Chemistry as understood by a writer.

As a college student, I am required to take certain classes. One of those is chemistry. At some point last semester I decided that it would be a good idea to take the summer course, which also happens to be online, leaving me to try to finish a full course in a shortened period of time and without those boring in-class lectures that do help quite a bit. This has left me with the task of trying to understand the straight-to-the-point textbook on my own, basically. As it turns out, my brain likes to work with very strange analogies. (But not the ones in my human biology textbook. My brain hates those.)

Today's analogy is the "Atoms are high schools" metaphor.

Here are the relationships.

Atom nucleus= A boy.

Electrons= Girls.

Chemistry says that the radii of atoms decrease as the number of protons in their nuclei increase because the electrons are more attracted to the greater positive charge.


My brain says that as the boy bulks up into a hot muscular man, the girls flock to him more than when he was a spindly-armed nerd.

This analogy went into much further detail than this, actually. It ended up being a rather convoluted school system with cities, suburbs and rinky-dink little rural towns. There were classes and social groups. Everything combined into a crazy explanation of science that could not possibly make understanding this book any easier to anyone but me. And this is the easier of my two science books to understand. My notes on cells read more like a movie script than a simple re-writing of a textbook.