowledge stick?  Surely the knowledge sticking bit is about us as individuals, about us deciding we want to know something, we want to get a good grade, we need to learn this or that in order to progress to the next level?  Should teaching be more about exposure to knowledge and ideas, and less about forcing knowledge to stick (or measuring the temporary cramming of knowledge)?]

Anyway, by far and away the best training course I’ve ever been on was a week long residential course on team-working (some might prefer to call it collaboration because it sounds a bit more, well you know, 21^st century).  It was based in a conference centre with beautiful gardens in Surrey and run by the US corporate coaching organisation, Coverdale.  http://www.coverdale.us  Admittedly my positive, episodic memories of this event may be skewed by the fact I got to meet and hang out with lots of like-minded, fairly hip young graduates and postgraduates and we got riotously drunk every night.  I don’t remember exactly when this was, but it was within 3 years of graduating in chemistry and in the employment of Zeneca Agrochemicals*, circa 1997 or 1998.  I’d have been 25 or 26. 

There were 40 on the course in total, all between the age of 24 and 30ish.  We were all gainfully employed by Zeneca Agrochemicals and either worked out in the field as agronomists; in the chemistry or biology labs and glasshouses at Jealott’s Hill research station in Berkshire or in the product development (formulation and process chemistry) department at Yalding in Kent (yours truly).  There may have been a few chemical and process engineers from the manufacturing sites in Huddersfield, Yorkshire and Grangemouth, Scotland; and perhaps some science graduates working in the marketing and commercial divisions based at Fernhurst (near Haslemere) or Guildford in Surrey but as my eye was drawn to the female plant-based biologist stereotype and my mind was drawn to philosophical science-y muso types who looked like Neil Young in 1970, I didn’t really give much credence to the power dressing commercial stereotypes or the heavy-metaller engineering stereotypes at the time: the tail end of my (very) late adolescent, misplaced judging of the surface characteristics and appearance of my fellow humans.

*Zeneca formed from the demerger of ICI’s (imperial chemical industries, once the UK’s largest company) high profit margin businesses in 1993; it later merged with Swedish pharmaceutical company, Astra to form AstraZeneca (AZ).  In 2001 AZ demerged its agribusiness, as did Swiss company Novartis and the two merged to form Syngenta, then the world’s largest agribusiness.  According to Google, ChemChina offered $43 million for Syngenta in 2016 and the deal went through.  I left Syngenta, following global integration activities to join Pfizer in 2001.

So, Zeneca sent 40 graduate scientists – 2 or 3 years into their career – away together to get pissed, develop friendships, network, and (as an aside) develop some team working and problem solving skills along the way.  Prior to the first day no one knew more than three others in the room but by the end of the week some had quite intimate knowledge of each other and lasting friendships were formed.  The 40 of us were split into five groups of 8.  On Monday and Tuesday we worked in our groups to carry out a series of tasks.  Each task lasted between 2 and 3 hours and there were a few brief talks as well, so we carried out 5 or 6 tasks in the first 2 days.  For each task we took it in turns to be leader, observer, researcher etc.  I quickly developed a reputation for being impulsive, impatient, creative, verbose and enthusiastic.  Accurate.  At the start, we may have clicked with some members of the group better than others but we quickly got to know each others’ strengths and dominant character traits (in group situations).  By the end of day 2 – whether we were building tall towers from spaghetti or Lego; solving clues on treasure hunts; or solving more complex problems involving the reading and dissemination of provided information – we had truly stormed, normed, formed and were starting to perform quite well as a group of individuals effectively collaborating together.

Then, kaboom!  On day three, two members of our team (of 8) were removed and replaced with two others from ANOTHER GROUP.  OMG!  Lord of the Flies.  United Vs City.  North Vs South.  Leave Vs Remain.  All manner of crap kicked off.   Yet these new invaders of our harmonious and quirky little clique (aka OUR team) were not aliens from another planet, nor Thatcherites in a Northern mining town circa 1984, nor Farage in Brighton or Corbyn in Tunbridge Wells, they were very similar to us, they worked for the same company with similar intellects and similar scientific backgrounds and we’d spent two evenings in the bar with them sharing personal anecdotes, identifying common interests and talking alcohol fuelled bollocks.  Despite all this we still despised their disturbance of our happy little team environment.  Day 3 was tough and taught us all a lot about group think; about human nature; about body language; about prejudice; about openness; about aloofness; about suspicion, fear and distrust. 

Of course it all ended happily ever after, with our new mutant team storming (more like a tornado), norming and forming by the end of day 4.  On day five all 40 of us worked together to produce a newspaper with an editorial team, a news desk, a sports desk, an arts desk and a features desk.  I ended up on the sports desk and we spent the day writing entirely fictional and inappropriate stories about the ‘sporting antics’ of our newfound corporate buddies.  Fun.  And funny.

It was a great course because there was a good mix of theoretical input and learning by experience and observation.  It was fun, engaging and a revitalising change from the daily routine; and it was great to be so well looked after; so well trained – technically and softly – by my employer.  Zeneca clearly cared a lot about the importance of collaboration, and this was evident beyond the box tick ‘let’s send some of our most promising semi-experienced graduates and postgraduates on a training course to show we care or to fulfil our training budgets.’  The teams I worked in, and people I worked with from 1995 to 2001 really understood the concepts of teamwork, of team bonding, of collaboration, empathy and mutual respect.  We had a lot of fun, worked hard and pulled together to help each other out when our backs were against the wall on busy or problematic projects.  I’d go so far to suggest that the ability to collaborate effectively with others is probably the most important trait, characteristic or competence in the majority of workplaces; in life too.  I’m sure I could find some data to prove that effective collaborators are both happier and more successful in their careers and lives than those who find working with others, adapting to varied situations, empathising with different viewpoints and tolerating people from very different walks of life more challenging.

In most situations teams (or groups of collaborators) are not constructed based upon their ability to collaborate effectively.  Teams normally develop based upon a shared talent (e.g. football), skill (e.g. bricklaying), technical background (e.g. chemistry) or a common goal (e.g. marketing campaign, school leadership, company board of directors).  They are rarely formed from the perfect balance of introverts and extraverts; creative thinkers and implementers; task orientated and compliant versus people-orientated and sceptical.  The psychological traits of a team have been used (or abused) to great effect in reality TV on programmes such as Big Brother, I’m a celebrity get me out of here, Love island etc, where psychological profiling of the participants enables some feisty TV moments. 

In science based industry, I was always part of technically constructed workgroups (or ‘lines’ as in line managed) but as I progressed technically through both Zeneca and Pfizer, I became part of multi-disciplined project teams frequently collaborating with people from very different parts of the Research & Development organisation and sometimes beyond into academia.  These were still technically driven, but the most effective teams definitely had a better balance of character traits within them.  In industry, it is well known that to achieve a (major) goal you need a variety of skills and character types / personality traits to succeed.  When you click with a group of individuals it enables the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts.  I’d suggest that this can happen in classrooms too.  Teachers know when they have a symbiotic cohort (strong team chemistry) or an antagonistic one (negative team chemistry).

If we have worked in schools all our lives: in classrooms day in day out, reluctantly attending staff meetings and “CPD” brainwashes on the latest initiative, we may not fully understand how important successful collaboration is in the wider world.  Conversely, we may teach quite complex children, or a supremely intellectual child, neither of whom are effective collaborators with their more typical peers and then we decide to make it our life’s work to make them into a more effective collaborator with people they are never really going to collaborate with later in life.  The most effective teams of collaborators are not necessarily the ones who all get along famously, or expend enormous hours of effort trying to understand each other; rather they are made up of varied and diverse individuals who accept and understand where their strengths and flaws begin and end; also what specific knowledge or skill they bring to that collaborative environment.   They are self-aware, tolerant and sometimes empathetic yet they are rarely friends.  Friendship is a misplaced concept within the parameters of effective collaboration. 

So should we teach collaboration at school?  Yes AND no. 

Yes, of course we should provide opportunities (not all the time) for children to work together (not just with their friends or usual group).  Yes, we should highlight the importance of collaboration in their future lives and yes, we should spend some time properly defining the word.  What we shouldn’t do is have the word written on every classroom wall and only refer to it in one assembly or PSHE lesson each term.  What we shouldn’t really do either is have one huge great big collaborative workshop fandango as an off timetable super fun day out and then never talk of it again, until the next super fun, off timetable collaborative quest mission.  This can lead to cynicism from teachers and pupils alike; where a visiting consultant or adviser says that collaboration is important and you insincerely pay it educational initiative bolt on lip service, to detrimental effect.  It needs to be a genuine part of the DNA of the school.  But NOT in every lesson…more on this is my final summer edublog number 8.  This is number 3.  Yes, I know…the second half of August is going to be blogtastic, or summer is going to be extended until late September – we’ll see!

No, we shouldn’t teach it because it is a skill or trait that can be developed later on in life, in real situations.  No we shouldn’t teach it because never ending lessons in collaboration could quickly descend into vacuity with children happily engaging in fun activities, while their nascent minds whither on the vine of a perpetual focus on style before substance.

With all the inane talk of the importance of 21^st century skills and preparing children for the 65% of jobs which haven’t been invented yet (seriously, who is making money out of this?), I thought it might be fun to imagine a schooling system based on the ability to collaborate as opposed to the ability to know (or more accurately the ability to remember).  At the moment our schooling system is predominantly based upon teaching something, testing it, checking if children have learnt it (which frequently means memorised or remembered it for a few days or weeks rather than properly understanding it) and [school] society is then divided based on the quality of individuals long-term memories.  The children with good long-term memories (and we really don’t know why some people’s are so much better than others but I suspect it – generally – has much more to do with genetic propensity than motivation, conscientiousness, nurtured psychology or social class) thrive in the school and exam (our narrow, short-term measure of education) environment while those whose long term memories are not of the most shiny (6+ at GCSE / C+ at A level) variety flounder and leave feeling devalued by the system or worse, inadequate.

Much has been made of long-term memory in recent educational folklore.  The quality of our long-term memory (the amount of information stored in our brains readily available for instant retrieval) is a determinant for success in our educational system.  From everything I’ve read about neuroscience and the mind, I suspect most of the information we are exposed to goes into our heads but the real differentiator between those with “good” memories and “poor” memories is how much time we spend thinking about that information (grappling with, practising, repeating, talking about, discussing – call it what you will) determines its ease of retrieval when we need it.  So the educational zeitgeist has ended up in a place where we believe it is our job to increase the amount of stuff stored in our long-term memories, the amount of knowledge we have.  Because we look at those who are successful in politics, in the sciences, the arts, in business, in life and most of them have a lot of knowledge (in a narrow domain) and we extrapolate that knowing lots makes you clever makes you more capable of breaking through into the elite and preventing us ending up with another bumbling right wing tosser from Eton for prime minister because we’ll make ‘real people’ clever, so privileged toffs will be sent to the guillotine and never allowed to run this school, business, country, global corporation again.  If only it was that simple, humans would have found and developed utopia long ago…

[An aside, for future exploration:  I fully embrace the importance of long-term memory to future learning, the development of our imaginations, our skills and the deepening of our understanding.  While increasing our long-term memory store may be a sensible goal of education, the real day to day business of education is centred upon our working memory.  Our working memory is our knowledge filter, our pencil case, our internet search, our reference book, our reading book, our listening skills, our toolbox in the classroom and all other learning environments.  If it isn’t well oiled, or doesn’t function very well (for whatever reason) then school is going to feel really grim.  Particularly when everyone starts harping on about knowledge as all that matters until you are an adult, when – miraculously – all that wonderful knowledge magically interweaves and makes you into a creative, critical and analytical thinker capable of anything, so long as you have the same knowledge substrate pumped into your head, and measured via the medium of exams, until the age of 18 everything will be fine.  Just fine. Mmmm?]

Which brings me back to collaboration.  One of the entirely justified critiques of those arguing against the importance of knowledge (I’m not one of them to clarify, I’m just riffing with the challenge we have as educators in an era of rapidly advancing technological complexity) is that if we focus education on soft skills, or life skills and de-emphasize the importance of knowledge then those with the least knowledge, from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, will suffer most.  The argument goes that social justice and social mobility will worsen if we stop teaching knowledge.  I am not totally convinced of this argument.  Society is not structured based upon cleverness or knowledge, but it is structured upon access to knowledge.  This is probably a good time to share a little known secret from my 17 years experience in high falutin’ science based industry:  the best scientists I worked with, learnt from and recruited while at Pfizer and Zeneca were not always the Firsts from Oxbridge or Imperial.  Frequently they were those who were the most curious, patient and collaborative.  Why be a walking encyclopaedia when knowing who to ask, where to look, or how to interpret complex information is what really matters?  

There are many people punching above their intellectual weight in public life and within large corporations; the reason for that is they are excellent communicators or collaborators or both.  And they have become excellent communicators and collaborators by practising these skills, or honing these traits, throughout their lives.  At school this may have meant engaging in conversations with teachers outside the classroom, exposure to a great many ideas and arguments through debating and other extra-curricular activity.  Outside school, it probably involved a lot of conversation and discussion in the home, broad cultural awareness and exposure to museums and the arts; it may have involved being part of a thriving community with a diverse demographic and not just mixing with people grouped by age, gender, intellect, social class, religion or politics. 

Just as I believe that we probably have varying intellectual propensities coded in our genes, I suspect we also have varying collaborative propensities within us too.  Just as it is easier to teach some people maths or history, it is probably easier to hone some people as collaborators more than others.  But here is the thing, as successful collaboration is ultimately a greater path to happiness and success in modern life – more so than pure undiluted intellect per se (it is what you do with knowledge that matters, rather than what you know…), wouldn’t it be interesting to see a school system structured around the ability to collaborate with others, rather than the ability to remember.  As some of the most engaging and fun children to work with are frequently the best collaborators but not always the most intellectual, couldn’t this be a more effective way to improve social justice and mobility?  To expose those from all backgrounds and all intellectual propensities to far greater opportunities to collaborate with a far more varied and diverse range of humans than their immediate peer group.  This is what makes the real difference in life.  

Ever since humans started farming about 12,000 years ago and we unshackled ourselves from the natural order of things (look where that has got us…), we have specialised as a species.  Not all humans do the same thing, or lead the same type of life – unlike our wild animal cousins, where there are still social pecking orders but no different tribes specialising in agriculture, industry, medicine, law, academia, education, retail, commerce, finance or the arts.  Before the invention of farming (producing food for others, not just for our immediate family) we were jacks of all trades but with farming, then (much later) industrialisation and now technologisation we have specialised enormously.  With specialisation comes the need to collaborate, the most important 21^st century skill.  And the most important 20^th century skill, 19^th century skill, 18^th century skill, 11^th century skill, 1^st century skill and circa 10,000 BCE (before the Christian era) skill.   We look, we learn, we adapt, we collaborate.

Another really important 21^st century skill is creativity.  We have, as a species, been fairly creative before.  We’ve invented, discovered or imagined stories, religion, music, the aforementioned farming, then maths, measurement, money, nations, tools and instrumentation, wheels, electricity, sanitation, schools, the chemical industry, antibiotics, satellites, computers, the internet and – for reasons I cannot fully comprehend – the electric eraser.  All this happened before the year 2000.  Along the way, we’ve expressed ourselves through art, poetry, writing, music, dance, sport and drama.  And the creative types who played their part in all this ingenious wonder didn’t have creativity or collaboration lessons at school.  No, it was all classics, history and algebra.  So, that is all we should teach our kids these days.  Apparently.

Oh, man!  This creativity thing drives me crazy.  Like many others I was seduced by Sir Ken Robinson’s viral TED talk discussing whether schools are killing creativity or not during my PGCE in 2013/2014 and I was also captivated by a poem called The Little Boy by Helen Buckley (Google it).  Conversely, since then I have also found Daisy Christodoulou’s well reasoned arguments in 7 myths about education quite compelling and I am influenced by the current tide towards knowledge first, skills later (but not fully converted or convinced by the cut and paste “research evidence” nor charmed by some of the more vociferous, authoritarian, self promoters).  But I am also swayed by the ideas and books of Guy Claxton, Bill Lucas, Ellen Spencer and people beyond education like the neuroscientist Dan Levitin who wrote the organised mind; Kevin Mitchell the geneticist whose book Innate is in my never ending queue of mind boggling books to try and disseminate; some of the unsettling ideas in Robert Plomin’s book Blueprint and highly creative friends such as Andy Puncher – a highly successful and boundary pushing architect (also a primary school chair of governors) and many of the extremely bright, curious and creative minds I worked with in industry and collaborated with in academia. 

My challenge – and I suspect most humans who aren’t trying to build a brand or sell you something are the same – is that with all this noise out there; all this information; all this frequently niche, misrepresented, soundbitten research I don’t know who to believe.  The rebellious, non-conformist Dionysus in me likes to pick away at the orthodox, the formal, traditional preservers of the status quo.  The traditional; rational – so what is school really for and what can it realistically achieve in 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, 38 weeks of the year, for 14 years of our nascent minds in the earliest stages of our meandering, complex, modern lives, Apollo – in me wants to massively simplify education, to make it more honest, less caught up in showy initiatives, to follow the lead of Mark Enser and teach like nobody’s watching and fix this overly complex underfunded beast of an idea.  I am a contrary bugger; it is the analytical and creative scientist in me, considering all options and arguments, seeing things from different perspectives and not just “I want a happy, productive, colourful classroom of engaged learners” or “I want to close the attainment gap” or “I want to optimise each pupil’s GCSE results or SATs data in my subject(s)”  If trapped in a room full of convincing traditionalist cognitive science evangelists, I’m going to scream.  But I’ll probably scream louder when trapped in a room with those caught up in the cult of showy, happy clappy, child orientated disneyfied let’s have fun fun fun indulgent shiny fluff.  There must be a third way.  An education system which enlightens, engages, inspires and opens minds but also one that is structured – rationally and yes, cognitively – to optimise the oft conflicting development of the human mind and human society.

Back to creativity and the perceived misconceptions of the concept in schools.  If we go full hog and let children indulge themselves fully in their own creativity and curiosity at school, it would be a disaster for society.  This is the individualism I spoke of in my first summer edublog.  We’d all be in it for ourselves, the fraying fabric of society would completely break down; we’d all become even more me me me and never learn the universal substrate which underpins a functioning adult society.  But I don’t think anyone is proposing this are they, with the exception of some niche Sudbury schools and home educators?

If school lasts only just over 6 hours a day, then I do think the majority of this time should be on “academics” but we need to find time on the fringes of that, perhaps for another 3 hours a day, to nurture and develop pupils creative minds, practical skills, physical strength and co-ordination via sport, dance and outward bounds and explore the visual and performing arts.  It is current education system preserving bias to suggest that creativity only exists within a highly knowledgeable and skilled domain; or that you can only be curious about things you know a lot about.

This infers that we are empty wells which have to be pumped full of the same knowledge as everyone else before we can think about anything, before we can ask questions.  This is a highly specific and literal interpretation of the huge complexities of cognition.  This infers that highly knowledgeable people automatically become creative at some magic point in time.  This infers that only clever, learned people can or should ask questions about how the world works, about how we educate each other, about how the hell did we end up in this Brexit shambles, or Climate crisis or the rise of artificial intelligence, or universal income and meaningful work for everyone?

Well, let me tell you something.  In my experience, the more someone knows about something (and I’m talking about very knowledgeable and experienced academic scientists here) the harder they find it to think creatively about a problem.  To solve complex problems, our minds have to wander into unfamiliar domains, normally into the minds of other people who have greater knowledge in that domain.  The world is full of specialists and experts.  They don’t solve problems alone, they collaborate with others to do so.  And frequently there will be someone, a rare being maybe, on that team who isn’t shackled by deep knowledge in any one domain, but has a little bit of knowledge of each domain – an under-rated, amateur generalist perhaps – but is really good at asking questions, at connecting disparate nuggets of information, at seeing things differently, at placing the cat amongst the pigeons.

Those type of people – creative thinkers – are hugely stifled, or bored, by conventional schooling.  I love the first page of Rod Judkins book, ‘The Art of Creative Thinking’ where he rips the conventions and limitations of school to pieces.  I think the impasse in education stems from our expectations for school to do too much.  In my previous blog, I riffed on my own childhood and experience and where I think my creative mind was nurtured.

