What were you taught about atoms?

[kaberett]

Expanding on one of the things I mentioned yesterday: for Pain Project reasons, I'm interested in knowing what you learned about atoms at school, and roughly what age you were. I'm especially interested in whether (and when) you were exposed to the Bohr model (there's a nucleus, with electrons orbiting around it at fixed distances) and the current consensus model (electron orbitals defined as regions where an electron is most likely to be found).

I think I got the Bohr model at GCSE and the current consensus model (more or less) at A-level, but knowing what ~my potential audience~ is familiar with would be useful!

The context being that I have decided to go with, at least for first draft purposes, explaining that What Most Of Us Know About Pain is good enough for most purposes, most of the time, but if you're wanting to be able to explain or predict more complex phenomena you need a more detailed model... but I would like some reassurance that this might land, like, at all.

Comments

[madgastronomer]

I'm 48 and in the US. I had definitely been taught the Bohr model before high school (so by age 14 or 15). I was out of school before the current consensus model was popularized, but I'm certainly aware of it. I couldn't tell you when, though.

[madgastronomer]

Oh, and in high school, probably the year I was 16, we discussed the history of different models of the atom and competing hypotheses that were popular at the time, in chemistry class. I don't remember the details exactly, but there you go.

[vass]

I remember in year nine or ten that my science teacher taught us that ever since ancient times people had been interested in the question of what the smallest possible particle was, something so small it couldn't be divided further. He said the Greek word "atomos" meant "indivisible", and that the particles we called atoms were that particle, thus resolving that ancient query.

But then, he explained, we split the atom.

I was indignant.

Re the Bohr model, we had diagrams like that in our science classrooms and learned that atoms are made up of electrons and protons and neutrons and that electrons orbit the protons and neutrons, but if we went into detail I probably tuned it out because I was tuning out a lot in year nine and ten.

I didn't do chemistry in my VCE years, and I failed one semester of year 11 physics then switched to IT for my science requirement.

[me_and]

I definitely remember having covered the Bohr model by the time I was doing my GCSEs, although I couldn't tell you where it was in the 11–16 range I'd covered it. I'm honestly not sure where I heard the consensus model; I'm 90% certain it was while I was before I finished university, but I'm not sure more specifically than that.

[shanaqui]

Private school educated, secondary school in the 2000s. I think Bohr model up to GCSE, with my teacher noting that it was A Simplification That Was Enough For Our Purposes.

I only did biology at AS level and no science at A Level, so nothing there. In my natural sciences BSc, I think it was Bohr model inasfar as I ever touched it, tangentially to what I was actually learning, but I specialised the biology pathway (no biochemistry even) so I don't think it came up past the initial non-specialised year.

However, being aware of my reading tendencies and my family background, you will likely be Deeply Unsurprised to know that I knew about the current consensus model from very young (13ish? at a guess?), even before teachers were hinting about it.

(Mum just confirmed I was probably 14. Her chemistry teacher, also at a private school but in Wales in the 70s, taught her that the Bohr model was an oversimplification; she believes she basically decided my chemistry knowledge was adequate at that same age and told me it herself then if I didn't know from other sources. Which I might have done.)

Lisa, in the Belgian school system, learned Bohr model around 15, but thinks this was also supplemented by the teacher saying "well actually it's more complicated".

So from the three of us, with somewhat varying levels of eventual interest in science, I'd say our experience suggests the analogy will land as we were basically taught the Bohr model with that caveat.

[watersword]

I definitely absorbed the Bohr model from General Zeitgeist as a child; by the time I took a formal chemistry class in high school at age ...fifteen?, eleventh grade, when the teacher asked us to draw atoms on the whiteboard on the first day of class, I drew the quantum model and felt verysmug when my classmates all drew the Bohr model. I have no idea when I learned this, mind, and also that would be my last success in chem class.

[redbird]

I think I was aware of the Bohr model by 8th grade (age 13), but I don't remember whether I was taught that in school, or just picked it up from the zeitgeist: in those days libraries were using a schematic of the Bohr atom to label science fiction books. (I think some still are).

I'm also not sure when/where I learned about the current consensus model.

For reference, I'm 62, born and raised in the United States, specifically New York City.

[starlady]

I'm in the States. We learned the Bohr model as the original idea and then immediately moved into the current consensus model, in both middle school and high school chemistry.