"In Calormen storytelling (Whether the storys are true or made up) is a thing your taught just as English boys and girls are taught essay writing. The difference is that people want to hear the storys, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays." The Horse and His Boy

Authors note: Usually I wouldn't consider posting an essay on here and I understand completely if you don't want to read it, but I'm rather pleased with how this essay turned out and it made my younger sister laugh so here it is.

I used to think of a mole as most people do, as a small furry creature that tunnels in the ground and make piles of dirt for me to mow over. However, now when I think of a mole I think of a vast number of molecules or atoms (6.022 x 10 to the 23rd power to be precise).

I remember the day when I first saw that lesson titled “The Mole” and wondered what it could possibly mean coming from a chemistry text book. I remember the awe I felt when I learned that if there was an electronic computer capable of counting 10 million objects every second it would still take about 2 billion years to count a mole of something. Somehow, though, I remained mystified as to the purpose of this mole. My Mom must have explained it to me dozens of times but it never made any sense to me. This may be partly due to the fact that I had acquired a habit of daydreaming through explanations, then automatically saying, “yes”, when asked if I understood. I made it through that chapter anyway and continued on with stoichiometry.

From stoichiometry I ventured on to gases, thermodynamics, atomic structure, the periodic table, intermolecular forces and then it was midterm, time to go back and relearn all those forgotten things for one enormous test. Still I was moderately pleased for I was ahead of schedule and had plenty of time to study and complete the test before Christmas break. Even though I figured I had more than enough time for studying later, my less procrastinating mother insisted I begin on Saturday. So we sat side by side on the couch and began at chapter one. It felt strange to be studying cations and anions while looking out the window at a tree surrounded by snow where we had first memorized them in much warmer circumstances. We worked through the pages, studying formulas and memorizing scientific laws written by long dead people with funny names.

Inevitably we came to the part about moles and Mother was explaining it to me yet again when it began to dawn on me. Feeling strangely excited, I asked her if a mole of an element weighed its atomic mass in grams. She said “yes”. Suddenly it was all perfectly clear to me. A mole of Zinc with an atomic mass of 65.37 weighed 65.37 grams. How could this simple fact have eluded me for so long? How could I have missed this through all the times we had gone over it before?

It may have been that I had convinced myself that it was too complicated for me to figure out. Perhaps the real epiphany here isn’t just that a mole of something is its atomic mass in grams but rather that things that may seem very complicated can be very simple. Maybe if I had really tried to understand it for myself and not given up on it I would have understood the concepts of the mole much sooner. I can’t go back and change what I did but I can learn from this experience and do better for the second half of chemistry.