[big open spaces, lots of freedom and exploration of the countryside, huge
tracts of time where I had to create an imaginary world just to entertain
myself, meeting & talking to people of all ages throughout my childhood,
being really interested in how things worked (especially farm implements!) and
speaking to people who knew more about it than me – most of this happened
outside school]

I infer that it must have been nurtured but I’m coming around to the view that just as some people have a greater propensity for intellectualism than others; or a greater propensity for drive, focus, conscientiousness and ambition (ruthlessness?); or a greater propensity for hand-eye co-ordination [and therefore sporting or artistic talent] some of us have a greater propensity for creative thinking than others.  Yes it is up to our parents, our teachers, our friends and our peers to draw that out of us and to help us polish it, nurture it, develop it but there is some innate coding already there just waiting to be activated – or stifled and deactivated if we’re not careful.

I do understand that to be truly creative in one domain (science, engineering, art, music, teaching, whatevs) we need to know a lot about that domain.  I get that.  Knowledge does come first.

I do also understand that to ask purposeful questions about a topic, to be curious about it you need some baseline knowledge of the area or idea you are curious about.

I understand that being professionally creative or curious is different to the wide-eyed imagination and curiosity found in many young children.  There is probably a correlation between memory/knowledge and curiosity; creativity too.  But we do encounter genuinely curious and creative minds in young children; children who don’t really know very much about anything.  So I’m afraid that curiosity and / or creativity may be more likely to correlate with innate intelligence (of a certain type) than with knowledge or memory per se.  Young curious minds may just be very hungry for information.  The well may not be being filled fast enough, or it is being filled with an uninspiring field of knowledge.  Young creative minds do exist, but they probably don’t realise it.  They will enjoy school at the fringes where information and ideas collide at the interface of subject domains; they simply won’t see the world in the same way as the school, university or global authority on any particular “knowledge domain.”

So to cut a long story short, I don’t think we can ignore or avoid the teaching – or at least practising – of creativity and collaboration in schools.  These are both central tenets of human civilisation, they do not just magic themselves up in adulthood.  They need highlighting and nurturing in our schools, but not to the detriment of the core substrate of school: knowledge.

Within education, and hopefully some of you are reading this, there are many people who write off and discard the piffle I’ve been spouting above and say things like, well I teach art or English, so I’m honing imaginations and teaching creativity everyday; you teach science which is all about logical reasoning and empirical understanding and there’s nothing creative in that.  There is some justification in this line of thinking, providing that children receive a true baccalaureate of ideas in their education.  That in art lessons they have time to look, observe, create and think abstractly; in English lessons they really celebrate the beauty of language and explore inference and imagery in great detail and in Science they understand the difference between the practical doing of science and the cerebral process of asking scientific questions and converting them into experiments.  But too frequently, Robinson would argue, Science lessons equate to a hugely daunting body of abstract knowledge to be assimilated; English lessons focus too much on the intricacies of grammar; Art lessons focus too much on technique or Art history rather than as a way of seeing the world, or expressing ourselves.  It is always their Science, their English, their Art and never my Science, my English or my Art.  Whether we like it or not, we shoehorn and control and force children to conform from an early age.  Yes, this enables society’s careful functioning; but in a world of possibilities, of technology, of digitisation, of robotics and automation let alone artificial intelligence this really doesn’t mirror the adult world anymore. 

It was fascinating to listen to Sir Anthony Seldon give the same talk twice in the summer, once at an independent prep school conference on the future of the common entrance exam at 13+ and then at the Bryanston education summit where I also went to excellent talks from Alex Quigley, Oliver Cavigioli, Craig Barton, Robert Plomin and my personal favourite from Ian Warwick – celebrating polymathism and discussing his book Learning with Leonardo (da Vinci), and some great panel discussions too. 

An aside: I look forward to exploring Ian Warwick’s book in more detail as a way of developing the creative mind within conventional learning, drawing upon the following seven ideas of concepts important to Leonardo (artist, mathematician, scientist, inventor):  1) Conscious ignorance [developing a beginner’s mind; experts develop frozen thinking] , 2) Regaining wonder [developing the fuel of enthusiasm]

, 3) Perfecting attention [trusted his senses, didn’t always trust books], 4) Unnecessary beauty [developing the dialogue across disciplines – science and art are NOT separate], 5) Thinking aside [developing a metaphoric perspective and connecting dissimilar ideas], 6) Negative capability [accepting uncertainty, introduction of desirable difficulties, importance of doubt], 7) Unfinished perfection [refusing to freeze your thinking, accepting non-completion as an ending, developing our ability to suspend judgement].

Seldon talks about how our education system depersonalises humans and he addresses the following three questions: What does it mean to be educated?  What does it mean to be intelligent?  What does it mean to be human?  He talks about the 4^th education revolution, the first being the beginnings of communication with the evolution of spoken language 500,000 years ago; then the first schools in ancient Greece 5000 years ago, the invention of the printing press 500 years ago and now, artificial intelligence, technology and dehumanisation.  He is more of a performer than a lecturer and he makes a long list of provocative statements, some more insightful than others:

Being is more important than doing.  (I agree).

The exam results and the damage done. (I agree, particularly as this quote is influenced by Neil Young).

Howard Gardner:  Not how intelligent is a child?  How is a child intelligent?

Being stressed out as a head is no good to anyone.  (obvs).

Summer term teachers…from anxious to angry!

It is all compelling stuff, he labels a quarter of the audience as brilliant, smart, excellent; tells most of us we’re OK – a little bit dull perhaps but OK and the remaining quarter that we’re thick.  And suggests this is the sorting hat of education, this is all it does, it labels us in such a narrow, harmful way.  My colleague and friend Brian who I wrote about affectionately in my prologue summer blog likes this comparative, sorting hat approach.  That is what school is for – to sort the wheat from the chaff and help us find our place in the pecking order of society.  But Sir Anthony, myself and Catherine who I also wrote about affectionately in my prologue blog would counter that with, “is sorting society based upon our ability to remember and perform aged 16, or aged 18 in a narrow measure of who we are really the best way to structure society?”

Now, it is easy to write off Seldon, Robinson and the like as masterful self-promoters, as privileged very well educated white men steeped in knowledge, as narcissistic provocateurs but they have a massive point.  I wrote about it in my first summer blog on Why Science?  21^st century education exists within an increasingly materialist and technologised world and these forces are not going away; they are stronger forces than the mass movement of people from country to town in the industrial revolution.   Robinson’s is an individualistic quest; whereas Seldon’s is more human – he is encouraging us to look very deeply at what makes us human in the (rising) age of the machine, and to think deeply about how education needs to change to prevent the machine from winning (despite the fact that us dastardly Luddites have already invented the machine). 

Some traditionalists scoff at him and suggest that if we preserve culture and promote deep cultural knowledge and understanding within education then everything will be OK.  Machines can carry on taking over the world but that is a post university problem, we’ll just keep calm and carry on.  I’ll explore the merits of this approach and worldview in my next blog.

So are there any solutions from Seldon, Robinson et al on how to fix or adapt education to the needs and overriding culture of the 21^st century?  Not especially.  Over the next few blogs I intend to narrow down into my solutions to the challenges of education in the 21^st century:  some utopian, some naïve, some practical, some just plain old wishful thinking.

Next blog (no.4) – yet more contention and incoherence:  “Knowledge matters. But do exams?” influenced by Christine Counsell and Martin Robinson.

Then 5) – my (fantasy) idealistic education revolution influenced by Mr Yamazaki @solomon_teach –  “Bottom up, instead of top down.”

After that in blogs 6, 7 & 8 we’ll get into more specific (and hopefully less stream of consciousness / mental purge / incohorent) territory, articulating the what, when, how and why I’m doing what I’m doing with Science, STEAM, collaboration, curiosity and creativity in KS3…

2. The Accidental Scientist.   How and why I became a scientist, and whether school had anything to do with it. 

Before I can move on to interpreting and analysing the traditionalist and progressive, skills orientated or knowledge rich mantras in education – and their reactive and proactive elements – I need to reflect; to purge the corruption of my perspectives on science education first.  This is indulgent, but I hope it also brings insight to – what I believe – is the foresight of my pending six further summer edublogs. 

Here, I am influenced by Graham Coxon, the talented and inventive musician and guitarist with Blur.  At Blur’s creative and commercial peak, when he retreated from the front line of indie pop to explore alternative American guitar bands, he talked of ‘unlearning’ the guitar.  He had by this point mastered its texture, rhythm and delicious, squelchy nuance but he felt shackled by the manifestation of his knowledge and experience.  To improve as a guitarist, he wanted to unlearn what he already knew, to progress down an alterative, more folky, less conventionally pop avenue.  This is – I think – a metaphor for individual human progress and deep learning.  We have to take a step back from what we know, unpick it, analyse it and learn another way (with lots of practice) in order to move forward as individuals, as schools, as organisations, as nations and as global human society.  We will not keep learning, keep improving, if we always do things the same way, if we seek to maintain – and incrementally improve – the status quo.  

So, back to me.  Specifically me on 1^st February 2011:  I am standing with about 2400 other people in the cavernous, tiered, ship-like decking of the campus gateway on Pfizer’s Global Research & Development (R&D) site near Sandwich in Kent, the headquarters of their European R&D.  It is an impressive space, a statement of intent, a showpiece.  It oozes corporate success and multinational riches.  It is a monument to the discovery of blockbuster medicines such as Diflucan (fluconazole, for treating fungal infections), Norvasc (amlodipine for treating high blood pressure) and Viagra (sildenafil – you know what this one is for…).  The head of global R&D stands on the podium and shuffles through some benign and carefully crafted powerpoint slides.  On slide 8 he says it, “Pfizer intends to exit from the Sandwich site.”  Despite prior warning signs for the more discerning and more corporately aware employees, there was an audible gasp is the room.  This was a big shock.

A few weeks later, after some intense, confidential and emotionally draining employee consultation, I – as employee chair of the employee forum – was standing on the same podium, in the same place, with the same audience sharing the news of our enhanced, site specific, redundancy package; supported and encouraged by then site head, Dr Ruth McKernan later chief executive of Innovate UK.  Then, after a protracted period of further consultation, career guidance from redeployment consultants, career experimentation leading a small STEM (science, technology, engineering & maths) enrichment charity, unemployment, reflection and self-doubt it was that enhanced redundancy package which enabled my intentional career change into teaching, aged 41: as a teaching assistant from January 2013, PGCE in September 2013 and KS2/KS3 Science and maths teacher (now head of Science) from September 2014. 

So, it was in February 2011, aged 38, that I ceased to be a scientist.  My subsequent pathway into teaching was (later) planned, considered and intentional.  My pathway into science was purely accidental.  This blog post documents my accidental journey into science, shares some of my experience and insight from my 17 years in industry and contextualises the perspective and questioning curious mind I have brought into my teaching career.  Inevitably I entered the teaching profession with a fairly utilitarian view of school science education based upon my experience in industry, a view which remains confused during the international skills versus knowledge Twitter wars of 2018 onwards…this indulgent purge sets me up for engaging more purposefully, truthfully and open-mindedly in that debate in subsequent posts.

So, from an educational qualification perspective I can explain very simply why I became a scientist:  I went to school; learnt some stuff; got As in Chemistry, Biology, Maths and History at GCSE; considered medicine as a career so chose Chem, Bio and Maths A levels; flunked Maths; went to Kingston Poly to study chemistry; had industrial placement in industry; needed to earn some money (and therefore get a job); had a 2:1 degree in chemistry so became a graduate scientist in Zeneca and then Pfizer.  Blah.  Next post. 

That is what happened, but why did it happen and how did it happen?  Uh oh.  Cue long meander through family, school, home, character and experience; and dipping my toe into the age old – frequently misplaced – chestnut of nature Vs nurture.

Unless something seriously weird happened, we all tend to think of our childhood as normal.  Everyone else’s is alien.  This sometimes becomes apparent when we spend Christmas with our partner’s family for the first time.  Looking back, my early childhood was idyllic, blissful and happy yet far from normal.  In comparison with my own children, I had more freedom, I was more socially privileged, less disposably affluent, I was far less integrated with my local community and I was (subconsciously) trapped in an isolated, bucolic paradise.

For my father, I was child number six and the first product of his third marriage.  His life was far more worthy of biography than mine:  born in 1917; son of a vicar; boarding school; Cambridge – kicked out; Wye agricultural college; 2^nd world war – Italy and North Africa, a Lt. Col in the Royal Artillery; 1^st marriage – 2 boys, wife committed suicide just after the war when one was 3 years old and the other just 3 weeks old;  new wife – three more children; a pioneering and much respected farmer in Devon; sold the dairy herd and experimented with intensive pig farming, failed, sold farm; invested in a failed golfing contraption; separated from second wife; long affair; played lots of golf; spontaneously married my Mum, 24 years his junior, where we pick up his story, because it is mine too.

For my mother, I was child number one of two in her first and only marriage.  She left her London life behind to marry my father, following an apparently spontaneous decision to ditch her affair with a married man.  They bought a ramshackle North Devon farmhouse with some semi-derelict, disused farm buildings and seven acres in May 1971.  (For £8100)!  I appeared in August 1972 and a younger sister joined us, as my childhood sparring partner, in October 1974.

Until I was four, my Dad worked as secretary and head green-keeper at the Royal North Devon Golf Club; after that he grew vegetables – at home – for local hotels.  In the early 1980s when I was about 10, he started growing flowers for drying and my parents set up Withacott Dried Flowers, a small local business.  Initially it was a small, sustainable project but it soon spiralled into quite an enterprise, in fear of the never-ending school fees my parents chose to pay.  He worked bloody hard.  He was out in the garden, or the barns, from dawn to dusk, except for the 1 o’clock news and his afternoon nap.  He was a farmer; a grower; an ideas man.  Apart from his army days in the war, and two years managing a farm for someone else before he bought his own, he was his own boss and a free spirit.  He wasn’t a businessman.  Before I went to boarding school at twelve, he was always at home.  He was a constant presence in my early childhood, yet he was somehow distant as well.

While my father was busy doing, my mother was everywhere.  She was the dominant figure in my childhood and she did everything for us.  Our home life was informal, with TV suppers, and a constant throng of activity and heated discussion around the Aga in our rustic farmhouse kitchen.  She drove my sister and I fifteen minutes each way to school, to the beach on sunny days, and for occasional visits to friends’ houses.  We spent a lot of time in the car.  Our cars were third hand old bangers.  Our biennial holiday was a visit to an old friend of my Mum’s in the Wiltshire countryside for a weekend in May.  Our food was simple and not lavish.  The only thing my parents spent money on was private school fees.  My Dad received a small private income (inherited from rich spinster Aunts) and made some pocket money with his various enterprises.  Family heirlooms were sold and money was borrowed against the fantastic – yet flawed – dried flower business.

My first school was a small local independent school heavily subsidised by the Roman Catholic church (we weren’t Catholics).  It was mostly local farmers, doctors and dentists and local business owner’s kids and I recall it as a relentless but harmless drill.  I was timid and frail, a bit of a Mummy’s boy and I specifically remember missing (and never mastering) long division due to another bout of tonsillitis (they were whipped out aged 10).  When I wasn’t ill, it gave me a very solid, academic, head start in life.  I don’t remember studying any science there at all but recall learning why Thursday is called Thursday (after Thor) and January called January (after Janus).  I also remember learning a lot about the Sabre Tooth Tiger.  I’m not sure why.  I also remember not knowing the answer to the tiresome question, “which football team do your support?”  I still don’t know today.  This was – perhaps – an early sign that I saw the world a little differently to most, and that I wasn’t remotely interested in running with the pack.

At 8, I went daily to a local prep school which closed down for economic viability reasons just before I was 12.  There, I was exposed to lots of formal, instructive, traditional teaching.  There were 8 forms spanning school years 4 – 8 (5 years) in modern money.  I was one of only about 12 day pupils amongst about 100 full time boarders, so a little bit of an outsider.  Am I a natural outsider?  Was it nurtured?  Or do I actively seek to be an outsider; an obstuse, over-analytical, obstinate, argumentative provocateur? 

I started in form 2, moved to form 3 after three weeks and then form 5 in my second year, form 6 and form 7.  So by the top end we were in age groups, approximately, but lower down we were accelerated – or held back – according to ability.  My maths teacher was excellent, possibly the best teacher I’ve ever had; my memory served me very well in history, geography and science; languages (mainly French and Latin grammar) came naturally to me and I was put off reading until well into adult life by “reading” 1984 by George Orwell aged 10.  Learning Science in a real lab from the age of 8 may have been important.  I remember watching mercury flow around on the lab bench; watching a fractional distillation of crude oil demo and playing with various models of polystyrene balls to represent the different packing arrangements of atoms inside crystals. Most of all I remember endless summers of pond dipping on the school lake, and taking samples of various creatures back to the lab for closer inspection.

It was – I think – some of the stuff outside the classroom that shaped the workings of my curious and creative mind far more than all the conventional, subject-based, classroom learning.  Aged 10, I became fascinated by photography.  I liked going for walks and properly seeing, not just looking; focussing on composition.  I liked the science of photography; the variables – film speed, shutter speed and aperture, but it was the chemicals in the dark room I loved the most, something about breaking the heat seal to reveal the distinctive chemical aroma.  This resonated with my senses.  I also loved woodwork:  carving bowls on the lathe; perfecting a dovetail joint; the doing and the making.   Before lunch, everyday, we would change into “smocks and jeans” and roam the wilds of the North Devon countryside surrounding the school.  This may have involved building dens in the woods, building a muddy dam on the small stream feeding the lake, swinging from branches, climbing trees or listening to Queen, Jean Michel Jarre or the early ‘Now’ compilations on our primitive cassette players.  I recall no playground tussles, no competitive games of football and no adult supervision during this time.

Outside of school there were ridiculously long holidays, rarely with anyone else to play with other than my younger sister.  Days, even weeks, would go by in my imaginary world with a seven acre playground of disused barns, a paddock and garden to fuel my imagination.  Was all this blissful isolation the cause of my imagination, of my creative thinking; or was it just a mirror to the happy little world that would have been going on inside my head wherever and however I grew up?   When I wasn’t meandering through my imaginary world or building lethal contraptions from old prams, wheelbarrows and bicycle wheel I ventured to the neighbouring farm, initially seduced by the hypnotic rattle of a Massey Ferguson tractor engine.  There I would spend hours watching farm activities: milking; calf feeding; pig feeding; haymaking; silaging; harvest; even slurry spreading had its rustic charm!  I chatted curiously to the farmer about his antics; very interested in the detail about milk yields and bacterial inoculation to accelerate the fermentation of fresh grass into silage.  My particular fascination with cows, milk production and dairy farming was further enhanced via conversation with Dad, when he had the time, and also riding around the local farms on a milk tanker to collect the milk from the bulk tanks with a local family friend.  On those farms, I had an even bigger audience of farmers to quiz with my incessant agricultural curiosity!

At 12, in 1984, I moved prep school (staying for 2 rather than 1 potentially unsettling year) and started boarding in Tavistock on the edge of Dartmoor, 35 miles from home.  This was an even more socially and academically elitist establishment than I’d experienced to date; full of the sons of naval officers, local solicitors and high court judges.  I don’t really remember any particularly revelatory teaching, though with hindsight my English teacher was clearly a Marxist as we spent quite a long time interpreting the lyrics to Imagine by John Lennon.  Regardless of the dry, unmemorable teaching, learning surrounded by some intellectual big guns whom later won scholarship awards to Eton, Winchester and Sherborne in Dorset was probably good for my intellectual development.  I wasn’t quite bright enough to gain a scholarship to one of the top division public schools, so my outrageously snobby mother sought out the socially acceptable, but academically suboptimal, establishment of Milton Abbey School in Dorset.  I managed to gain a scholarship award of 40% off the fees by being able to do some quite challenging maths, write a reasonable history essay, regurgitate some abstract scientific facts and spell my name correctly. 

