User:Askthenerd

I am Paul R. Young, and I have been a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois for over 30 years. Early in my career, I specialized in teaching Organic and Biochemistry and directed a large research group. I am the author of "Organic Chemistry Online", which was the first comprehensive online tutorial in Organic Chemistry. The product was adopted by Brooks/Cole Publishing Company to accompany McMurry's Organic Chemistry and is still utilized and the core tutorial in the Organic OWL product. I was generally regarded as an "effective teacher" of large lecture sections and I was asked to "try" teaching in the Introductory and General Chemistry sequences. I currently teach four large sections per year, specializing in Introductory Chemistry (one semester) and the first semester of General Chemistry.

As with many teaching professionals, I have become disturbed by the rising cost of college textbooks. In the race for revenue, publishers seem to cram more and more glossy pictures and extraneous material into textbooks, which are then set as "new editions" on rotating calendars as short as three years. In response to this, I have written a simple (yet elegant) textbook appropriate for a one-semester course in Introductory Chemistry which was custom-published and made available to my classes for a bookstore price of about $30. I am now considering moving the core text to Wikibooks to encourage the community of like-minded Chemistry Teachers to contribute to the content.