I hate chemistry

I was swimming today when I realized how much I hated chemistry in high school.

The fact is, when I'm swimming (and running, cycling, eating, even talking) my mind will sometimes start wandering about. I may start thinking philosophically about the basic existence of humanity. On the other hand I may think about trivial things like what I am going to have for lunch after I swim, and whether whatever I would eat would be too fattening. This thinking keeps me off boredom and asking myself why am I exercising (I hate exercising, but it's good for me.. go figure ...)

Anyway today I was thinking about swimming. Specifically, I was asking myself what kind of strokes would propel me forward the fastest. My reasoning is that the faster I swim, the faster I would get out of there (I swim a fixed number of laps). Once again.. I hate exercising :)

Anyway, I started thinking about it in a high school physics sort of way. I took into account Newton's law which basically says that if apples started falling in the swimming pool, I would move faster. Actually the Newton's law I was talking about was that the action reaction part. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That's why after I swim (action..) burning fat.. I love to eat a lot of fatty food (reaction).

Okay.. back to the story.. thinking about modelling the swimming strokes. I realized that this is how I should've learned physics in high school. Give me a problem, and tell me to explain it using physics law. Instead of memorizing formulas and problems and their solution, this would enable me to understand more of the physics. The teachers would be helping me in solving the problem, instead of standing at the blackboard being ignored by the students. One serious flaw would be how to find an interesting problem for problems such as quantum computing or Einstein's law of relativity.

It was about this time that my brain switched gears and I realized how much my high school education sucks (not that my college education was any better). The focus on the education in Indonesia unfortunately is memorizing and using what we have to be able to pass tomorrow's test.

Furthermore I thought of how much I hated chemistry. Well I don't despise it, I can do it pretty much (okay I got a C in college chemistry). I only felt that I didn't learn as much. I learnt the molecular structure for ethanol, methanol and so on. Unfortunately none of that is any use. I still can't work out why ethanol and methanol are different. I can't still understand why some substance exists as solids and others as gas and others as liquids at a certain temperature. I still can't understand why when two substances are mixed they turn red, purple or green, or maybe even a rainbow color (I was forced to memorize... and I didn't, which is probably why I never got a good score).

The results of my thinking:
- organized education is evil and pretty much useless.....
- learning should be exploratory (not an original thought, I should add, a lot of people have advocated this) instead of rote learning
- I never did find out the most efficient way to swim