Science didn’t especially rock my world aged 12 – 15, nor did English or Maths.  I think I preferred History and Geography.  Classic school subjects.  My history teacher was brilliant.  At the age of 15 my Dad had a huge operation and was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer which had reached his liver.  He died in the middle of my early French GCSE in November 1988.  I was awarded a B.  In January I sat maths early and was awarded an A.  In June 1989 I sat the rest, gaining further As in Chemistry, Biology and History; a B in Geography and Cs in English Lit, Lang and Physics.  I really didn’t like Physics at school; didn’t read enough (back then) to improve my English; I had an excellent Biology teacher and for some unknown reason Chemistry made perfect sense to me.  Dad’s death conjured up notions of medicine in my mind and the romantic idea of becoming a 1950s style village GP, with a folding leather briefcase, big sideburns, an aura of learned wisdom and widespread adoration from the local community.  So medicine was the aim and I therefore chose science based A levels:  Biology, Chemistry and Maths (the latter because I thought I was some kind of maths genius having attained an A grade with no revision or practice two months after Dad died).

With hindsight this was a ridiculous idea from an establishment full of Tim nice but Dims from the Harry Enfield show.  I didn’t work hard enough.  My maths teacher didn’t bring complex numbers, projectiles and calculus to life for me; a (combined cadet force) fake war with helicopters and explosions going on outside during my biology practical exam didn’t help; I was distracted by my pastoral responsibilities as Head of House and school prefect; I had started to love Rugby; being a roadie for the school band; going for long walks to explore the glorious local countryside and cycling over Bulbarrow hill to find some beautiful young public school girls who specialised in aloof pouting and ingratiating flicks of their voluminous hair.  Academic achievement just wasn’t on Milton Abbey’s radar.  Their modus operandi was the churning out of charming toffs who’d go on to become Army officers, take over Daddy’s farm or become an entrepreneur.  Medical school generally wasn’t in their sights.

After school finished I spent the summer working my arse off on a local Devon pig and arable farm.  I was manning the grain drier and stores on results day.  B in chemistry.  C in biology.  N in maths for not sure, nearly or never again – I’m not sure which!  Clearly no self respecting medical school was going to ping through an offer, and retaking was going to be like starting over again, so Chemistry seemed like something to pursue, a B after very little revision.  Not bad.  Always came fairly easily to me.  I liked biology but didn’t love it.  Chemistry was better.  My teacher was good and I liked him; complete space cadet but yes, he saw something in me.  I really enjoyed our open morning demonstration of chaos and clocks in chemistry: a solution of inorganic compounds and complexes, swirling around in a large beaker, mounted on a magnetic stirrer, and changing colour at random and unpredictable intervals based upon the different oxidation states of transition metals such as vanadium and chromium.

So with a little help from Mum, I whizzed up to chat to Dr Will Bland at Kingston Poly and secured myself a place on a sandwich degree course in Applied Chemistry with Business Administration.  Why Kingston?  It had a reputation as one of the better polytechnics and was near London if I wanted to hang out with my affluent school mates; all swanning around Fulham, Battersea and Clapham, darling!  Why chemistry?  Because I could.  Why business?  Mother’s influence.  She suggested all scientists were socially inept nerds and that I was far too gregarious, posh (she didn’t use that word because posh people don’t use the word posh) and too much like my former front bench politician Uncle (her brother is John Nott, former defence secretary in the Falklands war and in Thatcher’s cabinet 1979-1982).

What my Mum didn’t account for is that I have very little interest in the machinery of business, very little interest in the financial world, very little interest in making money for making money’s sake.  While my character was similar to my Mum and my Mum’s side of the family; it turns out that my interests, intellect and values were much more closely aligned with the more creative, liberal and slightly anti-establishment trend on my Dad’s side of the family.  I am however grateful for the business element of my degree because it is mostly common sense, so I could bash out an essay on economics, a project on Marketing or research the history of employee relations to bolster my grades where I didn’t work hard enough to grapple with some of the complex and alien concepts in chemistry.

And now a long section on the Chemistry aspect of my degree course…a 15-20 minute read…extracted from my longer writing elsewhere.

Chemistry

According to modern scientific theory, Chemistry has existed for nearly 14 billion years, since the first atomic nuclei formed approximately 300,000 years after the Big Bang.  Physics, in terms of time, energy and subatomic particles pre-dates chemistry by a mere 300,000 years (biology came along much later).  Since then, stars have been and gone, where atomic nuclei were joined by electrons, forming the first atoms: the chemical elements of the periodic table.  Our tiny insignificant Planet Earth formed and cooled approximately 4.5 billion years ago and those elements combined to form molecules of increasing complexity; eventually due to a miraculous and improbably perfect set of conditions in the primordial soup of 3.8 billions years ago, simple molecules called amino acids appeared which reacted to form proteins.  Proteins developed an ingenious technique of replicating themselves via some mysterious genetic substrate called RNA (our good friend DNA was to follow much later); cells developed, life appeared and just 100 million years ago, mammals started to evolve.

Fast-forward to approximately 6 million years ago, when humans started to evolve from ape ancestors while only 300,000 years ago, homo sapiens, our species of hominid evolved.  By that time, we now have evidence of the daily use of fire – perhaps the most prevalent application of chemistry on the planet.  Language started to develop approximately 70,000 years ago; there is evidence of counting which dates back 35,000 years and then by 12,000 years ago we broke free from nature and started farming.  Since then humans have been on a roller coaster ride of rapidly developing civilisation: cultures, religions and nations with some useful, though rather toxic, inventions – such as money – developed along the way.  About 2500 years ago, 400 years BCE (before the Christian era), an ancient Greek dude called Democritus first conceived the concept of an atom (a tiny “uncuttable” particle), the tiny building blocks of which all matter is composed.

Despite the ancient Greeks intellectual advancement, things didn’t really progress much scientifically for the next 2000 years.  The scientific revolution started with Copernicus and Galileo less than 500 years ago, and then accelerated via Newton, whose theories of motion underpinned the science behind the great period of invention, engineering and industrial productivity that has become known as the industrial revolution throughout the 19^th century (1800s, or the Georgian, Regency and Victorian eras). 

Lavoisier and Priestley just about snuck in some Chemistry at the end of the 18^th century (in the late 1700s) with their respective discoveries of oxygen’s significance in Combustion and Respiration but up until 1800, virtually all scientific advances were in the field of Physics, with all notable discoveries, and therefore knowledge, in Chemistry starting after Humphry Davy’s discovery of new (reactive metal) elements such as Sodium and Potassium in 1808, and John Dalton’s proposal of atomic theory in 1809, with the exception of some pioneering work on the properties of gases by Robert Boyle in 1661.  Chemistry became a subject of serious scientific research after the publication of the first periodic table of elements by Dimitri Mendeleyev in 1869 but only really came of age following the discovery of the electron by JJ Thomson in 1897, followed by Ernest Rutherford’s and Niels Bohr’s pioneering work on the structure of the atom in the early 20^th century.  So, Chemistry – as a human endeavour – is only about 200 years old, with most of the Chemistry that is taught in schools and on undergraduate courses at university, being based upon research that is less than 100 years old.  

I didn’t learn any of the contents of the above four paragraphs at school, nor on my undergraduate Chemistry degree.  Nor did I learn this as a practicing chemist in industry.  The above is self-taught knowledge I have learnt over the last five years, partly through personal interest, and partly because I think a history of the human understanding of science; and the roots of the human scientific discipline of chemistry are an essential place to start when teaching this glorious subject.  Just like every other school pupil, and perhaps the majority of chemistry undergraduates, I was taught chemistry as if it had always existed, as if the textbooks and curricula were sacrosanct, as if it was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  I was taught Chemistry at school, and university, as series of facts and processes I must learn to pass an exam.

Bizarrely, I completely accepted this diluted, testable, linear, uninspiring, often abstract, and now approximately 67 years old (since A levels were introduced in 1951) approach to teaching science and chemistry.  I knew no other way.  As with the vast majority of school children and university students I was extremely compliant and there only seemed to be two options throughout my education: completely shut down, ignore it and leave with no qualifications; or blindly accept that this is the way the world has to be and get on with it.  When we’re young we have no concept of how the adult world works, or how things could be different, maybe better, maybe worse; so we happily – perhaps reluctantly – doff our caps to the perceived wisdom of our elders.

I’m now going to summarise what I was taught about Chemistry, and how I was instructed, at university, with some analytical deviations along the way.  I fully accept that my recollections are now over 25 years old, and that my memory may play tricks on me by filling in gaps with falsehoods that fit the story my mind is trying to weave, but I will attempt to be honest, or sparse if I have forgotten, with my memories.  

On the first morning, meandering through the suburban back streets of Surbiton, on the walk down to Penrhyn road to enrol, I encountered a metaller (a long hair = someone wearing black jeans, a black leather jacket with Megadeth embossed on the back and implausibly long and straggly black hair).  This was Ross, soon to become affectionately known as Rockin’ Ross, the God of Rock.  Having encountered a few ‘metallers’ at the Imperial College open day, and on the medisix conference in Nottingham, I assumed he would be a fellow chemist, on the basis that chemists (and physicists) are often devoid of any discernable taste in clothes or music.  How right I was, for Ross was the first person I met on my course.  And he remains a good friend today.  One of the best.  We arrived in the large foyer outside the main lecture theatre, enrolled, found out our timetable and that our course director was the aforementioned big affable man, Dr Will Bland and that our course tutor was a Mrs Daphne Eadington (Daphers). 

Daphers was a good sort with a slightly nervous disposition.  One of our first lecture courses was titled, “Modern laboratory techniques.”  This module allowed our development of basic measurement and observation techniques in the lab.  We had a rough lab book and the course was assessed with a neat copy lab notebook containing neat and accurate write-ups of our experimental investigations.  The techniques ranged from simple gravimetric techniques (weighing accurately on four figure digital balances), melting point apparatus to the most exciting at the time:  infra-red spectroscopy.  At A-level we’d heard about characterisation techniques like infra-red and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and mass spectrometry but school could not afford such equipment; so it was thrilling to be able to prepare a sample between two quartz discs, place it in the IR-spectrophotometer and watch the plotter do some crazy things as the sample’s IR spectrum revealed the substance’s unique chemical bond stretching and vibrating fingerprint.

During our first year, the (approximately) forty peers on my course, plus all the straight chemists (not sitting combined courses) and a lot of biologists, geologists and Earth scientists, who were going to need a solid understanding of chemistry, sat two modules titled Foundation Chemistry I and II, one in the first semester and the other in the second semester.  Each lecture series on these modules, and associated practical classes were split three ways:  1) organic chemistry, 2) inorganic chemistry and 3) physical chemistry.  I was a good student and bought the four recommended core course texts:  Fessenden & Fessenden (Organic Chemistry); Cotton, Wilkinson and Gaus (Inorganic Chemistry); Laidler and Meiser (Physical Chemistry) and Fifield and Kealey (Analytical Chemistry).  My course notes have long since been disposed of, but I am still the proud owner of these four tomes of chemistry information.[1]  Now that I’m teaching, I sometimes dip into them to try and remind myself of my formerly acquired detailed knowledge, looking for deeper insight into the massively diluted topics I teach at school, and it scares me how little of the content of these books – which were my course bibles – I remember, or ever learnt in the first place.

I started keenly enough, taking notes in lectures, reading the allocated pages of the books, asking questions and grappling with the complex concepts presented to me.  As well as lectures and practical sessions, there was a tutorial system with the relevant lecturers, or sometimes a post-doctoral researcher from their field of expertise.  Tutorials were in much smaller groups than the lectures and this was where most of my learning was done – where we could work through the substrate of lectures at a slower pace, try out some model questions and bounce ideas and questions around with our tutor, and each other.  This is, and was, an efficient model for learning; and was closer to how learning is embedded within school.  There were no tutorials in the second year (maybe we could request them, but I was either too lazy, or had too much pride; or they didn’t exist).

Lectures were a mixed bag.  Foundation chemistry was in the main lecture theatre with approximately 200 students from a variety of physical and life based science courses.  Chemistry options later in the first year, business lectures and final year options were more intimate, sometimes with less than thirty people.  There were front row students, back row students and middle rows students.  I started in the middle and drifted towards the back.  Some of the doodles that Nick Whatley drew next to me have mentally scarred me for life!  I listened attentively in lectures to start with, though my extravert and gregarious nature, and the opportunity to sit next to some of the prettier girls – especially the biologists – often distracted me from the task in hand.  Of course my ability to pay attention in lectures was dependent on four main factors:  my interest in the topic, the engaging style of the lecturer, how hungover I was and who I was sitting next to.  Initially, I was interested in all the chemistry lectures but Dr Jim Betts quickly killed off any interest in physical chemistry with his endless, regurgitated OHP [overhead projector] acetates (I started my university days in a powerpoint free world).  He droned on about ideal gases, Boyle’s law and Avogadro’s constant – and showed us how their famous equations or numbers were derived from first principles; my lack of a thorough understanding of algebra and lack of willingness to really grapple with the vertex of where maths meets physics meets chemistry let me down here; though whizzing through some prescriptive content at breakneck speed with minimal audience involvement was far from engaging.

Dr Will Bland first taught me inorganic chemistry, with a much greater presence and passion than Dr Betts.  However, the subject matter soon turned me off:  oxidation states, transition metals and complexes never really rocked my chemical world.  Lol, a good friend on the course and proper Romford boy, nicknamed Dr Bland, ‘me old fruit and fibre’, due to his friendly, big, cockney geezer appearance.  Dr Alistair Mann, affectionately nicknamed Sooty due to his uncanny resemblance to Matthew Corbett – presenter of the Sooty and Sweep show – was our first organic chemistry lecturer.  He was good, not terribly exciting, but he varied his pace and deepened my interest in all things carbon.

In the second year, Dr Cooper taught us Organic chemistry and he was a proper eccentric.  He taught without notes (always a good thing in my view) and drew great big curly arrows all over the rotating blackboard.  I struggled to keep up with his curly arrows and it was around here that organic reaction schemes started to become unfathomable to me – I could cope with electrophiles and nucleophiles; and substitution and elimination reactions; and stereochemistry didn’t freak me out too much but all the Sn1 and Sn2 stuff caused me to glaze over and imagine where the next beer was coming from. 

Being battered over the head with some complex and abstract concepts in a lecture theatre has never really been an ideal way for me to learn.  Admittedly my focus was suboptimal, but it was hard to get excited by such complex theory, and to assimilate it in one sitting.  Yet, that is what I expected my mind to do.  The subject matter needed much more prodding and playing with than a 1 hour-long information pass lecture.  I needed to give it all more time, but between beer, late nights, sleep and making friends there didn’t seem to be enough time.  I was ill-disciplined and insufficiently motivated.

Chemistry is such a complicated subject, and as one gets older you come to realise that scientists know more and more about less and less.  One particularly annoying thing about being a scientist, is that when a ley person first meets you and finds out that you are a scientist of some sort, first you get the Blind Date[2] “whooooo,” followed by a discussion about medical ailments or some really big, fundamental science question about a field of science you’ve not studied since you were twelve like, “why is the sky blue?”  Virtually all the scientists I’ve met and worked with know loads and loads about their teeny weeny specialism, but very little about anything else.  And I mean anything else.  There are, of course, a few exceptions where a scientist is extremely well-educated across the sciences and beyond; and there are a few non-scientists who are far better scientific generalists than Dr Felicity Fictional-Chemist who knows everything there is to know about the allotropes of sulphur but couldn’t easily explain to you what causes the seasons, or recite the balanced chemical equation for photosynthesis.

Most peoples’ knowledge deepens in one or two particular areas throughout their adult lives, depending upon their profession, their specialism and their personal interests.  Our general life experience broadens our understanding of how the world works, but it is rare for adults’ knowledge to both broaden and deepen significantly.  Some professions, for example primary school teachers, require a broad, but often very shallow, knowledge about lots of things.  With the exception of their personal interests and passions they need to know a tiny amount about loads of things.  As long as they are two steps ahead of all the young children they teach, they can get away without being founts of all knowledge.  Secondary school science teachers are required to know a little about a lot of things (the secondary school science curriculum, plus their own specialism).  Chemistry lecturers are required to know a lot about their field of chemistry (but not all chemistry).  Researchers know an awful lot, sometimes more than anyone else, about a tiny narrow area of a tiny narrow field of chemistry.  Unless we use our knowledge regularly, and keep hooking new information onto it, it remains inaccessible to us – buried deep within the recesses of our minds:  the old adage, ‘use it or lose it’ is sound advice here.  So we end up forgetting most of what we learnt in school and university.  Indeed recent research into dementia suggests that regular training and use of the mind, particularly learning new things, (so not just sticking to one field of existing expertise) may delay – if not prevent – the onset of dementia in old age.

With the exception of the most astute and insightful young people, children at school do not realise how little their teachers or lecturers actually know.  Children are incredibly accepting of whatever is presented or taught to them, as are many adults.  This simple fact explains the dominance and influence of the media on all our lives; and how conventional schooling – as wonderful as it can be – is really just a form of social conditioning to prepare individuals to become useful members of local, national and global society.  We collectively assume that our teacher knows loads of stuff.  We collectively assume the intellectual authority and experience of our teachers, and our lecturers, yet many of them have never done anything other than teach, or lecture.  So they know loads about teaching and lecturing but not much else.  The occasional bolshie smart Alec detects this weakness in their teacher or lecturer and makes their life hell, but in the most part young people know very little about anything so the natural hierarchy of school and university is preserved.  This is probably a good thing, but it is not without its flaws.

As real chemistry that real chemists do is based upon some fairly complicated principles, chemistry is built up in layers throughout school and university.  Even before chemistry is called chemistry at primary school, we are taught about rocks and materials.  Different properties of materials are observed and we are taught that materials behave differently dependent upon the internal structure of the “particles” inside the material.  A little later, typically in a general science class, the concept of elements (chemical substances made from only one type of atom) and compounds (chemical substances made from two or more different types of atom, chemically joined together) are introduced.  Around this point chemistry suddenly becomes an “exciting” practical subject with some very simple illustrative and investigative practical work carried out using Bunsen burners and some cheap, and readily available school laboratory chemicals (the good old dilute hydrochloric acid, sodium hydroxide, copper sulphate, calcium carbonate and potassium permanganate to name a few).  The purpose of this playing in the lab is to introduce children to the concept of chemical reactions and to distinguish between chemical changes (sometimes described as irreversible changes such as burning or rusting) and physical changes (often described as reversible changes such as melting or dissolving).  Everyone is taught about the pH scale, acids and alkalis. This introduces how substances can have very different chemical properties and reactivity.  Links are made to common and tangible practices in farming and medicine and a simplified version of chemical bonding is then introduced.  At A-level our understanding of chemical bonding and chemical reactions both broadens and deepens and the language of chemistry notches up a gear but – in the most part – we’re still being pumped full of facts.  Then, at university, chemistry is split three ways (before sub dividing further and further) into the aforementioned Organic chemistry (chemical reactions and properties of carbon based compounds), Inorganic chemistry (chemical reactions and properties of all the other elements) and Physical Chemistry (studying physical properties and applying the principles of Physics to solving chemical problems).

The point I’m trying to make is that although the school and university Chemistry curriculum is built up in layers, I’m not entirely sure that we can reason, or understand the reactions of the alkenes, or alcohols at A-level because of our limited understanding of the reactions of the metal carbonates at GCSE.  And, as everyone who has ever learnt any chemistry beyond GCSE, O-level or A-level can attest, the early chemistry we are taught is a series of over-simplified lies, or half-truths just to help us assimilate a few facts so that we can be tested on them.  I don’t – yet – have an easy solution to this problem; but after several years of gradually deepening layers of knowledge being pumped into my brain at school, this process continued at university, with an enormous amount of prescriptive information to assimilate in order to succeed on my course.  Maybe my mind needed those layers of prior knowledge to assimilate some of the new concepts, equations, reaction mechanisms and terminology that was being bombarded at my brain cells?  Maybe I could only ever become a good scientist with tonnes of seemingly superfluous knowledge pumped into my head?

I remember a conversation with a peer in my first or second year at university, when the ever-deepening complexity of Chemistry was starting to dawn upon us, where we discussed if there could ever be an end point to the depth of our knowledge of Chemistry, or science?  It is this quest for knowledge, this quest for understanding that drives academic scientists, albeit in miniscule nuggets of very precise progress.  While I would never expect a 10 year old, or a 16 year old, to grapple with degree level chemistry; I sometimes think it important to show them where all this teaching can lead, to show them how complicated and wonderful the subject can be.  Yet, this goes against mainstream educational dogma, where we can only use age relevant words and diluted concepts for fear of scaring off children from how complicated learning can be.

