I have collected here some songs and poems that my students have written over the years. Maybe you'll be inspired to write one someday. All are used by permission.
Click here for some
plays about organic chemistry (courtesy of Dave Reingold at Juniata College)
"Our Favorite Things"
By Kathy Fletcher and Katie Perrin
Refluxes, and condensers, and vacuum distillations,
Doing procedures that require cooperation,
Carcinogens, and toxins, and lachrymators too,
These are the things that we all like to do.
Wittigs, and enamines, and triphenylmethanol,
Synthesizing new products you can smell down the hall,
Going to the spec room and throwing solids in the NMR,
If Hanson finds out, you'd better run for your car!
When the sink floods, and the lab burns,
And your goggles leave a permanent impression on your face,
You simply remember someone else did it too,
and then it's not such a disgrace!
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"Chemistry 101"
by Heidi Middendorf '99
Eyes out of focus behind thick black frames
Reflecting fluorescent light,
The absent-minded professor,
Chalk-flecked fingers at the black board,
Is touched by such DEEP CHEMICAL CONCEPTS that
Mind and fingers disconnect for
Momentary millisecs,
And "particle" becomes "paricle,"
"
Stoichiometry " becomes "stochometry."
Not that we can tell the difference,
Squirming in our plastic chairs,
Fingers clenched in forehead hair.
We'd give anything for a simple E = mc2
But Einstein had buddies who made subatomic discoveries
To fizzle our photons into further confusion:
Planck and his quanta, wavelength and frequency,
Bohr and line spectra, Heisenberg's uncertainty.
The uncertainty we comprehend completely,
But we bumble through the others,
And jumble up the quantum numbers:
Principal, azimuthal, magnetic, spin.
Oh, for a mind like Millikan!
But we're muddled from isopropyl alcohol
Breathed
in a sunless tomb of a lab room
On the fluorescent third floor of the S&M hall,
Bemused by electron configurations,
Ionic bonds, and compound formations,
Baffled by the protons, neutrons, electrons
Pressed into the blackboard--
White chalk words,
Vast, mysterious chemical world.
Last updated Sunday, August 23, 2009 . Contents & layout copyright 2009 Prof. Bryan Hanson