Sunday, October 31, 2010

The Harvard culinary show

Harvard has started offering a basic science course where the lab work is cooking. It employs a couple of celebrity chefs and is immensely popular. The idea is to introduce some formulas and concepts from chemistry and physics to analyze different processes students observe in the course of food preparation. A couple of years ago I read somewhere that as high school students were increasingly uninterested in basic science, they were being offered new courses in applied disciplines - like forensic science. Let me think - if Harvard is now using cooking as a way to make chemistry and physics more relevant to its students, what should Indiana University in Gary do to achieve a similar effect? Teach massage?