The above deviation is triggered by how my lateral mind wasn’t stimulated by the series of factual and logical processes and concepts I was exposed to in Chemistry at university.  While my mind is more logical than many, with some well honed mathematical reasoning skills and plenty of critical scientific thinking; my mind works in a more creative, lateral way.  I like to bounce ideas around, challenge fixed viewpoints, solve problems that haven’t been solved before and debate the best – or an alternative – way of doing things.  I didn’t realise this at the time, but I now know that I have a creative mind, one that was not stimulated by incontestable, logically proven – albeit complex – concepts.  As well as my natural affinity for the student bar, this probably explains why I wasn’t engrossed, consumed and set alight by my chemistry lectures at university. 

Chemistry courses at university don’t beat about the bush.  Well mine certainly didn’t.  There was no preliminary discussion about what chemistry is, why we learn it or how we learn it, instead courses charge full steam ahead with pumping knowledge into our brains.  We were thrust into Boyle’s law of gases, chemical bonding or oxidation states.  There was no flowering it up, no drama, no suspense, no sense of wonder; just straight into the factual meat of the subject.  Creative thinkers are stifled by this style of teaching and learning.  It is solely focused on academic and logical thinkers, which – I concur – most scientists need to be, but all of us?

While the theoretical principles of chemistry didn’t thrill me in the lecture theatre, some applied aspects of the subject interested me more.  I lapped up Environmental chemistry, taught by Dr Freddie Fifield, a tall, big hipped, corduroy trousered and stuffy old tweed jacketed antique of a lecturer, with the world’s largest abundance of grey, curly ear hair.  Acres of the stuff.  He was just the sort of charming and wise old duffer a chemistry lecturer should be.  Dr Elizabeth Tyrell managed to bring medicinal chemistry alive with its natty term ‘retrosynthesis’ and tangible real-life case studies of ibuprofen (Nurofen®) and salbutamol (Ventolin®).

In the second year I learned to like Physical Chemistry a little more, with lectures from Dr Foot (“Footie”) and Dr Wyer.  I was particularly interested in phase diagrams and phase transitions, which – unbeknownst to me at the time – would dominate the latter half of my Pharmaceutical Materials Science career with Pfizer.  Dr Cooper kept Organic chemistry engaging yet utterly baffling.  I remember an in-ordinate amount of time being spent on the Wittig reaction, but have absolutely no recollection of what a Wittig reaction is.  And a new (old) inorganic chemistry lecturer (Dr Moseley) enthralled me with the complex Redox (reduction-oxidation) chemistry of Vanadium, the most wonderful and fascinating of all the transition (or d-block) metals, while boring me senseless about chelates and the chelating agent, EDTA (ethylene diamine tetra-acetic acid).

I have mentioned tutorials and lectures but so far I haven’t mentioned practical sessions.  There were, of course, lots of these.  A practical session would last between 2.5 and 3 hours, and there were two, sometimes three a week.  Add to this approximately 4 to 6 hours of chemistry lectures and 4 to 6 hours of business lectures, so our total contact time added up to approximately 20 hours.  14 hours more than my friends studying geography!   There were also some lectures in maths – to help underpin all the deriving scientific equations from first principles that dominated my studies in physical chemistry.  Computing was starting to dominate the world, so we were all taught how to use outmoded MS-DOS software packages like GRAPHPLOT and MINITAB, before being trained to use Lotus-123 spread-sheets and Word Perfect word processing before Microsoft took over the world.  Those 20 hours were supposed to be about half of it.  I should have been finding another 20 hours a week to study, read, and write-up practical investigations.   Writing this now, it seems pathetic that I couldn’t find this time amongst my busy social, drinking, eating and sleeping schedule; but I was – for a while – the archetypal lazy student, having the time of his life.

Practicals were an opportunity to mess around and banter.  This is one of the best aspects about being a scientist – putting the world to rights, discussing the meaning of life, and trying to make others laugh is what makes lab life go round.  Chemistry is – famously – a practical subject, yet did I love practicals?  Not especially.  I have always liked debating, discussing and grappling with new knowledge: asking lots of questions, being curious; but I am perhaps a rarity in that I never particularly enjoyed school or university practical sessions.  Later on, in industry, I loved being in the lab; but carrying out a tried and tested experiment, where your teacher, or lecturer, knows what will happen doesn’t thrill me that much.  I think there are three reasons why I didn’t especially like practicals: Firstly, I wasn’t relaxed – I always feared I would make a mistake or do something wrong, perhaps break something; or add the reactants in the wrong order or at the wrong addition rate.  Secondly, my practicals often did go wrong.  When I was supposed to filter a crystalline residue, I often ended up with nothing: zero yield.  Sometimes I would make something, but it would be a sticky mess and far less elegant than my classmates’ beautiful crystalline offerings.  Thirdly, and this is the deal clincher, I never really felt I was learning anything.  Despite all the diatribe above, I actually quite liked having twenty tonnes of facts pumped into my brain.  I liked the technical meat of chemistry lectures, even if some of them went over my head, or were monosyllabic and dull. 

In an illustrative practical, the actual science is dealt with elsewhere – in lectures, or assignments or – at school – in desk based lessons.  All one is doing is following a set of instructions, a bit like assembling a bookshelf or setting up a new computer, and then being quietly pleased with the end result.  Some of the time we were learning practical skills that would benefit us if we were going to become synthetic organic chemists, or industrial process chemists.  Skills are an important part of learning science, but I wanted the substance, the explanation too.  Occasionally, there was an element of surprise, which is a good way to tantalise students with new knowledge but in the most part we were following recipes that had been carried out hundreds of times before. 

As a teacher, I fully appreciate that practical lessons are an opportunity to make science exciting and different from more deskbound school subjects, but – in my opinion – if taught creatively and with a variety of activities and tasks – science is a pretty exciting subject with or without practical investigations.  They have their place, but they are not always the holy grail they are made out to be.  If we got to design our own practical investigations that would have been a different matter:  designing an experiment, or series of experiments, to prove or disprove your own personal hypothesis can be thrilling, particularly when the results are magically revealed for the first time.

Clearly it is more exciting to learn chemistry via practical activities, than by conventional rote learning, but it can be terribly inefficient.  At school, a simple practical can consume an hour, while the teaching point in question could be explained in 5 minutes.  It depends on what else you want to teach, or cram into your chemistry course.  Personally, I’d prefer greater efficiency with mandated (curriculum) factual learning with fewer illustrative practicals, to free up more time for creative, pupil-led investigations – off curriculum; if it helps to inspire and generate greater enthusiasm for science, or chemistry.  There are the less academic but highly practically skilled individuals who we want to keep on the science bus to consider – it is always great seeing a pupil who struggles with the depth of content they are required to learn suddenly master a practical, mechanical or electrical skill.  They are often king for a day, in place of the curious, more cerebral minds.  The modern world needs a lot more electricians, plumbers and skilled practical people than it does Professors of Chemistry, so it is essential to keep developing these skills in school science labs, but there are not too many prospective electricians sitting chemistry degrees.

My most memorable university practical sessions were in Medicinal chemistry in the second year.  My practical partner was Robin Farmer, who – along with Henry from my Clayhill house in the first year and someone unaffectionately known as Matt the Twat, I shared a four bedroom house with.  Robin and I were good friends.  He was loud, northern and obnoxious.  I was equally loud, southern and fractionally less obnoxious.  We were both quite studious in comparison to some of our fellow reprobates on the course but also rather competitive with each other.  I still frequently failed to produce good yields[3] from our reactions, but we were often the first to finish, giving us more time to prey upon our friends and contemporaries in some weird ‘who can be the most obnoxious twat league.’  Happy yet strange days.

I will return to the notion that chemistry is a practical subject in a later blog.  This was something that was debated extensively in the Materials Science labs at Pfizer and also on my science PGCE course prior to starting my second career, in teaching.  For now I will leave you with two thoughts: it is predominantly a practical subject, but there are many ways of being a great scientist without fantastic practical skills.  Secondly, virtually every practical skill honed in a school science laboratory is completely outmoded within a modern industrial or hospital setting.

My degree featured a sandwich placement for a year in industry…so now for my Eureka moment, my moment where the doing of Science, rather than just the learning of science, brought it all alive for me…another 20+ minutes read complete with some optional “brief technical interludes!”

  Eureka! – The beginning

            After my third and final summer of working all hours on Brian Jones’ pig and arable farm in Sheepwash, Devon I returned to the South-East of England.  Not to my familiar stomping ground of Penrhyn road student union; but to small, temporary accommodation adjacent to SmithKline Beecham’s R&D facility, near Tonbridge in Kent.  Like every other science based job I’ve had, I started my first day wearing a tie, never to wear a tie again – until the interview for, or first day of, the next science based job.

            I was assigned to the mass spectrometry[4] lab, in the spectroscopy group of the analytical sciences department.  I overlapped for one week with the previous student; and two weeks with a summer student (the previous year’s student) before spending most of my year with Duncan, my supervisor; and Brian the lab leader.  Brian interviewed me, but it was his boss – the head of the spectroscopy section, Dr Mike Webb, Kingston Alma Mater, who initially lured me in to the wonderful world of chemical development.  Mike was a lively character, with carefully crafted mannerisms in the style of Mick Jagger.  Our mutual love of the Rolling Stones was – quite possibly – a deal clincher in my interview success.  While he was a notch up the convoluted hierarchy from Brian and Duncan, he was more playful and distracting than both: frequently popping into the lab to re-connect with lab life, and – presumably – avoid the tiresome rigmarole of climbing the slippery pole of corporate middle management.  At the time of writing, he is now a very senior figure within Glaxo SmithKline.

            For my first few days, I tiptoed tentatively around my first taste of industry.  Paul, my predecessor, made me laugh with impressions of Brian’s meticulous mannerisms and Duncan seemed friendly enough.  Initially, I was pre-occupied with finding some fellow students to share a house with for the year.  My temporary accommodation was only available for a maximum of three weeks, and I wanted to avoid ending up sharing with uber-geek, Dan, my temporary room-mate.

            While the site seemed quite big to me, I now know that this was a small and intimate Research and Development facility in comparison to most others in the Pharmaceutical industry; with approximately 120 employees on site.  For the majority of my year, this included 8 undergraduate placement students (including me), with the occasional Masters degree, or SmithKline Beecham sponsored PhD student temporarily on site for 1-3 months.  But when I started in September 1993, along with the 8 new placement students, there was a scattering of the previous year’s students who hadn’t quite finished, and some summer placement students too; so – upon arrival – the small site was awash with 12, maybe 15, undergraduates.  So, it felt like quite a youthful, vibrant place to be; not exactly a university campus but quite relaxed and modern, and not alien or oppressive to a 22 year old undergraduate.

            I distinctly remember my first morning coffee break.  Everyone, in small workgroups, spilled out from various buildings at ten o’clock and then walked down the path, lined with ornamental flower beds, and descended upon the canteen.  While most of the more experienced employees sat in groups of three or four at tables, the burgeoning throng of undergraduates huddled in one corner of the room.  I was uncharacteristically quiet on that first day.  Just on the first day.  Later on in my career, when starting a new job I always vowed to play it cool, to not give too much of my character away too soon.  Such vows are futile.  I am, by default, a gregarious and verbose individual.  Many would use stronger language to describe their first impression of me.  Holding myself back, is like King Canute trying to hold back the tide.  I can, however, rein myself in on the first day of employment, just to suss out the lie of the land; form my own first impressions and preserve a modicum of decorum and self-respect.

            On this first coffee break, of this first day, of this first period of formal employment within science based research and development, during my first foray into industry; my eyes were drawn to a female, all dressed in black.  She was wearing leggings, tightly clamped to some long, thin, double crossed legs.  She exuded a calm, confident aura with a subtle, enigmatic smile.  Her twinkling blue eyes, set against her soft, pale complexion and thick dark hair were enticing; but it was her soft southern Irish accent and delicate manner that beguiled me most.

            This first glimpse of Cathriona convinced me to start project house share.  After a few days, four of us had formed a bond, found a house and both the present, and the future, seemed exciting.  I immersed myself in work and play, and within two weeks had made some good new friends; enjoyed some boozy nights out and was quickly learning the craft of mass spectrometry.  Cathriona was going out with Mark, an outgoing student.  He was a bit of a tit.  So I subconsciously bided my time.  This biding of my time included a day of riotous and drunken tomfoolery at the annual SmithKline Beecham fun day.

            SmithKline and French (a US company) merged with Beecham pharmaceuticals (a UK company) in 1989, to form SmithKline Beecham[5].  In September 1993 they still had six or seven R&D (research and development) sites dotted around the dormitory settlements of London, just outside the M25.[6]   The annual fun day was a way of saying thank you to their employees and their respective families.  The UK R&D division hired the grounds of a large country estate and coached in over 2000 people, with no expense spared.  There was an incredible buffet, free drinks and a heavily subsidised bar, fairground rides, medieval jousting and an inter-site “It’s a knockout” competition hosted by Stuart Hall (who hosted the original BBC TV show), whose name has since fallen into disrepute.  I managed to make it on to the Tonbridge and Walton Oaks[7] team.

            It’s a knockout involved all sorts of ridiculous obstacles, giant costumes and lots of water.  It was a lot of fun.  Then there was lots of drinking.  By the evening, I was well oiled.  There was dancing and a very pretty girl from the Brockham Park site.  I adorned one of the large foam horse costumes from it’s a knockout, mock cantered around the dance floor staging, fell off the stage in a drunken stupor, cavorted with the pretty girl’s larger and not quite so pretty friend and moonied, out the back window, from the back row of the coach on the way back home. 

            Twelve days in to my first dalliance with real science, I had made quite an impression.  Duncan – my supervisor – must have been quite worried.  He alluded to this event, and indeed many other similar breaches of sensibility throughout the year, in my leaving card a year later: A brilliant year: a vindication of a private school education, though the behavioural side was frequently monstrous!  By the time Duncan wrote this, he was my scientific superhero, friend, and the single most influential factor of my accidental journey into science.

            There was a lot more riotous partying and drunken debauchery throughout the year: funded by a reasonable salary, another student loan, some money I was lucky to inherit for my 21^st birthday and a fairly healthy overdraft.  While I spent a stupid amount of money on beer; my excessive expenditure included the purchase of separates stereo system (Kenwood amp, Tannoy speakers, Sony CD player, Aiwa tape deck), loads of CDs, a holiday to Prague (to stay in the British Embassy with my Godfather, the British ambassador at the time), and most notably my first ticket to the Glastonbury festival of music and performing arts in Somerset, in June 1994.  

            While I had seen a few bands before Glastonbury, the combination of this melting pot of cutting edge musical culture; a big loud stereo and my voracious reading of the NME, Q and Select magazinespropelled my obsessive musical journey for the next few years.  While I was slowly – unbeknownst to me at the time -becoming a scientist; I was heavily pre-occupied with my love of music, the subject of a separate version of my life…

            While my journey into music obsession is not relevant here, it consumed a lot of my time; and a lot of my money.  Not just buying albums and going to gigs but reading a lot of books and magazines about music.  It was an all consuming hobby and interest, and one – with hindsight – which may have detracted from me becoming a scientific researcher, or an academic at university.  If I had voraciously consumed scientific literature and conference attendances, the way I gorged on the rough guide to Rock or the music monthlies then maybe I’d be a Professor by now; but that wasn’t my path.

            I look back with great nostalgia on this year; and in the forefront of my mind are all the social, musical, emotional, and cultural experiences but beneath all that, this was the year I became a scientist.  This was the beginning. 

            At the time, the culture of working and earning a reasonable income enabled my social life, my drinking, my partying, my silly-arsing about. I enjoyed mixing with a range of quite different people, of quite different ages; I enjoyed the culture of work; of working with some interesting people in a state-of-the-art, cutting edge scientific environment.  The institutionalised worlds of school and university seemed to be behind me; and I enjoyed being part of something more permanent, something more purposeful, something with more autonomy and more freedom; and something I was paid for.  Everything about working in a lab, with other scientists, still surrounded by some young kindred spirits; but also a handful of wise old sages – it all seemed to click for me; seemed to resonate with my very being.

            Neil, a friendly Northern lad, casa-nova and computer scientist; Marion, a chemist from Omagh, in Northern Ireland, working in the NMR[8] lab; myself and the aforementioned Cathriona moved into 1A, Goldsmid Road, Tonbridge in late September 1993.  Marion and Cathriona were civil to each other but never best buddies.  Their upbringings either side of the Irish border, and their very different characters, not conducive to a deep connection.  Neil was very different to me but we got on like a house on fire.  He was a great guitarist but played too much fiddly diddly Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Eddie Van Halen self-indulgent crap while standing in front of the mirror and checking his hair.  Apart from these shortcomings I liked him a lot, and we both lost our Glastonbury virginity together  – along with lots of my Kingston friends – in June 1994.

            Cathriona and I happened in October.  Before Cathriona there were drunken fumbles and lots of passing unrequited loves.  After Cathriona there were some more drunken fumbles and a couple of insignificant romantic dalliances before Amanda, my wife, best friend and love of my life came along in 1999.  Cathriona was the one who got away.  She was lovely.  Gorgeous.  Apart from Amanda, she was the only girl I’ve loved.  We spent an intense four months together; before my drunken debauchery, my immaturity and my gregarious social instincts ground us down.  From October to Christmas was lovely – I’d never really got the girl (I wanted) before, so this was special.  After Christmas, she came back from Ireland a little homesick.  She was a bit low and my energetic persona was too much for her at times.  I was too young to calm down, to be the sensible boyfriend she seemed to want; so she slipped away and we ended in February.  The right time, right place soon became the wrong time and wrong place. 

            It was a little awkward in the house to start with.  I grew closer to Neil and Marion.  We hosted some riotous parties, much to the delight of the under 35s at work!  Speakers were thrown out of windows, curtains ripped down, windows smashed (by accident); beer and piss soiled the carpets.  In my mind, I was in a punk band, trashing hotel rooms while in reality I was working for a large multi-national science based company and staring down the barrel of a life of science, conformity and financial security.  Cathriona was more sensible, more grown up; she had less deferred teenage angst, no supressed parental loss to rinse out; so she gravitated towards a mysterious older man and spent most of her time away from the den of iniquity that 1A Goldsmid Road became.

            Duncan liked a good party.  As did his wife Katy.  And Martin the German Schnapps obsessive.  There was a lot of fun in pubs and at house parties that year. Sending out late night search parties for a drunken and wandering Katy and blagging a sandwich from a consultant in a late night A&E department are also particularly memorable.  Brian, Duncan’s boss and head of the mass spectrometry lab didn’t have the aura of a party animal.  He had a young son, Robert, who he was always – understandably – keen to get home to, leaving Duncan and I together in the lab late into the evening on occasion.   I was never in early enough to witness Brian’s daily ritual, at 7:45 every morning, of neatly removing his patterned tank top over his neatly trimmed and angular beard, and folding it neatly into his brief case before his work day commenced.  On the surface he was the archetypal analytical scientist: quiet, understated, with very precise and impossibly neat handwriting.  He wore a lot of brown and beige and liked order and tidiness. He was vociferous in his dislike of Jeremy Clarkson, who had dared to describe his beloved Citroen diesel as, “about as interesting as Lincolnshire” in a review on Top Gear.  This led me to write the following, rather unkind, two line poem about him:

He looks like a weasel,

And likes to drive a diesel

This is clearly my greatest literary work.

I really liked Brian.  Our paths briefly crossed when I was at Pfizer, many years later.  He was a good man, and he was funny, kind and very supportive of me, if a little infuriated by my exuberant, youthful and energetic idiocy.  Back when I was 21, he was representative of the scientific stereotype.  The stereotype which puts people off science: introverted, cautious, quiet, straight, sensible, and completely devoid of any style whatsoever.  While Duncan was my “boss”, Brian ran the lab and was more mature and autocratic than Duncan.  I was Duncan’s first student, so it was sometimes a little hard for Brian to let go of the apron strings of supervising undergraduate underlings. 

The lab lobby opened via double doors from the expansive foyer of the brand new two-story building F.  To the left was the NMR lab and to the right, us, the mass spec lab.  From the lobby there was a single door into our write-up area, a comfortable and expansive galley of four wide desks and some over-head filing cupboards.  Two large windows over looked the lab.

