"Hey Ms. P.L, if you could be a superhero based on an element in the periodic table, who would you be?" Hardly the ground-breaking, significant question a teacher might want to elicit from the next generation of budding chemists. I was in the middle of a lecture about a central idea in chemistry: PV= nRT. Wandering through the rows of students seated on laboratory stools, I expounded the virtues of the Ideal Gas Law and how it expressed the relationship between pressure, volume and temperature in the reality of our everyday atmospheric conditions. Then came the question about which superhero I would be. Everybody sat up, all eyes on me, full attention.
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