|
|
|
|
 |
| photo:Les Todd |
ames F. Bonk stands in front of the long blackboard
in the main chemistry auditorium and, for once, the man who never
needs lecture notes does not know what to say. He simply stands there,
a wiry, bespectacled man with a fringe of gray hair and a shirt pocket
stuffed with pens, shaking his head in astonishment.
He’s been had, and he
knows it.
Usually, Bonk is in his element
in this room, talking calmly and easily, cracking jokes, filling the
board with meticulous cursive writing, explaining the principles of
chemistry to an audience of undergraduates as he paces back and forth
behind the demonstration table. Ask any former student about Bonk,
and he or she will likely offer testimonials about how Bonk “made
a complicated subject easy,” how his lectures were “clear”
and “seamless,” how he never failed to answer—indeed,
to anticipate—questions from students.
On this day, however, the hall belongs to the students.
Small groups of them have been trickling into the lecture hall for
the past half-hour, settling into rows of seats covered in 1970s-era
harvest-gold fuzz, waiting for their former professor to enter. They
are attending not to hear Bonk, but to honor him.
The instant he walks in, they burst into applause—more
than a hundred students, plus a dozen professors and a handful of
administrators, all standing and cheering the man in the crisp white
shirt who stands abashed at the front of the room. The end-of-semester
pressures, the early-morning lectures, the occasional “F”
on a Friday quiz—all are forgotten in this moment, this hero’s
welcome for the professor who has dedicated his career to teaching.
When the applause dies down, Bonk finds his voice. “Usually,
in this room, I’m not speechless,” he says, grinning amazement
and adjusting his trademark red tie. “But today, I am sort of
speechless.”
Bonk came to Duke in 1959, a twenty-eight-year-old
chemist with a passion for teaching, fresh from a graduate-school
stint in charge of an entire satellite campus of freshman chemistry
students. Now, after forty-two years and more than 30,000 students,
he has the teaching of chemistry down to, well, a science. He spends
from four to six hours preparing each lecture, choreographing what
he will do and say, even planning where he needs to place pieces of
chalk in the blackboard tray so he does not waste time searching for
them. He says he gets his best ideas while jogging, so on the day
before he lectures, he doesn’t wear headphones; they make it
harder to concentrate. And although he has taught the same course
for decades, he rethinks what he says each year, searching for a better
way to help students learn.
Nothing in his experience or training, however, could
prepare him for the day when he had to leave part of it behind—or
for the university’s response when he finally did. This spring,
the last day of undergraduate classes marked more than just the end
of another semester at Duke. It also heralded the end of “Bonkistry,”
the famous introductory chemistry sequence Bonk created in the Sixties
and has taught ever since. Starting this fall, general chemistry students
will choose between a traditional lecture-based section and one more
focused on semi-independent laboratory investigation. For the first
time since Eisenhower was president, Jim Bonk will not be their primary
teacher.
Which isn’t to say the veteran professor won’t
be keeping busy. There’s the new course, for one thing. As chemistry’s
director of undergraduate studies, he will be monitoring how students
respond to different teaching approaches. Then there’s the Duke
tennis team. He has served as a volunteer assistant coach for decades,
and he has no intention of quitting, despite a shoulder injury that
keeps his serve in check. He also plans to teach a new environmental
chemistry course for non-majors this coming year—“see if
we can teach an old dog new tricks,” he says, chuckling.
In a way, Bonk has been learning new tricks throughout
his long career as Duke’s point man on general chemistry. In
the past forty years, the field of chemistry has undergone a tremendous
shift as traditional boundaries between life sciences and physical
sciences have become increasingly blurred. Research on living cells,
once the near-exclusive domain of biologists, is now a primary interest
for several Duke chemists. The American Chemical Society, for its
part, is poised to add biochemistry to its list of requirements for
chemistry majors. So, although the basic form of Bonkistry—lectures,
lab, recitation—has remained constant, many of its details have
not.
Some changes are purely physical. In the 1960s, chemistry
students attended class in the gray Gothic building now known as Old
Chem, where the lecture hall “looked like something out of the
nineteenth century,” recalls Jim Ray ’68. Ray and his fellow
students did their laboratory work on East Campus, in the “depressingly
dreary” basement of what is now the Duke University Museum of
Art. If students needed help, they could find him in an office numbered
“07”—an appropriate location for the man who sometimes
introduces himself as “Bonk…James Bonk,” in a nod to
his almost-namesake, Agent 007. When the chemistry department moved
to the new Paul M. Gross Chemistry Laboratory on Science Drive, Bonk
lost the “07” but gained more space for labs, an illuminated
periodic table of the elements, and eventually the large plastic “Bonk
Is Here” banner that hangs above his office door.
The gradual elimination of lecture-demonstrations has
been a more subtle change in general chemistry. Although live chemical
pyrotechnics are popular with students, they can be dangerous. Bonk
cites the experience of one of his colleagues who tried to demonstrate
a thermite reaction in class. “Thermite tends to produce large
flames and temperatures over 1200 degrees Celsius. On this occasion,
whoever prepared it must have put too much in the pan, because when
he ignited the thing, it caught his lecture notes on fire. As I recall,
the class applauded wildly.”
The course’s content has also changed, mostly in
response to new directions and emphases in chemical research. Topics
once considered too advanced or arcane for general chemistry—such
as the hot, diffuse “ideal” gases that inhabit the equations
of physical chemistry—have become vital. Some formerly essential
topics, such as scrutiny of the periodic table of the elements and
the systematic identification of unknown compounds, have disappeared.
“The second semester of general chemistry used to
be a kind of travelogue of the periodic table,” Bonk says. “We’d
go through one family at a time and learn all the reactions and uses
for each element. That very detailed kind of information has been
totally replaced—mainly with things that trickled down from physical
chemistry or with the acid-base chemistry, which is the foundation
of so much industrial chemistry and biology,” he says, citing
new topics such as equilibrium, the delicate acid-base balance that
organisms must maintain for survival.
Some chemists bemoan the disappearance from the curriculum
of such “descriptive chemistry,” Bonk notes. He cites an
article in the Journal of Chemical Education, “Silver Chloride
Is a Pale Green Gas,” whose author lamented the loss of what
was once common knowledge among beginning students. The inside joke,
as a hands-on chemist would know, is that silver chloride is actually
a white powder. As the divide between chemistry and biology began
to be breached, however, crossover topics like acid-base chemistry
took precedence.
“In a broad sense, acid-base chemistry is probably
the thing that will serve [students] best,” Bonk says. “For
biology—well, the ‘A’ in DNA and RNA is ‘acid.’
The techniques of chemistry are being applied to living systems, and
that certainly influences what we try to teach.”
• continues on page two
.
|
|