The mass spectrometry (mass spec, or MS) lab was light and airy.  On the left was the prep bench, for dissolving and diluting samples, and a couple of fumehoods.[9]  To the right, some cupboards and empty benching; later to be filled with an open-access mass spectrometer for the synthetic chemists to come and test their own samples.  At the front of the lab there was a VG Trio electron impact, single quadrupole mass spectrometer, with chemical ionisation functionality hyphenated to a gas chromatograph (a GC-MS system).  To the rear was an enormous Sciex API-III pneumatically assisted electrospray (ionspray) triple quadrupole mass spectrometer coupled with a high performance liquid chromatograph (HPLC) to create a state of the art HPLC-MS/MS system.  The Sciex was equipped with two Apple Mac computers, one for the complex software to control the instrument and the other for processing data.  Around both large instruments (the VG Trio rig was approximately 2m wide x 2m deep x 1.5m high, while the Sciex rig was approximately 4m wide by 2 m deep x 1.5 m high) were a plethora of vacuum pumps and other ancillary equipment.  At the far end of the lab was the large glass frontage to the building, letting in lots of light and providing a great view of the site.  The lab was temperature controlled and air conditioned.

In September 1993 – just as you now, dear reader – I had no idea what any of this meant.  To the untrained eye, state of the art analytical equipment just looks like a big grey box.  It is all a long way from the stereotypical idea of a science laboratory; full of multi-coloured, bubbling potions.  Before I dive deeper into the technical shenanigans of my enlightening first year in industry, I should explain something we can all comprehend: carpet.  The mass spectrometry lab at SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals in building F, old powder mills, Leigh, Tonbridge, Kent was carpeted.  Since then I’ve seen a lot of science labs.  This was one of only two science labs I have seen carpeted in my life.  The other was the neighbouring NMR lab.  Why would you carpet a lab?

Well, the sample quantities involved in mass spectrometry are very small and any large volumes of liquids could be contained in the fume-hoods; or the flammable solvent cupboards, complete with spill trays at the bottom.  The main reason for the carpet is one of the same reasons we carpet our houses:  to absorb sound.  Carpet is very effective at absorbing sound, so when the mass spec department heard that the loudest and most verbose prospective scientist to ever walk the land was coming to work with them for a year, they decided to carpet the lab!  More seriously, mass spectrometers need to work at very low pressures (very high vacuum), which means lots of pumps.  Vacuum pumps make a tedious, constant whirring sound.  The carpet was installed to absorb as much of this sound as possible.  This made the lab a very welcoming environment to work in.

There is of-course a flip side: dust.  Carpets have an insatiable capacity for dust particles.  Dust particles are notoriously unfriendly to expensive and complex scientific equipment.  As the lab contained over half a million pounds worth of highly specialist equipment (the very new and shiny Sciex API-III cost £330,000 in late 1992), Brian was reluctant to let the cleaners in to “hoover” the carpet.  So, this was my privilege.  Every Friday afternoon at 4pm, I, humble mass spectrometry undergraduate placement student, had to hoover the lab.  Within a week or two, I found out that Duncan was a big fan of Queen, the rock band.  Every Friday, I delighted in camping it up and impersonating Freddie Mercury in the video to their hit single “I want to break free.”  Sometimes this drew an audience of, perhaps, five or six people.  Not quite Queen at Live Aid in 1985…

A brief technical interlude:  Mass Spectrometry   Mass spectrometry is an analytical technique which probes the chemical structure of molecules.    A molecule is a chemical substance made of two or more atoms covalently bonded together.  Covalent bonds, as opposed to ionic bonds, involve the sharing of electrons between atoms.  This allows the outer orbital, or shell, of electrons to be “full” for each atom involved in the chemical bond.  The specific chemistry of each type of atom (or chemical element) determines how many chemical bonds it can form.  For example, hydrogen atoms can only share one electron so can only form one single covalent chemical bond.  Oxygen atoms can share two electrons and therefore form either two single bonds, with two other atoms or one double bond with one other atom.  Nitrogen atoms can share three electrons, and therefore form three single bonds; a double bond and a single bond; or a triple bond.  Carbon, the most versatile of atoms, and justifiably known as the main element of life, can form four single bonds; one double bond and two single bonds or a triple bond and one single bond.   All medicinal drugs are made of molecules; so are most pesticides, plastics and polymers, dyes, flavours, fragrances, petrochemicals and virtually all the many millions of chemicals in animals and plants are molecules.  Most of the main components of food, cosmetics and healthcare products are all molecules.  So characterising and identifying molecules is extremely important in many parts of the pharmaceutical, chemical and food industries.   Mass spectrometry’s origins lie in the measurement of the mass of atoms.  All molecules are made of atoms.  A chemical substance made of just one type of atom is called an element; so all the known chemical elements appear in the periodic table, that colourful table full of weird and wonderful names which adorned your chemistry lab wall at school.  With the exception of hydrogen [a hydrogen nucleus contains just one proton], all atoms contain protons and neutrons in the their nucleus, orbited by electrons.  In terms of mass; protons and neutrons have a relative mass of 1 while the mass of electrons is negligible.  In terms of electric charge neutrons are neutral [they have no charge] while protons have a net positive charge of +1 and electrons have a net negative charge of -1.  An individual atom has virtually no mass: many millions atoms of a chemical element would be required to provide just 1 gram of that substance.  However, the mass of all known matter on Earth is due the mass of atoms.  So atoms can be said to have relative mass to each other.  Rounded to the nearest whole number the atomic mass of some common, and important elements are listed below:   Hydrogen (H): 1             Carbon (C): 12              Nitrogen (N): 14               Oxygen (O): 16   So the relative molecular mass of water [H2O] is (2 x 1) + 16 = 18.  Carbon dioxide [CO2] is 12 + (2 x 16) = 44.  An oxygen molecule [O2] will have a relative molecular mass of 2 x 16 = 32.   JJ Thomson’s pioneering work at the Cavendish laboratory, leading to the discovery of the electron in 1897, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1906, opened up the field of mass spectrometry, based as it is on the measurement of mass to charge ratio.  But it was his protégé, Francis Aston, who built the first mass spectrograph; later being awarded a Nobel prize for chemistry in 1922.  Early mass spectrometers – those based on the bombardment of atoms with a high energy beam of electrons – removed an electron from the atom (or molecule) to create a positively charged ion, or positively charged molecular ion.  Neutral species cannot be analysed or detected by mass spectrometers.  So the removal of the one electron gives the ion a mass/charge [m/z] ratio of 1+, meaning that the mass of the ion can be measured.   The precise physics of how this works is too complex to go into here.   Early work by Aston and his contemporaries, during the first three decades of the 20th century [1900 – 1930] utilised mass spectrometry to prove the existence of chemical isotopes.  A neutral, non-ionised atom will always contain the same number of protons as it does electrons, as the charges cancel out.  The chemistry of an atom is determined by its electronic structure [the number of electrons in its outer shell], while the mass is determined by the contents of the nucleus.  The elements of the periodic table are organised based upon their atomic number [the number of protons in the nucleus, and therefore also equal to its total number of electrons].  For many elements, the average number of neutrons in the nucleus equals the number of protons, e.g. Carbon contains 6 protons and 6 neutrons to create an average atomic mass of 12; Oxygen 8 protons and 8 neutrons, atomic mass 16; but in reality the number of neutrons in the nucleus of a atom can vary: these are isotopes.  The vast majority of Carbon atoms are 12C, but 13C atoms containing a seventh neutron and the radioactive 14C atom, contains two extra neutrons.  Because the number of protons (and therefore electrons) doesn’t change, the chemistry of different isotopes does not vary; however their physical properties and radioactivity can vary.  Most elements have a dominant isotope, but there are some exceptions, notably chlorine which has a 3:1 ratio of isotope 35 to isotope 37, creating an average atomic mass of 35.5; and Bromine which has a 1:1 ratio of isotope 79 to 81, creating an average atomic mass of 80.   The discovery and measurement of chemical isotopes was of huge importance to the Manhattan project, which developed the first nuclear weapons that ended the second world war.   After the discovery of isotopes, mass spectrometry found a niche application measuring volatile (easy to evaporate) hydrocarbons in the oil industry in 1940s.[10]  It wasn’t until the 1960s that it was developed for the characterisation of more labile (fragile) natural products and drug molecules.  By the 1980s it was an integral analytical tool in the testing and development of novel pharmaceuticals but the real revolution came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, since when it has become an essential analytical tool in the biotechnology revolution.   Prior to this revolution, it was a very useful technique in combination with NMR [nuclear magnetic resonance] spectroscopy and FT-IR [Fourier transform infra-red] spectroscopy, in the structure elucidation of novel molecular entities.  At its simplest mass spectrometry can provide useful information about the molecular mass of a chemical substance and also key molecular fragments (after destruction inside the mass spectrometer) gleaning important structural information about the molecule.  Combined with other structural data from NMR and FT-IR it is now an indispensable tool in the development of new medicines.   As well as identifying the molecular mass and chemical structure of drug molecules, their impurities, degradants and metabolites it has numerous other applications: for example identifying low levels of antibiotics in cow’s milk; in forensic science; in DNA and gene sequencing; and in police breathalysers.   To try and explain some of the complexity included above, some pictorial information is shown for the drug molecule, Aspirin below:   Trade name: Aspirin                          Chemical name: Acetyl salicylic acid Chemical formula: C9H8O4 Molecular mass (mw) :  180 Da [(9 x 12) + (8 x1) + (4 x 16) = 180]                                    Fig. 1  Chemical structure of Aspirin with                     Fig. 2   Standard notation of the chemical structure of all the atoms labelled. Note the four bonds                               Aspirin without carbon atoms (and hydrogen atoms    from each carbon atom, two from each oxygen,                         bound to carbon atoms) labelled.  and just one from, or to, each hydrogen.

Paul, the outgoing mass spectrometry student, and Rachel, a summer student and the previous year’s student; co-trained me on the VG Trio mass spectrometer.  I was taught how to calibrate it, how to retrieve samples from the sample store, how to prepare samples for analysis, how to use the instrument and how to interpret simple electron impact mass spectra.  I was also taught how to record results in my lab book, on the LIMS [laboratory information management system] database, and how to file any paperwork generated.   After a slightly nervous start, I took to it all quite quickly and became an effective mass spectrometer operative.  Initially, I was essentially a technician but as some of the mass spectra produced required higher levels of interpretation I needed to tap into some of my organic chemistry knowledge.

By working on one instrument, one technique and one set of interpretative skills (based upon some prior knowledge) my knowledge and application developed quickly; increasing my confidence.  This is the big difference between work and school, or university.  Repetition leads to quick mastery of new skills.  Whereas at school, or university, you may hear about a concept once or twice, read about it once; practise a related practical skill and then move on to something else – unless one puts in a lot of extra hours, the process of learning is grossly inefficient, as one is encouraged to dart about from lecture to lecture, practical session to practical session, or lesson to lesson.  Another major difference between working in industry and academic study is that someone else is dependent upon your effort and dedication.  In academic study it is only really oneself who seeks to benefit from any particular assignment, conversely in industry there will be another cog in the machine dependent upon your, albeit tiny, cog.  I liked mastering a new skill, and I liked learning about mass spectrometry.

During A level chemistry, I may have stumbled across the concept; and I recall being quite intrigued.  During my first two years at Kingston, there was little reference to mass spec; so virtually all of it was new to me.  As one progresses through a scientific career, we find ourselves knowing more and more about less and less.  I was quickly learning lots about a narrow field of analytical chemistry, itself only one part of all chemistry, less than one third of all science.  As I delved deeper into the wonderful world of mass spectrometry, I started to ponder the worth of all the prescriptive detail I was required to remember for my chemistry A level.   As it turned out, my embedded knowledge of organic chemistry functional groups was quite useful; all the curly arrowed reaction schemes which went in one ear and out the other, during Dr Cooper’s lectures at university, less so.

Once Paul and Rachel returned to university or wherever they were heading, it was just Brian, Duncan and me left in the large, modern, specialist laboratory.  I would occasionally slip next door to chat with Marion, or go to wind up Neil, or flirt via the primitive incarnation of MS-DOS email with Cathriona, while she was chained to an HPLC instrument in a lab somewhere upstairs.  Most of the time, I was either testing samples, or interpreting mass spectra.  Brian helped here initially but I quickly worked out that Duncan, my immediate supervisor, was the true intellectual force in the mass spec lab, maybe in the whole Analytical Sciences department.

Dr Duncan Bryant had joined SmithKline Beecham in early 1992.  Prior to that he spent two years as a post doctoral researcher at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, following a PhD conducted partly at the Open University and partly at Imperial College in London.  He studied for a degree in chemistry at Imperial college before that.  He knew an awful lot about mass spectrometry, and organic chemistry too.  During my year, I got to know Duncan very well professionally and personally and we became good friends.  When I left in 1994 we remained in contact; he came to both my stag party and wedding in 2000.  In 2005, he tragically died from a heart condition aged only 40.  As I mine my memory while writing this chapter, and dig into the mass spectrometry literature, I note that he became chair of the molecular spectroscopy group at the Royal Society of Chemistry and there is an annual Duncan Bryant award within that field of study.

I was extremely lucky to have Duncan as my supervisor, and even more fortunate to know him as a friend.  Beyond his intellectual prowess in chemistry, he was an all round intellect.  A handful of us went to the weekly pub quiz at the Primrose in Tonbridge, and every Sunday evening we also attended the pub quiz at the Cardinal’s Error, also in Tonbridge.  Duncan had sought out the Cardinal’s error due to its unique moniker.  He was a real ale aficionado; a shameless Queen fan and a huge fan of dub reggae, notably Scientist and King Tubby.  As well as lighting my scientific touch paper, he is responsible for turning me on to two of the great 20^th century symphony composers:  Shostakovich and Sibelius.  He was a rare mix of gifted, academic scientist; cultured intellect and hilarious drinker.  He was a big Alexei Sayle fan, and like all good intellectuals he was quite a leftie, also partly responsible for shifting my politics to the left of centre.  Back in 1993 and 1994, we had a lot of fun and I learnt loads from him.

He obviously trusted me and spotted something in me that I didn’t fully realise at the time, that I still don’t fully realise now; that I was also quite a competent intellect too.  My academic pedigree and paper qualifications don’t really stack up here, but as – after Duncan – one of the funniest and sharpest minds I know is one Simon Lee, painter, decorator and 1990s Glastonbury festivals friend, who left school very angry at sixteen; I learnt early on that qualifications bear little correlation to the quality of one’s mind; they only correlate to the quality of one’s conscientiousness and compliance.  Conscientiousness and compliance are clearly important in the modern world; but do they make the world go around, do they – on their own – fulfil us and give us purpose?  More on that another time…

After a few weeks of learning the ropes on the VG Trio and watching Brian’s meticulous beard stroking as he pondered the molecular fragment ions on some of my mass spectra, Duncan decided that I could be the first undergraduate student trained to use the Sciex API-III.  This was very exciting because the Sciex looked much like the WOPR – the super computer in the 1983 film “War games” starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy.  It was also exciting, as I was beginning to understand that electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry was at the cutting edge of analytical technology, particularly in the study of large, fragile, organic molecules; peptides and proteins.

At interview I had some well prepared patter about polarity; stationary and mobile phases and chromatography.  I knew little of mass spectrometry, nor was I expected to, so I wasn’t really quizzed on it.  When I was first assigned to the mass spec lab, fear of the unknown led to some mild disappointment that I wasn’t working in the chromatography labs.  There were some prettier girls up in the chromatography labs, notably Cathriona.  At first, Duncan’s bendy, mildly eccentric intellectualism and Brian’s precise form of pedantry weren’t quite the match for pretty girls and a tangible, university linked application of analytical chemistry.  How wrong I was.

Science is a bit like a great album.  If it makes sense straight away, or hooks you on first listen; you’ll soon tire of it.  If it is complex, abstract, awkward; perhaps a little mysterious – it will lure you in, get under your skin and stay with you forever.  My conversations with Duncan enlightened me in a way Dr Elizabeth Tyrell’s; Dr Andrew Cooper’s; Dr Alastair Mann’s or Mrs Daphne Eadington’s lectures never could.  I had a 1:1 audience with a real, practicing, pioneering scientist and I learnt a lot by bouncing around a mixture of ideas, questions and playful banter.  My deep voyage into molecular spectroscopy was built on some solid foundations from A level chemistry:  simple organic chemistry reactions (e.g. carboxylic acid + alcohol à ester + water); calculating molecular mass from chemical formulae and the names of key functional groups within molecules (alcohol, aldehyde, ketone, carboxylic acid, ester, alkane, alkene, amine, amide, etc); but in the most part I was learning on the job, learning by asking questions and trying things out.

To be a great molecular spectroscopist, or mass spectrometrist, it helped if you were both a great synthetic organic chemist and a great analytical scientist.  To be a successful chromatographer required analytical skill but not a deep knowledge of organic chemistry.  Chromatographers develop methods and separate mixtures.  Chromatography is a versatile range of techniques useful for separating impurities and mixtures; and it can be used to quantify components in a mixture.  There are generally two methods developed in projects using chromatography: 1) assay – to quantify the % purity of the active ingredient in the drug substance (e.g. white powder), or in the drug product (e.g. tablet / inhaler / cream) and 2) impurity profile – this will quantify all the relative % amounts in a mixture.  Chromatography will prove that you have a mixture.  It can separate the components in a mixture.  And there is a lot of skill and complex science in developing robust and reliable chromatographic methods, but chromatography cannot identify the components in a mixture.  A technique such as mass spectrometry is needed for that.  The process of structure elucidation to identify unknowns in a mixture really indulged my curiosity.  It was like solving a mystery with every sample.

Most of the samples we tested in the lab were intermediates in synthetic chemistry reaction routes.  Samples were dissolved, diluted and injected into the mass spectrometer.  A simple molecular weight test would take a few minutes; if the chemist wanted to have an indication of purity, and then identify any unknowns, several runs on the Sciex would be required, taking maybe 10 to 15 minutes.  Sometimes the interpretation and analysis of the ensuing mass spectra would take 30 minutes, sometimes over an hour.  Occasionally we would carry out HPLC-MS-MS on final drug substance, or a key intermediate; fully characterising and identifying each chromatographic peak.  Including sample preparation time, and characterisation time this could be a big, day long, job.  Some days, I would be chained to the Sciex in the lab, preparing samples, working through the backlog of samples and intermittently bantering with Duncan, or Marion, or Paul from the NMR lab next door.  Other days, I’d be at my desk, interpreting mass spectra; recording, reporting and filing data.  The best part of the job was reporting the results to the synthetic chemists.

