MUNCIE, Ind. – In order to successfully teach chemistry to K-12 students, the instructor must first be a ghost buster, says a Ball State University graduate student.

Too many youngsters have been told horror stories by relatives, bringing in the ghostly memories of failed experiments and ghastly tests, said Laura Slocum, the latest winner of the Radio Shack Prize for Teaching Excellence.

"They’ve been told all the terrible things by their brothers, sisters and cousins and walk in that first day terrified," she said. "Sometimes you feel as though you have to kill all the ghosts before you can move on. It is a real battle.

"But, then things change and you begin to have students master things they could not even think possible. That is the fun part - seeing students go on to college and study chemistry."

For most of the last decade the Hoosier native worked as a chemistry teacher in Connecticut and was recently awarded the Radio Shack prize for her work.

The company honors about 100 teachers each year from more than 2,000 candidates. Slocum will travel to Chicago on April 13 to receive her certificate, a $3,000 cash award, a new computer and Internet access for a year.

Slocum decided to return to Indiana to earn a master’s degree in chemistry education and to qualify for an Indiana teaching license.

Ball State is lucky to have her, said Lynn Sousa, chemistry department chair.

"Her performance in graduate chemistry courses is excellent, and her work as a graduate teaching assistant is informed by her years of successful high school teaching," he said. "She has enriched the environment of undergraduate students in the laboratories in which she assists. She has also enriched the environment of her fellow chemistry graduate students."

Now Slocum is taking her classroom teaching experience to the next level, working with chemistry professor Marcy Towns studying the way students at several colleges and universities might use e-mail to discuss sophisticated physical chemistry experiments.

"There are students learning about chemistry through the Web," she said. "We want to determine how well students are learning online as compared to traditional classroom lectures."

By Marc Ransford, Communications Manager

(NOTE TO EDITORS: For more information about this story contact Slocum through the Department of Chemistry at (765)285-8060.)