Responding+with+Wonderment+and+Awe

**Responding with Wonderment and Awe**
//Some people are 'turned off' to learning//. //They make statements like "When am I ever going to use this stuff," or "Why do I have to think so much," or "Does this count as a grade?" Learning can be exciting and fulfilling, if you approach it with wonderment and awe.//

One thing that I've always liked about the sciences is that much of the material logically fits and makes sense. Calculating the distance a ball would travel when thrown is abstract in math, but in physics you can actually apply it - and get a surprisingly close estimate of what would happen in reality. In chemistry, the elements seem very organized in the periodic table, but the more I learned about the organization of the table, the more shocked I was at how it seemed to fit so well. The fact that all elements in a period react in a similar manner, and how elements across a row share similar numbers of electron shells. What was most amazing was the fact that as you went down a period, the number of valence electrons stay exactly the same, with only the number of electron shells changing at a constant rate. 

I already expected that chemistry would be the more organized science between the three, since biology and physics both are hard to apply theory to reality, but how chemists past were able to accurately organize the elements in a cohesive yet perfectly arranged manner was quite surprising. Not only did it make things easier to remember and study, it was actually quite interesting to learn about the periodic table and how to read elements on it.

I have studied the periodic table back in 10th grade, but only marginally and not in any great depth. Back then, the arrangement of the table didn't strike me as significant, but now that I've actally thought about it, it seems quite amazing that someone was able to write a table that could describe the behavior of the elements so well and in such an organized way.

Of course, I have yet to learn about the properties of transition metals, which apperently have different effects and behaviors than the other elements, but I hope that it would be as logically organized as the rest of the elements.