A brief technical interlude: The Chemical Development Process   I am conscious that a lot of this chapter has veered into technical jargon, inaccessible to the lay person or untrained chemist.  Much of this brief technical interlude became apparent to me later in my career, while working at Pfizer from 2001-2011; but it is relevant now to help you, dear reader, try to make sense of the chemical development process and some key terms.   A medicine can be delivered as a tablet, an injection, a cream, an oral liquid or an inhaler (there are other dosage forms).  Common to all these dosage forms is the API, or active pharmaceutical ingredient.  At SmithKline Beecham (and other pharmaceutical companies), the API was referred to as the Drug Substance (DS) and the final dosage form (e.g. tablet) referred to as the Drug Product (DP).  In chemical development, we were only concerned with the drug substance.   At SmithKline Beecham, Tonbridge in 1993 and 1994; chemical development was split into three unequal parts: synthetic chemistry, process chemistry and analytical sciences.  The process chemists, including some chemical engineers scaled up reaction processes onto the pilot plant.  The pilot plant was used for manufacturing process trials but also to manufacture drug substance for clinical trials.  I had little to do with the process chemists.   By the time a potential medicine reaches chemical development, the final intended drug molecule is known.  The synthetic chemists’ aim is to create a safe, cost effective, impurity free and commercially viable synthetic route to this known, novel chemical substance.  An example of a synthetic route is shown below.                                           There is a lot of chemistry within one synthetic route.  Initially this work will be carried out on a small scale, with specialist reaction vessels and equipment in fume-hoods within conventional synthetic chemistry labs.   The intermediates or final drug substance will then be submitted for characterisation by a range of analytical techniques; and as the route and chemistry develops, more specific analytical methods will be developed.  This is where the analytical sciences department takes over; working closely with the chemists to qualify, quantify and develop their reaction schemes.   Structure elucidation – either proving the chemist has made what he or she thinks they have made, or identifying unwanted products from a reaction, or low level impurities, is carried out using a combination of NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance), MS (mass spectrometry) and IR (infra-red spectroscopy).  IR offers a fingerprint spectrum for a molecule and NMR probably provides the most structural detail but mass spectrometry can also provide useful structural information, as well as the molecular weight of the analyte.  NMR and IR are non-destructive techniques (i.e. the sample can be retained for further use or analysis) while mass spectrometry is a destructive technique.  Where mass spectrometry comes into its own is in its sensitivity.  Very little sample is needed.   A tiny amount of material is required for analysis and it can detect chemical substances down to very low levels.  In June 2017, at a small education meeting of science teachers, there was a talk from the resident mass spectrometrist at the British museum.  It was a nostalgic trip down memory lane for me.  He gave a brief background into electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry and then described how they could analyse a tiny fragment of a glaze on an ancient piece of pottery.  The subsequent identification of the dyes and pigments in the glaze allowed them to make links to trading routes and helped with dating the item of pottery.  Mass spectrometry is now an immensely powerful tool not just in drug development, but in art history; anthropology; archaeology; forensic science and food safety testing.   A brief technical interlude:  Chromatography   Chromatography is a far more widespread and commonly used analytical technique than mass spectrometry.  At school we are taught that chromatography is used to separate different coloured dyes in ink, paint or food colourings.  Hopefully your science teacher explained that the different coloured dyes in the mixture being analysed are separated on the basis of their differing solubility in the solvent (typically water or ethanol at school).  This is a classic, very visual and engaging piece of analytical chemistry taught in school.  We all have to understand it just a tiny little bit to score well in our chemistry GCSE.  After too many years of studying and applying chemistry I have learnt that this is just the tip of the chromatography iceberg; an over simplification of some complex chemistry for little purpose other than satisfying an exam specification.    In a chromatographic technique there is a stationary phase and a mobile phase.  One will be polar and the other non polar.  Depending on the affinity of the molecule, or molecules, being analysed for the polar phase or the non-polar phase will determine the separation.  Water is a polar solvent.  So a dye which dissolves well in water will also be quite polar (like dissolves like).  Such a dye will travel further with the water, and therefore travel further up the paper in classic school paper chromatography.  This means the dye has greater affinity for the polar, mobile phase and less affinity for the non-polar stationary phase.  A dye which doesn’t really like water very much (does not dissolve well in water, has low polarity) won’t travel with the water; instead it will prefer to hang out with the less polar stationary phase, in this case the paper.   This principle is applied to gas chromatography and liquid chromatography.  The latter technique is the most versatile in the analysis of polar and semi-polar drug molecules.  Most drugs have to dissolve and work their magic in living systems (the cells of our bodies), where the universal solvent is water; so they are inherently polar molecules.   In a high performance liquid chromatograph (HPLC), the stationary phase inside the separating column can be polar (normal phase HPLC, Cathriona’s speciality) or more typically nowadays non-polar (reverse phase HPLC) with the solvent (often an aqueous [water] and organic solvent mixture) being the opposite polarity of the stationary phase.   Method development involves “playing around” with the polarity of each phase, to optimise the separation of all the products of a reaction mixture.  For both GC and HPLC there are a range of detectors available for use.  Mass spectrometry is a popular choice in the pharmaceutical industry because of its specificity, its sensitivity and the option of further qualitative analysis (e.g. structural elucidation) of the components of the mixture. An HPLC-MS-MS system has become one of the jewels in the crown of analytical chemistry within the pharmaceutical industry.

            The walk from the mass spec lab, into building A (endearingly old) or the first or second floor of building B (quite modern), where the synthetic chemistry labs were became a regular occurrence.  I loved entering the labs, with their fumehoods full of complex, entangled glassware, and their glass guards annotated with chemical structures.  A synthetic chemistry lab bears considerable resemblance to a university lab, even a school lab; while the complex, expensive and state of the art analytical sciences labs were a million miles from anything I encountered at school or university.  So, a synthetic chemistry lab was a little closer to home, to my sphere of reference at the time; less intriguing but closer to most people’s general perception of chemistry:  lots of potions, reactions, sights and smells, instead of a soulless, mysterious big grey box full of abstract and unfathomable tricks.

            Sometimes my discussions with the chemists were brief, depending on the predictability and simplicity of the results.  On other occasions, longer discussions ensued – either because there was an unexpected result, or a new impurity had been identified, or the particular chemist enjoyed indulging my new found love of mass spectral interpretation, or – sometimes – the particular chemist enjoyed nurturing or tutoring my understanding of organic chemistry reaction schemes.  Some of the chemists were aloof, introverted, perhaps even nonchalant; but most gave me a lot of time, and seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say.  This boosted my scientific confidence.

            There were some quirky, and rather odd individuals:  One guy who shall remain nameless, I enjoyed speaking with a lot, but he had a rather unfortunate habit of rummaging in his trousers during conversation.  Another guy, partial to the burgeoning rave scene of the time, was mysteriously removed from the organisation.  There were rumours that one of the intermediates he was synthesizing was one reaction step away from MDMA (the drug molecule better known as Ecstasy).  Others spoke in strange voices while adorning distasteful brown ties and jackets.  Some had spectacularly unkempt beards.   But most were just regular guys – whatever that means.  The chemist who took me under his wing most of all was the affable, fun-loving, charming and rather brilliant chemist, Dr David Ennis.  He was working on some B-lactam antibiotics, in the wake of SmithKline Beecham’s success with Augmentin (amoxicillin and clavulanic acid).  He is now vice-president of chemical development at AstraZeneca.  Another chemist whose career was going stratospheric who also gave me a lot of time, was the equally fun-loving and very personable, Dr Dave Lathbury.  I also have fond memories of collaborative discussions with Ian Andrews, Jerome Hayes, Steve Smith and Richard Atkins.

            Collectively these guys proved that I was good listener (contrary to popular belief), a fast learner and that some of the chemistry to which I was exposed during my first two years at Kingston, and during A level must have some how infused with the unconscious neurons of my mind.  This proves to me, that exposure to ideas, to hooks, to concepts at school or university can be useful later on in life; even if you don’t consciously commit it to memory for an exam or test at the time.  It also proves to me that stored, remembered, rote, regurgitated knowledge is not the key; rather the ability to discuss, to listen, to assimilate and apply new information seems more important.  Yes, some facts and some language is key here; but is success in a technical, niche, scientific career really dependent upon the 10 years of rigid science curriculum learning at school?  Not sure.  We’ll revisit this another time…

            Upon reflection, what my technical and social interactions with the chemists highlighted to me was that I was a highly collaborative, people-orientated scientist.  Working with one, two or a handful of others in a lab, in a narrow field of science can be a lot of fun; the joy of finding things out and solving problems was certainly part of the attraction of science to me; but more significantly it was sharing my findings with others, discussing data, making decisions and working collaboratively which I enjoyed most.

            This was my Eureka moment.  Suddenly, I was deeply engaged with one tiny aspect of chemistry (and an even smaller aspect of science), and I was relishing solving problems that had never been solved before; using and applying a nascent development of an important analytical technique; working with state of the art equipment and technology; but most importantly I was working with others, collaborating with others, I was working in a team and between teams; across departmental interfaces.  I was part of something new, something bigger than myself, something bigger than one small team of individuals.  Essentially my work, and all the learning associated with it, had purpose; and more importantly I had a pervading sense that those around me, who I really enjoyed working with, shared the same sense of purpose.

            The majority of my year was split between developing my practical, theoretical and collaborative science skills.  I loved lab life, I loved the cerebral nature of interpreting mass spectra, I loved learning from and working with Duncan (Bryant), Dave (Ennis) and Mike (Webb) and loved being a fully integrated member of the mass spec team, working collaboratively across departmental interfaces.  This was the year I fell in love with science, and the possibilities of science.  Duncan (and to a lesser degree, Dave and Mike) had far greater influence over me than any number of university lecturers, or schoolteachers ever did, or could.  They used and applied science in their work, rather than merely knowing science and passing it on.  For the first time, I found a way of channelling my extraversion and gregarious nature into being an effective scientist.  Those three individuals saw something in me, encouraged something in me, and nurtured something in me that I had not previously realised existed.  They were nothing less than inspirational.

            The only condition of my industrial placement year, from Kingston university’s perspective, was that I carry out some research; which would ideally become part of my final year dissertation.  Duncan had big plans for me.  We adapted the ionspray (nebuliser gas assisted electrospray) source of the Sciex API-III mass spectrometer to allow the toggling between standard zero grade air, and deuterated[11] ammonia (ND₃).  My research project was titled “Hydrogen / Deuterium exchange in ionspray mass spectrometry.”  This work allowed me to identify labile[12] protons [hydrogen atoms] in organic molecules, including proteins and peptides; and ultimately compare the number of labile protons in a native and denatured protein [myoglobin].  Working with Duncan, and then independently, to gather and process a lot of data for this project was fulfilling.  By the time I had written up all my results, published an internal report and presented my work to the analytical sciences department, I felt an immense sense of pride.  This had consumed three months of my working life.  I am pleased to have had the opportunity to work on such cutting edge and beneficial technology – it is part of my “Eureka – yes! I am scientist year”; but I think it also confirmed that I don’t have the consistent focus, single-mindedness or deep enough interest in any one particular field of science to be a proper research scientist.

A brief technical interlude:  Electrospray mass spectrometry, protein analysis and labile protons   As alluded to earlier, mass spectrometry analyses molecular ions and identifies their mass.  Mass spectrometry can only separate, analyse and detect charged species; so molecules have to ionised before introduction into a mass spectrometer.  Traditional ionisation techniques are often harsh and break the molecular ion into ionised fragments (smaller parts of the molecule).   The beauty of electrospray (and nebuliser gas assisted electrospray, ionspray) is that the ionisation occurs at atmospheric pressure.  Tiny charged droplets are created in the ion source, which evaporate to form charged ions.  The pressure difference between the ion source and the vacuum chamber of the mass spectrometer is huge, so the combination of “tiny holes” and “very big pumps” are used to overcome this challenge.  Ionisation in the aqueous state at atmospheric pressure makes ionspray a very “soft” ionisation technique.  This means it can be used for analysing fragile, labile drug molecules and large organic molecules such a proteins without fragmenting the molecule.   Electrospray doesn’t ionise molecules by removing electrons to create positively charged ions, instead it protonates, or ammoniates by adding H+ or NH4+ ions to molecules basic centres to create positively charged molecular ions.  Therefore molecules need to be polar entities, to be suitable for analysis by electrospray.    In a triple quadrupole analyser like the Sciex, a molecular ion can be selected and then MS/MS analysis can be carried out, bombarding and fragmenting the molecular ion to allow more detailed mass spectral analysis and structural elucidation.   Proteins Proteins are biological polymers, or macromolecules.  Living cells in animals and plants contain many different proteins of many different shapes and sizes, with a broad range of functions.  Proteins are much larger and more complex molecules than conventional drug molecules.  Aspirin and Paracetamol have molecular masses of less than 200 mass units, and some of the largest “small molecule” medicines – notably the corticosteroids, used as preventive treatments for asthma or COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), have masses in the region of 500 mass units.  One of the smallest known proteins (insulin) has a molecular mass of approximately 5800 Da, ten times larger than the largest small molecule medicines.  Most proteins are significantly larger than Insulin.  Horse myoglobin (found in muscle cells) has a mass ~16,900Da; Haemoglobin approx. 64,000Da and monoclonal antibodies are in the region of 150,000Da.   The large molecular size of proteins is based upon their unique sequence of amino acids, made from just 20 naturally occurring “monomers” which we, humans, digest and extract from the proteins in food (meat, fish, eggs, milk, beans, pulses etc).  Amino acids are joined via peptide bonds (or amide functional groupings) to create the proteins primary structure.  As so many amino acids are chemically joined together, each with a variety of functional side groups in their side chains or “R groups”, they can interact to form secondary, tertiary and sometimes quarternary structures.  It is the these higher tier intra-molecular interactions (physical bonding with the protein molecule), as opposed to the chemical bonding within the primary amino acid sequence; which gives the protein its unique 3D structure, and function.  We often describe this a protein folding.   The two previous challenges with the analysis of proteins by mass spectrometry are 1) the fragility of the large complex molecules and 2) their large mass being way beyond the range of any conventional mass scanner.   Electrospray ionisation overcomes this by being soft enough not to destroy or fragment the molecule during ionisation.  Secondly as mass spectrometers measure mass to charge ratio, electrospray ionisation will protonate numerous basic centres in a protein molecule to create multiply charged ions.  These multiply charged ions can be de-convoluted by specialist mass spectrometry computer software to identify the molecular ion as shown below.     Labile protons   Hydrogen atoms in organic molecules are described as protons by chemists.  A labile proton is an intra (part of, or within) molecular hydrogen atom which is quite reactive; so it can easily be “lost”: substituted or eliminated in chemical reactions.  Inside mass spectrometers, labile protons can be exchanged with deuterium atoms.  Each exchanging proton for a deuterium will increase the mass by 1 mass unit.  So carrying out H/D exchange experiments in mass spectrometry will give the chemist, or analyst, useful information about the chemical structure of molecular or fragment ions, and some information about the chemistry of different functional groups within the molecule.  This is another powerful tool in the mass spectrometrist’s armoury.   It is particularly powerful for protein chemists to try to solve and identify protein folding and structure.  As proteins can exist in a native or denatured state, the number of exposed labile protons in their structures can vary greatly.  In the native (or natural state) – which is how they exist in nature, particularly in living systems or natural products (animal cells, plant cells, raw eggs, fresh milk etc) – they will be folded into complex, twisted shapes which determine their functionality, their chemistry and their solubility.  When they are denatured by changes in temperature, pH or agitation (mixing force), their complex secondary, tertiary and quarternary structures can unfold; releasing, exposing or simply making many more labile protons available for exchange, as those protons are no longer involved in intra-molecular hydrogen bonding or other physical interactions within the molecule.    In my project, the largest protein I studied was Horse Myoglobin in the native and denatured states.  I calculated that there are 262 possible protons available in a myoglobin molecule.  In my experiments in 1994, I observed a range of 200 – 255 labile protons in the denatured (unfolded) state; while only a range of 185 – 194 protons exchanged in the native state.  This was one hell of an Eureka moment for both Duncan and me! N.B.  The most common example of a native and denatured protein is egg albumin (or egg white).  When raw it is slimy, gloopy, transparent and NATIVE.  When it is cooked it is more rigid, white, opaque and DENATURED.  One of the most annoying things about being a science teacher is the over simplification of physical changes as reversible (e.g. melting, dissolving, evaporating) and chemical changes as irreversible (chemical reactions – fizzing, colour changes etc).  Cooking is certainly irreversible – baking a cake, or cooking egg white cannot easily be reversed; but too many science teachers, and more alarmingly science textbooks automatically describe cooking as a chemical change.  If you burn or brown something, then yes, there is chemical change; but gently cooking egg white is an irreversible, PHYSICAL change.  The chemical bonding within the protein has not changed, but the complex intra-molecular interactions have irreversibly changed.    When we melt a crystal of ice we break physical interactions in the crystal lattice.  These can easily reform upon re-freezing as water molecules are simple and regular and the inter-molecular (between molecules) hydrogen bonds rigid, repeating and easy to reform (in the right conditions).  The difference with the intra-molecular[13] (within molecules) is that they form in very specific conditions within nature (in living cells).  If broken due to small changes to temperature, pH or vibration / agitation; there are simply too many interactions, and they are too complex to reform; so proteins are irreversibly denatured when cooked; but unless very strongly heated, they may remain chemically intact, or unchanged…

            My transformative year ended with the annual SmithKline Beecham Analytical Sciences Colloquium at Robinson college, Cambridge.  We all stayed in college accommodation, while the students were away in the summer, attended lots of science talks, drank a lot and ended our evening having a good old fashioned knees up in a bedsit with a piano.

            It is easy, as I write this – 25 years on – to identify my year at SmithKline Beecham as the year I became a scientist, as the year I became properly interested in chemistry, and as the year that inspired my career in science.  At the time, I lived each week as it came, without any concrete plans for the future, other than drinking lots of beer and going to lots of raucous gigs.  I was on a journey, but there was no clear destination.

After my Eureka year, I went back to university, worked my socks off as I could finally see the purpose of gaining a good degree, got a 2:1, decided against a PhD due to my errant, meandering and creative mind not being keen on settling tenaciously to one narrow field of research. I got a job as a graduate chemist with Zeneca Agrochemicals: formulating colloidal suspensions of fungicides and herbicides. I loved the creative, collaborative and communicative elements of the job; the “cooking with chemicals” to design and develop new products. I enjoyed working with engineers to transfer processes into manufacturing and travelling to Scotland, Austria, Switzerland, Amsterdam and the US as part of my role.

After 6 years, I’d fallen in love with Amanda and got married. We had truly settled in Kent which ceased to be an option for continuing employment with Zeneca, once Syngenta formed in 2001. So while I’d have liked to take up the opportunity to become an international corporate scientific playboy, family life in the garden of England won the battle and a sideways move to Pfizer ensued.

At Pfizer, I initially joined as a “bioneer” formulating freeze dried proteins. Then I moved on to controlled release technology, trying to get Viagra to work in the evening – and the morning! Then, fed up with endless project plans, microsoft project and its ensuing gantt charts I crafted a move into the Materials Science group where I specialised in the solid state and powder properties of potential drug substance for treating asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorders (COPD) via dry powder inhalation devices.

Throughout my 17 years in industry I immersed myself deep in narrow fields of technical detail, I endlessly bounced ideas and experiments, problems and solutions, around with other scientists, I was curious, creative and collaborative and then, as mentioned about five hours ago at the beginning of this outrageously long post, I decided that I’d done science and it was time to pass the baton on…

This leads on to summer blog number 3 – which I promise will be shorter. And more about education, science, skills, knowledge than my self-indulgent, accidental journey into science…

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[1] Note that I write ‘information’ and NOT ‘knowledge’.  Knowledge is something that is acquired, grappled with and understood.  A text book contains someone else’s knowledge which may with effort, concentration and time become your knowledge too – but the reading of it, or the blind copying of it is merely information.

[2] 1980s and early 1990s ITV dating show presented by the late Cilla Black

[3] In chemistry you can predict a 100% yield from a reaction, which is the largest possible mass of product depending on the mass of the ingoing reactants and their stoichiometry (how much of reactant A reacts with reactant B etc – this relates to both molecular mass, the specific chemical groups that can react in the molecule and the concentration of the reactants).  The yield is then calculated by dividing your produced mass (once filtered and dried) by the total possible mass and multiplying by 100.  Stoichiometry is a complex concept to explain here in a couple of sentences. 

[4] I’ll explain what mass spectrometry is in more detail, a little later in the chapter…

[5] Later, in 1995, Glaxo would takeover Wellcome to form Glaxo Wellcome.  In 2000, GlaxoWellcome merged with SmithKline Beecham to form Glaxo SmithKline, commonly known as GSK, still one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world in 2018.

[6] The M25 is the London orbital motorway.  It is 117 miles, or 188km, long and passes through parts of Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Essex.

[7] Walton oaks was another smaller R&D site near Reigate in Surrey, who partnered Tonbridge.   SB’s veterinary medicines were developed there.  Pfizer later bought SB animal health and the site.  Walton Oaks is now, in 2018, Pfizer’s European commercial headquarters.

[8] NMR: nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.  I used to understand this.  It is a complex analytical technique involving very large magnets.  I’ll talk about it a bit later.

[9] A fumehood is a contained work bench, attached to the building’s extraction system.  These allow noxious solvents and hazardous chemicals to be worked on, with little or no risk to the scientist.

[10] Griffiths, Jennifer, “A brief history of Mass Spectrometry”, Anal. Chem. 2008, 80, 5678-5683

[11] Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen.  Instead of the atomic nucleus of hydrogen containing a single proton, deuterium contains a single proton and a single neutron.  So deuterium has an atomic mass of 2 while hydrogen has an atomic mass of 1.  The chemistry of hydrogen and deuterium is very similar.  So using deuterated ammonia gas, ND₃, [ammonia is a gas with chemical formula NH₃] allows deuteration of molecular ions; and labile proton and deuterium exchange in molecules.

[12] Reactive, or easily exchangeable

[13] Molecules need to be quite large and complex for intra-molecular interactions and hydrogen bonds to form.  Intermolecular (between 2 or more separate molecules) hydrogen bonds are the basis behind crystallography and the rigid, repeating patterns found in molecular crystals.  Typically proteins cannot form molecular crystals as they are too large and floppy, but they can form intra-molecular interactions (sometimes called physical bonds) which determine their structure, function and purpose in living organisms.

1. Why Science?  A meandering purge of some different perspectives on why we teach this multifarious beast of a subject. Also includes a diversion into why we educate and some modern forces acting against that noble aim.

This long blog is a purge of my meandering, incoherent riffing on the topics of Why educate? and Why Science? including the listing of four modern and powerful forces acting against education (Materialism, Individualism, Disneyfication & Trophy Children).  My next blog (summer edublog post no 2) will be another indulgent purge of my personal experience, describing how I became a scientist by accident and then a teacher by intent, but more interestingly pondering why I became a scientist; why my mind and character works the way it does and what impact – if any – my school education had on this.

This will lead into blog 3, consideration of the provocative and seductive call to arms from Educational revolutionaries Sir Ken Robinson, Sir Anthony Seldon, Guy Claxton, Bill Lucas, Nick Corston (@ST3AMCo), Sir Mark Grundy at Shireland Academy, Peter Hyman and Oli de Botton at School 21 and the pioneering ethos of Bedales school.

Blog 4 will flip the perspective and get inside the rational heads of the knowledge-rich counter arguments, drawing upon the thinking of Daisy Christodoulou, Christine Counsell, Martin Robinson, Clare Sealy and many more.

Blog 5 will consider how we could flip the system and build a bottom up curriculum in contrast to the top down system we have at present.  This will be heavily influenced by @solomon_teach and @Suchmo83.  What do we actually all need to know, in contrast with what do we need to know for that big exam in five years time…

Blog 6 will shine a spotlight on my thematic KS3 Science curriculum design and the thinking behind it.

Blog 7 will explore how I will sequence and structure each termly theme:  core knowledge first (60-65%), then investigation skills (15 – 30%) followed by projects and research (10 – 20%).

Finally in Blog 8, I will share some thinking we are doing at school about colour coding different ‘learning zones’ making modes of learning more explicit (e.g. direct instruction, group work, independent research, classroom discussion and debate) with an individual lesson existing in one zone, or a clear combination of zones, with the children understanding more about the relative merits, shortcomings (and required behaviours) of each colour coded learning zone.

Across my summer edublog octology, I’m going to ask a lot of questions.  How? When? Who? The all important What?  What again?  More How?  Know-How?  How again? You what? When do you expect me to do all this? WhyWhatWhenHow?  There is, quite rightly, some renewed focus on the What? at the moment and a temporary (I’m sure) respite from the How?  Ish.  But first, we start with a Why?  Why sets the tone.  Why gives us purpose.  Why is why we get out of the bed in the morning.  

One of my favourite INSET “training” courses was back in January 2016.  It was about leadership (not great big SLT leadership, but personal leadership; leadership in the classroom; leadership in our roles; leadership over our careers).  Sounds awful, doesn’t it?  Thankfully, it was presented by an actor, darling!  And set to Shakespeare’s Henry V.  Whether or not I learnt anything useful for the classroom doesn’t matter here, I learnt quite a lot about myself and many of my colleagues; it also vindicated my then nascent views on this honourable profession we call teaching.   Henry V actor bloke told us all that we will always be squeezed and pushed and shoved and manipulated and patronised and belittled throughout out careers.  He told us that we’d be exposed to a never-ending torrent of ill-thought out initiatives and slippery ladder climbers (Radiohead quote from Paranoid Android:  ambition makes you look pretty ugly) which he then offset by reminding us that we all had our purpose, and that we must – wherever practicably possible – let our own sense of purpose (why we teach) guide our roles, our classroom demeanour and our careers.  And of course he challenged us to make damn sure we had a purpose.  He also divided us into Warriors, Medicine women and two other categories I can’t remember.  And he prattled on about Henry’s dark night of the soul.  And how we’d have these quite often in teaching.  So, purpose.  Yeah.  Important.

I don’t think I can do any justice to the question of why we teach? or why we educate? or why school?  I’ll leave that to those with deeper insight and experience than me (but possibly with more bias and greater tendency towards self-preservation, self-promotion or comfortable maintenance of the status quo).  I do, however, believe I have a view worth considering on the very big question of Why science?  Back to that in (several) moments.

But first a brief why educate diversion.  What has become apparent to me is the importance accorded to education from those professionally in education. Obviously!  The idea that we educate with no other meaningful purpose other than to educate has been eloquently articulated by @bennewmark.  Academics certainly favour this view.  It resonates strongly with me.  But this, I don’t think, is why our education system exists (though it may be why it should exist).  And I don’t think many outside education (or many children inside education) share this view.  Collectively modern, affluent, right of centre, Western economies have an increasingly utilitarian, economically driven, view of education.  Parents, children and many teachers regularly express this view:  if you don’t work hard, you won’t get good grades and if don’t get good grades you won’t be able to prove you’re clever or get to the best universities and get the best degrees and then you won’t be able to get the best job.  And if you aren’t eligible for the best jobs you won’t make much money, you won’t be able to provide for your kids and you’ll lead a miserable life.  This mindset, however much the predominantly left leaning teaching profession denies it, is rife in our Thatcherite / Blairite / Govian / Johnsonian politics and society.

Since the establishment of the original ivory towers of academia and – much later – the establishment of mainstream education for all, society beyond the school gates has become rather more complex.  Yet school has remained virtually the same.  It’s main priority is to inculcate academic knowledge and to provide young people with qualifications they can take into adult (working) life [even if many teachers don’t fully subscribe to this purpose].  Schools are pretty good at this, and they have six hours a day, for five days a week, for 38 weeks of the year, for 14 years of our lives to do it. 

When I visited Nepal in 2002, the only time I’ve ventured beyond the affluence of Western Europe and the USA, I was struck by how dedicated the children were to getting an education.  Some of them walked 2.5 hours each way to school to be couped up with about 80 others of varying ages in one room.  They knew the benefits of an education.  They knew the struggle.  This must have been how going to school felt back home in the industrial revolution, and right up until the 1950s.  Most families lived in tiny houses, full of siblings.  They saw the struggle and effort of their parents and they understood how education was a pathway to a better life.  While lessons and classrooms may not have been the whizz-bang, hi-tech, multi-coloured feast for the eyes they have now become; school may have been a welcome escape from the hard work of home life, with no labour saving devices, no TV, no internet, not even the Sunday night top 40 to record on TDK90.  School would have been perceived as a route out of poverty, or out of mundanity and into a life of improved status, wealth and prosperity.  Is it perceived that way by the majority of the population anymore?

Also, school was about academics.  Everything else happened outside school.  Communities were built around church, Sunday school, perhaps the local football team, the youth club.  Families sat together and talked together and worked together.  Year groups and expected progress hadn’t been invented.  Schools were not asked to provide a minimum amount of PSHE, PE, Art, Music, Character education, Mindfulness, Wellbeing etc because these things all happened outside school.  I have no problem with schools being asked to provide these things, but in 6 hours a day?  In 8 or 9 hours a day maybe, but not 6.  I cannot write with any authority on this at all, as from the age of 8, I attended private schools – initially as a day pupil from 8:30am – 6pm (it was all sport and clubs after 3pm) and then as a full time boarder from the age of 12, only going home once every 3 weeks.  So I was enriched at school in Drama and Art and Sport and Chapel, never-ending bloody Chapel (but with hindsight – in spite of my agnosticism – I’d take this over meaningless mindfulness assemblies.  The implicit wisdom of thoughts for the day, or Sunday sermons, trumping the modern deluge of explicit Disneyesque messages of kindness).

So, before returning to my original question of Why Science, I have concluded there are four main factors which beset modern schools and education.  And the modern trad Vs prog or knowledge Vs skills dichotomies are a mere sideshow.

1. Materialism.  We are all greedy bastards.  We want what our neighbours have, and more.  And most of us have it.  Luxurious, reliable private car(s).  Warm, spacious homes.  Television (with all day kid’s TV channels).  Netflix.  Boxsets.  Multiplex cinemas and bowling alleys.  Theme parks.  The Internet and its multitude of pernicious social media cousins.  Video games.  In our bedrooms.  A fridge.  And cupboards full of biscuits and snacks.  Holidays.  Not just time off, but holidays in the sun.  We are not spending our long summers bringing in the harvest anymore are we?  This is – of course – brilliant in so many ways, but we are likely to have a version of these things available to us whether we, or our parents, work long and hard or not.  The incentive to work hard, to graft, to struggle simply isn’t there anymore because we have it all (materially).  Pretty hard to get excited about school when all this is waiting for you at home, isn’t it?  And our materialist urges as a society have, in turn, devalued the teaching profession.  No longer are we the route to a life of riches, or greater standing in society.  Our pay and prestige has diminished in real terms since the free market economy has been given free reign over our lives.  I blame Maggie and her apostles.

• Individualism.  We used to be educated to become part of something, to take our knowledge and skills into the world and work with others to raise a family, to strengthen a community or to contribute professionally or manually to the greater good. To have a job for life.  To be looked after by the company we work for.  Now we have target grades, career ladders, appraisals and accountability measures.  We spend our working lives showing we’re doing a good job rather than simply being trusted to get on with doing a good job.  We are encouraged to put ourselves first, to look after number 1, to gold plate our GCSE grades.  We are constantly being compared as individuals (on a narrow wicket).  The strength and diversity of a team environment is not good enough, we have to up skill ourselves and have the shiniest CV of them all.  We have to win the Apprentice, Love Island, Strictly, X Factor or Bake off.  Education now feeds this individualistic tendency.  Some will argue that individualism is a positive, that those who deserve it succeed, rather than those fortunate enough to be born with a silver spoon in their mouth; but I think it brings out that ugly ambitious, dog eat dog, competiveness in us all.  It is all me me me, rather than us us us.  Ultimately we fragment.  Communities whither.  Tolerance wanes.  Our purpose becomes to climb the ladder of life, with no rational idea of why we want to climb it in the first place.  And we lose collective meaning. 

• Disneyfication.  In our growing knowledge that children are not just little adults, we have decided that school education is all about the kids, rather than a portal to a civilised and harmonious human society.  About meeting children’s needs, about giving them what they want, about entertaining them and making it “fun” or relevant.  About avoiding long words or abstract concepts.  About instant gratification.  About seeing the world from a perpetual 9 or 14 year old bubble.  About being Peter Pan.  This is a big problem.  Teachers (and schools) get played off against each other (“his lessons are more fun,” “miss lets us snapchat in her lessons,’ ‘our two hours a week in the zero gravity hologram immersion room are amaaaaazzzing”) and the growth and development of our minds descends into a schmaltzy happily ever after piece of insipid feelgood pap.  Of course, in the ideal world we should enjoy learning, enjoy school and feel happy and valued while there but there are so many better ways of doing that than Disneyfying the whole goddamn thing!

• Trophy children.  A bit more niche this one, though prevalent in my world of the independent prep school bubble and quite common too in leafy primary schools in affluent suburbs and villages across the land.  The cult of project parenting has grown exponentionally over the last 30 years.  Yes, of course we want the best for our children (whatever that means) but I’m not sure marching them to every sports club, drama club, music lesson, public speaking competition is the answer.  I’m not sure that spending 3 hours a day home schooling them (beyond the 6 or 9 hours at school each day) is helpful [30 minutes is probably good].  I’m not sure doing everything you can as a parent to never let your children experience the feeling of failure, or the feeling of freedom, or the feeling of boredom, is doing much good to society.  It is linked to the cult of the individual listed in number 2.  Unfortunately, educators are sometimes complicit in praising these families, celebrating the false positives of their exam or extra-curricular successes at school; potentially setting up a rather big fall in the brutal lottery of life later on.  The brilliantly named Mungo Dunnett spoke about this at a meeting of independent prep school heads I attended in May.  He showed one of the best powerpoint slides I’ve seen in a while:  a picture of a Ford Ka next to a picture of a Customised Ford Ka.  The Ford Ka is a perfectly functional car.  The customised one has lots of cosmetic features bolted on, but it is still basically a Ford Ka.  Like individualism and disneyfication, this project parenting epidemic erodes the trust in the teaching profession.  We are seen more as consultants and mentors who can optimise the excellence of each individual child, rather than play our trusted part in strengthening their character, improving their self-awareness and developing their minds as part of a greater whole.  Unfortunately the phrase, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is rapidly losing meaning in our self-obsessed modern world.

These four challenges permeate school in many ways and like many provocateurs before me I have no simple solution to them, but to get back on track I’m going to link the challenges of Materialism and Disneyfication to why some people think we teach Science in school.

We live in a Material world, chiefly thanks to previously unimaginable advances in Science and Technology.  Culture evolves at a pace we can adapt to and respond to, but technology is rampant, incredible, life-changing, terrifying.  Science can, and maybe will, be our saviour but more often than not it thrusts upon us amazing products none of us really need.  Science and technology are the foundations of our global economy.  Science drives the economy, so – in nations where economic leadership is in their DNA – the economy drives Science.  So the economy drives science education.

I was on a school trip to France recently.  In the surprisingly swift queue for the Eiffel tower, I – inevitably – found myself standing next to two American tourists.   They were both young men who’d just finished high school and were about to go on to university.  I didn’t beat about the bush, and asked them about Trump and one of them vociferously defended their leader as he is “doing great things for the economy…”

            “At what cost to international relations, or the poorer members of your society?” I retorted before quickly moving on to speak of their individualistic and super shiny career plans.  

They were friendly and confident and polite, with no sense of irony.  One spoke with infectious enthusiasm about his pending degree course in engineering.  He spoke about how he considered sponsorship by BMW but decided to plump for Michelin instead.  In America their big corporations are King.  They basically run the country (and the Western world).  They sponsor technical, vocational, degree courses in high demand professions.  They have a completely utilitarian worldview about Science, and Science education.  As an employee of Pfizer (America’s largest pharmaceutical company) in the UK for 10 years, I was very aware of the far more vocational / utilitarian basis of the US Science education system.  We are heading that way over here.  And there are many good reasons to do so, but it is still rather alien to our British cultural heritage, which has much more in common with Europe than we care to acknowledge.

Before Pfizer, I worked for Zeneca Agrochemicals for 6  years up until the formation of Syngenta (formed from the merger of the demerged AstraZeneca and Novartis agribusinesses).  In 2001, I was fortunate to be a member of the global technical integration team, collaborating on a project with ex Novartis scientists in Greensboro, North Carolina, US; ex Novartis scientists in Basel, Switzerland and colleagues from Zeneca in the UK.  The Americans were great, gung ho, experimental, innovative and perhaps slightly deluded as to their true abilities; over confident.  The Swiss were much more guarded, cautious, methodical, meticulous.  But the most interesting thing about Switzerland (and I saw this in Germany too when working at Pfizer and collaborating with Glatt technologies & the wonderful Prof Roland Bodmeier & Dr Martin Korber at Freie Universitat, Berlin) was their two tier scientific culture. 

They had a technical / vocational arm to their education system.  Academically trained scientists (graduates & postgraduates) ran the projects, interpreted data, planned experimental investigations and made high level scientific decisions but the technicians ran the labs, carrying out all practical work; ordering and maintaining equipment and smoking at their desks in the lab.  Yes, smoking!  Admittedly these were aqueous based liquid formulation labs (not organic synthesis labs full of flammable organic solvents), but I was astonished that in 2001, smoking was still going on inside commercial chemistry labs!  Apparently the senior scientists and managers who ran the site were powerless to stop the technicians from smoking in the labs due their unionised power in employment law. 

Apart from the smoking, I think a non-academic technical ladder (post 16) via apprenticeships is a good way to go.  You know that kid who grapples with the written word, who hates abstract concepts but then builds and manipulates an electrical circuit in seconds; or takes an engine to pieces and puts it back together in minutes: well they are currently devalued in the English education system.  When I was in industry in the UK as a fresh graduate, I was astonished how much money we were paying ex PhD students and postdoc researchers to pipette and dilute solutions, or to run routine samples on heavily automated kit. 

This is one of the reasons I am quite anti the dominance of, or importance accorded to, practical work in Science – for those on an academic pathway.  In the real world of Science most practical work is carried out by robots or technicians, with the scientists interpreting data, planning investigations, designing experiments and thinking.  Practical skills are one small facet of most fields of modern science.  Though, I do acknowledge the craft and manual dexterity of a practical chemist, instrument engineer or microscopist.  But these are skills that can be acquired or developed more efficiently at school in the art room, the DT room, or the sports field than in a lab studying for a scientific GCSE or A level course.

So far I’ve mentioned the US, the UK, Switzerland and Germany and their varied approaches to late stage science education with its more utilitarian, economically driven standing in those countries.  For contrast, I’d like to mention Spain.  Again my insight comes from a school visit on a school trip to Madrid last October.  I visited an all the way through school, funded by the Catholic church.  The head was amazing and really generous with her time.

In Spain, pure science courses in Biology, Chemistry or Physics are NOT compulsory post 14.  But History is.  In the UK, quite a lot of children drop history (excellent training for future scientists and researchers) aged 14 but compulsorily endure some version of academic Science until 16, along with Maths and English.  I found this very interesting.  The economically driven, utilitarian, STEM obsessed, more maths and physics grads please syndrome obviously hasn’t caught on in Spain.  No, they believe culture is more important.  And that History is the best medium by which to inculcate a deep sense of cultural understanding and belonging.  And I might be with them.  The headmistress explained that the sciences get complicated post 14, that they only resonate with a certain type of mind, that they are not for all.  She went on to say that those with an obvious propensity for, or capability in, the sciences were encouraged to stick with them.  She also told me that most children with a greater bent for the humanities or languages choose a history / culture of science as an option post 14, and that they don’t have national exams at 16, just internal school ones and public exams at 18 only.  I was quite seduced by this approach, even though it devalued the importance of my beloved science in schools, it was somehow more honest about the technical and cerebral complexity of science and maths; and how the brains of a significant swathe of the populous do not have the flexibility of mind, the logical reasoning, the patience, the conscientiousness or the desire to get inside the glorious, multifarious collection of scientific disciplines.  Or cutting through my verbosity – what is the point in teaching and testing children on stuff they can’t fully comprehend and are never going to apply, or study further in their adult lives?  Good question.

The Spanish proposition is perhaps more honest than our education system.  In that school isn’t really about science.  It is about the three Rs (Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic – all of which enable science later on) and then some culture and a weekly PE lesson bolted on top.  The sciences get their glory post school. 

The modern philosopher and thinker, Alain de Botton, writes about the dominance of English and History teachers, their teaching, assessment methods and their influence over the English education system in his chapter titled Education, in his book Religion for Atheists.  He – controversially – infers that the greater economic importance of both maths and the sciences are misappropriated and misrepresented in our education system; because quite simply great mathematicians and great scientists aged 23 rarely enter the teaching profession because the world of work is their oyster:  scientific research; applied science in the agricultural and healthcare sectors; in the food, pharmaceutical, chemical and household products industries; all forms of engineering and design; accountancy and economics; computer science; data processing and statistics; enterprise and business.  Whereas hotshot English, History and Geography graduates frequently do enter the teaching profession straight after university. 

This is a conversation I had with my dear friend and ex colleague Brian (mentioned in my previous blog), Head of Maths to my Head of Science.  We used to laugh at the much lower percentage grade boundaries in maths and science scholarship papers relative to English, History and French (Geography sat in the middle).  We concluded that our subjects are much harder for most people.  Or that most English, History and French teachers are much better at teaching than most Maths and Science teachers.  Or that our exam system, nay even our whole school system is skewed towards the ability to read, write and interpret words and passages of writing.   And that deeper understanding of number, of abstract concepts, of problem solving, of logic, of non-verbal reasoning and of rational thought is de-emphasized in school and deferred to higher education and beyond.  I do believe this to be true, but I think it probably has to stay this way.  Language comes first.  Culture comes second.  Science and technical complexity come third.  A question: if headships and SLTs were dominated by teachers with backgrounds in maths or the sciences (particularly those with experience in industry, academia or commerce before teaching) how different would our education system look and feel?  I wonder.

Before, I alienate all my English, Humanities and Languages teaching peers any further, I’d should say that if I could choose to teach any other subject, or retrain, I would teach Philosophy.  Also, in case I have accidentally come across as a scientific intellectual snob (absolutely not the intention) I should say that the majority of the true intellectuals I have met in my life (with the exception of my Scientific inspiration, the late and brilliant Dr Duncan Bryant – see next blog post, ‘the accidental scientist’) have been from an arts or humanities background.  A PhD or professorship in the arts and humanities also far rarer, and I suspect harder to come by, than one in the sciences, or the social sciences.

So far, I have offered one long, elaborate justification for why we should teach Science in school:  future study at university or employment in science, technology or engineering.  The utilitarian purpose, as most strongly advocated by our good friends in the US of A.

So finally, as I did @CurriculumEd on 1^st June, my brief canter through some very different perspectives on why we learn science at school and perhaps where our focus (at different stages of our education) should be.

Our perspective on this depends greatly on our experience of science.  So the media thinks science is really important because there is a lot of shit going down in the world that science has caused (plastic, obesity) or that science has revealed (climate change) or that science can solve (global energy supply; food security; disease prevention, earlier identification, diagnosis and cure; the aforementioned plastic, obesity, climate change etc).  So we better make sure we teach about this stuff in school.

The views of academic research scientists about our focus on school science are perhaps different to those of science teachers.  I love @DrWilkinsonSci view that we should spend a lot more time in primary school and KS3 focussing on hypothesis and how to convert scientific questions into experiments which prove or disprove our hypothesis, rather than the relentless and repetitive over-emphasis on fair testing and controlling variables.  Also from a scientific background, I find Professor Susan Greenfield’s (now Baroness Greenfield, former neuroscientist and Director of the Royal Institution) views expressed about the many pointless hours spent assembling and dismantling very specific scientific apparatus (e.g. distillation) at school, rather than being encouraged to think more deeply and critically about scientific concepts and ideas. 

Parent perspectives on Science teaching are interesting too.  Having taught the same cohort of children from Year 5 through to Year 8 at a prep school, I would describe many of them starting out as Dr Jekyll but ending up as Mr Hyde.  In year 5 they just wanted me to inspire them, to excite them about science, they loved my encouragement of their curiosity and creativity in science and the deep, cerebral discussions I encouraged.  But by year 8 they just wanted me to gold plate their exam results for entry to senior school, or for academic scholarship.  Just get them the bloody grade, son.  I don’t care about your fluffy edutainment or your cerebral off piste philosophy.  Teach them to pass, not to know.  Bollocks to thinking, just get them the effing grade.  Oh, and P.S.  what are YOU doing to make MY child better than average?  Mmmm.  I’d say most parents have become victims of our excessively exam-orientated exam system.  See earlier discussion about trophy children.

We’ve sort of done the utilitarian perspective to death, but I’ve skirted the prevalence of the economically driven STEM (science, technology, engineering & maths) agenda (this will feature much more heavily in summer blog number 3 when it comes – this is no 1 of 8!).  There is now the more creativity driven STEAM (A = art) agenda, which I quite like (up to a point – more of that much later in blog number 6 of 8!) but we could of course make the case for a SHAG faculty (science, history, art and geography) or maybe settle for a SHAM (science, history, art and maths).  I will discuss the importance of history teaching to future scientific research in blog no. 4 of 8: “all about knowledge”.

Then, of course there is the pupil perspective.  This varies quite a lot.  If they’ve decided they want to be a doctor, a vet, an astronaut, a marine biologist or an environmental scientist then they tend to lap up science lessons like a hungry dog.  If they are a typical nine year old or twelve year old, they just want to be edutained.  Fire is always exciting, so are exploding 35mm Fuji film canasters (courtesy of the reaction of citric acid and sodium bicarbonate in water to give off carbon dioxide).  Yes sir!  Science is wicked!  Most young children find the idea of science amazing:  all the hands on interactive stuff in the Science museum.  Space.  Black holes.  Exploring nature.  Pond dipping.  Fire.  Bunsen burners.  Electricity.  Looking at tiny objects, creatures or cells down a microscope for the first time.  The Human body with its thousands of miles of blood vessels and unfolded lung surface area of half a tennis court.  Approximately.  Sodium fizzing vigorously on the surface of water.  Playing with parachutes and pushing cars down a carpet coated ramp.  Exciting, amazing, awe inspiring stuff.  And then bam, the GCSE syllabi kick in and most children begin to wonder why they found science so damn exciting in the first place.  Death by too many abstract concepts.  Is there any other subject so universally adored under the age of 10 and so maligned post 14?  Is this the only way it can be?  Or is the post 14 reduced enthusiasm more to do with adolescence and the over-emphasis on examined knowledge, unfairly attributed to the subject rather than the system the subject finds itself in?

Finally, what of the teacher’s perspective of Science.   There are the purists who want their charges to understand this damn complicated stuff as well as they do; there are the edutainers who like to woo their charges with terrifying acts of self harm and arson; there are the primary school science hunters who dress up their charges in lab coats and goggles and revel in pseudocoolgeekery, proliferating the stereotype so many STEM ambassadors try to debunk, before your local STEM brokerage accidently sends a 68 year old retired male engineer with a beard to ceremoniously open your new Rosie Revere Engineer corner in EYFS.  Mmmm.

More seriously – trad and progressive, knowledge and skills aside – there are broadly speaking two types of teachers, I think:

1. Those whose purpose is to build foundational knowledge and experience for the long term benefits of both the individual and society (Long-term educators).
2. Those whose purpose is to optimise the outcomes from education, where measured outcomes (SATs, grades, progress trackers, exams, assessments) become a stand alone thing. (Short-term educators). 

Both have their merits.  Some would argue that doing number 2 well supports number 1.  Others would argue that doing number 1 well and number 2 will look after itself.

I am firmly in the first camp, but I acknowledge that the education system has pushed many teachers into the second camp.  We (not just teachers, but the modern world) have become obsessed by short-term performance indicators, measurement and tracking, by showing rather than doing.  This means that when teaching chemistry GCSE, instead of building foundational knowledge for future study and application, we are pushed towards teaching a highly specific exam specification; a complex yet diluted set of abstract facts and concepts.  There are many brilliant chemistry tweachers out there whose modus operandi is to optimise foundational chemistry knowledge, while fulfilling the oppressive GCSE specifications.  I cannot say what drives them, whether it is passing on a fundamental love of chemistry, of training the country’s future scientists, doctors and engineers; or optimising each pupil’s exam grade in order to increase the range of future opportunities available for that individual.

To conclude this giant purge of an opening summer edublog I leave you with my Why (and whens) we teach science.  Blogs 3,4,5 and 6 will grapple with What we teach (Curriculum) and blogs 7&8 will grapple with How we teach the What. 

One brief comment on assessment (including public exams at 16 and 18):  Knowing where you’re at and what you’ve gotta do to improve helps BUT this OMNIPRESENT TAIL has a nasty habit of WAGGING the curriculum dog…so here are my whys we teach science with the over-inflated influence of the assessment tail removed:

Primary school

• To inspire awe and wonder at the universe, the world, life and ourselves (Aged 6 – 11).
• To explain the world…(Aged 6 – 11, then in considerably more depth at 18+)

KS3 (Aged 11 – 14) / Middle school / Prep School

• To develop our scientific literacy (saving personal money, looking after the environment, improving health and diet, debunking fads)
• To celebrate and understand the importance of science to our culture, our ethics, our economy and our future

KS4 & 5 (Aged 14 – 18)

• To learn how to think methodically, logically, rationally, empirically, critically and creatively (with some foundations aged 11-14)

Post 16, Further education, Higher education and employment

• To identify and develop the scientists & engineers of the future (Aged 16 – 25)
• To invent, to innovate, to improve, to create, to research, to discover, to develop (18+ and in employment / academia)

A summer edublogology part 1:  The Outsider

I’m feeling a little sheepish.  Most of my teaching peers have between 8 and 11 days left of term, while I’m already admiring my borders, walking the dogs, scouring the Guardian while eating breakfast, reading a book and intermittently popping in to school to tidy up a year of hidden mess.  Sorry. 

The school year ended in the usual way: with the ancient ritual of prize-giving.  All children from year 3 to 8, teachers, governors and parents sit on plastic white chairs in the sports hall and clap politely for an hour and a half while cups, medals and a rainforest of books are distributed.  Afterwards there is what essentially amounts to a POSH wedding reception in a marquee in our beautiful grounds with a delicious barbequed buffet and a plentiful supply of Pimm’s and wine.  My favourite aspect of this traditional mirage is the NOT wearing of an academic gown, unlike the majority of my colleagues.  When Lord and Lady Finknorton-Wotsit (or “call me Dave”, the local entrepreneur) ask me why I’m not wearing a gown, I delight in replying, “I’m an industrialist and a creative, NOT an academic.”  I am a human being, and yes – currently a teacher – and yes – I spent 3 years at university 25 years ago – but I believe in celebrating our collective diversity as humans, not our academic uniformity.  My only fellow non-gowner, the Head of Maths and former city trader, is moving on.  A very different teacher to me, but a kindred spirit in terms of being an “industry” outsider inside education.

It was a pleasure to give the leaving speech for Brian at the end of term staff party the night before.  I will miss him greatly.  Being an outsider in education brings insight, a breath of fresh air and a different sense of purpose to that of many “edu-lifers.”  This sometimes creates tension and misunderstanding.  While I have many great colleagues, virtually all brilliant teachers in their own very different ways, he is one of two who I admire the most.  Brian, a mathematical purist, a classroom minimalist, a direct instructor, a non-shiny marker, a subject specialist who does not believe in dumbing down, a warm-strict disciplinarian, a 60 year old traditionalist who is King of his classroom and bites the head off late pupils and invading peripatetic music teachers.  He rocks the scientific purist; the traditionalist teacher in my mind.

In complete contrast, my other local hero is called Catherine.  She is assistant head pastoral, head of “middle school – Years 3 – 5” and teaches RS in Years 6, 7 & 8.  She has worked in primary schools and special schools and was our former SENCO, prior to her current role.  She is a purebred teacher of children, with more than 25 years classroom experience.  She is absolutely brilliant is resolving pastoral matters, a diligent marker with a more progressive style than Brian, involving children in discussion and seeing the potential and capability in everyone, rather than judging them on the score in their most recent test.  Catherine has been brilliantly welcoming and supportive of me and my ex industry, untidy, off the creative scale/his rocker maverick approaches to Science teaching and form tutoring over the years.  She rocks the maverick, creative, progressive, philosophical teacher of children in my mind.

These two brilliant people highlight the crossroads at which the school I currently work in finds itself.   Are we an academically rigorous hothouse, paving the way on to high ranking senior school, Oxbridge and then the City of London?  Or are we a supportive, nurturing environment, seeking to develop the whole child and celebrate the individual riches each pupil offers to a complex and advanced human society?  Or can we be a bit of both?  By trying to be both do we dilute the purpose and integrity of each extreme?

The complex dichotomy of an independent prep school (perhaps also relevant to a mainstream middle school from Year 5 – 8) also applies to me, as five years (+ PGCE) into my teaching career I am trying to work out in which direction to plough my educational furrow.  Am I a teacher of children, more primary or KS2/KS3 transition orientated?  Am I a chemistry purist?  Should I transition to a senior school and muscle in on some philosophy teaching?  Do I want to lead research / curriculum design and / or teaching and learning in a school?  Do I want to write books? (Er, yes – of course!)  Do I want to get very comfortable in one school community, or do I want to broaden and deepen my experience elsewhere?  Do I want an “easy” work life, or a “constantly changing, challenging and rewarding” work life?  Do I want to stay in the classroom for another 12 – 15 years, or do another 5 and move on to something different?  Do I want to change the world?

It has been an enlightening and turbulent year in school and beyond.  There is – as always – much to prepare for September, particularly as we are changing our Year 7 & 8 curriculum in September and I’ve been planning a heady mix of knowledge-rich traditionalism and more skills-orientated progressivism into Science, and co-ordinating all subjects through this transition too.  Then there is the meaningful fusion of our character education programme with a new assessment framework, including the profiling of skills and learning habits; and somehow honouring the prep school traditions of specialist subject teaching from Year 5 as well. 

Outside school, I’ve become (mildly) addicted to Twitter (only joining in October 2018) and have heard the following inspirational people – and diverse thinkers – speak at various meetings and conferences this year:  Martin Robinson (@Trivium21c) , Christine Counsell (@Counsell_C), Clare Sealy (@ClareSealy), Oliver Caviglioli (@olicav), Craig Barton (@mrbartonmaths), Anthony Seldon (@AnthonySeldon), Bill Lucas (@LucasLearn), Mark Grundy (@sirmarkgrundy), Alex Quigley (@HuntingEnglish), Robert Plomin (@RobertPlomin), Ed Dorrell (@Ed_Dorrell), John Taylor (@DrJohnTaylor), Ian Warwick (not on twitter).   I’ve also spoken @CurriculumED courtesy of Steve Lane (@sputniksteve) this year, my talk titled, “What should everyone know sbout science?” sharing some nascent ideas about curriculum and my deeper insights from my 17 years in Science industry.

Finally, I’ve been very interested in the writing and ideas of Tom Sherrington (@teacherhead), Mark Enser (@EnserMark), Ben Newmark (@bennewmark) , Ruth Walker (@Rosalindphys), Adam Boxer (@adamboxer1), Bill Wilkinson (@DrWilkinsonSci) and Solomon Kingsnorth (@solomon_teach) – while in contrast, energised by the cat amongst the pigeons art and creativity revolution spearheaded by Nick Corston (@ST3AMCo).

So to ease my sheepish guilt of extended independent school holidays I’ve got a series of edublogs swirling around my mind, which could amount to a brain dump Octology! I hope for them to be of some benefit to others with equally meandering edu-minds out there! 

1. Why Science?  Perspectives on this multifarious beast of a subject.
2. The Accidental Scientist.  How and why I became a scientist, and its corruption of my teaching worldview!
3. The much trumped skills agenda: how to be human in world of machines.
4. The Knowledge-richers: they’re not wrong either.
5. Top down Vs Bottom up…
6. Developing a thematically linked Science curriculum in KS3.
7. Knowledge first.  Investigation second.  Projects third.
8. Zoned learning: an explicit, colour-coded approach.

Coming soon to a Twitter timeline near you…

I am in insider looking out and an outsider looking in on education.  I have much to learn.  My mind is exploding with ideas, some possibly flawed with others possibly less flawed…I hope you enjoy!

I have a biased worldview of the cultural significance of the Glastonbury festival of music and performing arts. 25 years ago, I walked across several car-filled, sun drenched fields in rural Somerset to first encounter that life-changing view: a tented city of revelry, escapism and wonderful music temporarily built on rich dairy farming pasture. From 1994 – 1999, and back again in 2009, my annual pilgrimage to Worthy Farm was initially about friends, fun, frolics and escape from the conventions of provincial town life. By 1997 it was all about the music: old favourites, new discoveries and a growing eclecticism to my musical taste. In 2009, I was stone cold sober, having a break from family life, avoiding (jazz) cigarettes and alcohol and getting high on Madness, Specials, Blur, Neil Young, Nick Cave, Bon Iver, Fucked Up, Rokia Traore, Shlomo, Bellatrix and much much more.

Since then I’ve joined the teaching profession and got my festival kicks elsewhere (WOMAD, End of the road, Wilderness, Hop Farm & Vicar’s Picnic) but those heady nineties days are deeply engrained upon my memory. While I love a good chat, a bit of debate and laughter with close friends and family, I am sometimes sceptical of the modern world we have created: the loss of community, the loss of a clear sense of purpose, the increase in materialism, our individualistic pursuit of success. I often feel most alive at a natural beauty spot, untouched by man. But back then, I felt most alive at Glastonbury. Sharing a spiritual, musical moment with between 10 and 100,000 strangers is enough to restore one’s faith in humankind. Together we can, do, and could achieve so much. For me, this place remains the centre of my cultural universe.

Which brings me to Stormzy. And the comfort of my home TV. I wasn’t there, and if I was, I’d probably have sought out some free jazz, some Malian rhythms, some noisy guitars, or Billy Bragg on the Leftfield stage, while harping on to anyone who’d listen about how it was edgier in the 90s; about how bands like the Cure were the soul of Glastonbury back then; about how there are too many dancers on stage these days; about WTF is Miley Cyrus doing at “MY BELOVED” Glastonbury.

Stormzy’s show pushed the Glastonbury production boundaries. Musically as I say, not really my bag; but artistically, culturally, politically he was right on point. From the comfort of my newly acquired John Lewis snuggle, his show blew my mind. My wife was transfixed and she hates festivals, RAP and loud music!

Which brings me back to education. Does Stormzy have a place in our school curriculum? During his show I flippantly and provocatively tweeted that I’d put him in my music curriculum, on the basis of his command of the Pyramid stage not likely to be bettered by Mozart (catalysed by an earlier debate in the Twittersphere). Martin Robinson (@Trivium21c) rightly highlighted that Mozart was a show off and show man and actually probably would have rocked (me Amadeus) the Pyramid had he been born circa 220 years later. Good point.

Of course everyone should know who Mozart is. I’d happily make a case for sitting silently through his Requiem Mass in D minor for an hour in place of any number of explicit, meaningless, mindfulness assemblies. I also happily accept that he should have a timeless place in the school history of music curriculum. I happily accept that Mozart’s music will live on in the minds of the truly musical, and the intellectual cognoscenti for all time; while Stormzy will be largely forgotten in one hundred years.

But what of the roots of Stormzy’s music? Is his music not a stronger link to the oppressed, to the downtrodden, to the disenfranchised than the indulgent and affluent riches of Mozart’s original fans? Can we not trace Grime and RAP back via soul and Motown, the blues, ska, jazz, the Mississippi delta and ultimately reverse the slave trade back to West Africa; to the rhythmic roots of western pop music in Mali or Senegal? Is that not a story of greater cultural riches, or greater importance to humanity than the over-dressed and over-indulged in 18th century Vienna?

Music lessons at school should probably be a creative outlet. About composition, collaboration and exploration of a range of genres. So Mozart and Bach yes. But jazz and blues; rock and pop too. But I’m not just talking about music lessons. What about history? Why does the history of white Europe still dominate in our schools? Why not more modern history to help us make sense of now, why not more African history, more musical history, more scientific history, more literary history, and why not the history, geography, science, ethics, and art of Glastonbury?

This hasn’t really got anything to do with music. It is all about culture. How did we get here? Why is there so much mythology surrounding Glastonbury? Why was Stormzy headlining Friday night more important than the Killers headlining on Saturday? Discuss.

My Glastonbury knowledge is rich. It really matters to me; and an ever increasing sector of society. Glastonbury is music. It is politics. It is the environment. It is a collective voice. It is culture. Michael and Emily Eavis are arguably more important to many in this country than Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt. Stormzy is definitely more important – right now – than Mozart. We shouldn’t bin, forget or diminish the significance of the past but our schools should celebrate, dissect, analyse, criticise and discuss the present. And Stormzy at Glastonbury should be part of that.

After thought: I am often jealous of UKS2 primary school teachers in Pilton, Somerset and the surrounding area. How much could you teach via the theme of the Glastonbury Festival? Pretty much everything: environmental and political campaigning; climate change and plastic; charity; Arthurian legends; the sixties counterculture and origins of the festival movement; CND and the cold war; the history of western pop, rock and global folk, blues and jazz; map making in Geography; art, art and more art; design; construction; dance, drama, poetry and performance; modern dairy farming and food production; sound engineering; sound, light & electricity in physics; global cuisine; statistics in maths; stage times and scheduling in maths; loads of programme writing and review opportunities in English. That’s it, I’m going to start planning my thematic, knowledge-rich, Glastonbury curriculum!!

P.S. For the anti-Stormzy Mozartists out there, I challenge you to design such a knowledge rich and culturally diverse curriculum as this on the back of Glyndebourne…

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton