How should we teach crystallography? A review of teaching books’ contents pages

This short article reflects on how we teach a crystallography course and which is specifically linked to what is called the course book. An audience of undergraduates in practice presents different challenges to the teacher depending on whether they are physicists, chemists or biologists; these being the specific courses I have taught in the last 40 years or so and for which I, therefore, have extensive experience. Graduate courses are organized by our crystallographic societies and associations. Such courses might be tailored to a given subject, as with undergraduates, or more likely might be for a broad, across the subjects, set of students. I have also taught on and/or organized these. In a third category, as researchers, we are increasingly called upon to explain our research to broad audiences such as of the public, and/or of school children, and these cross sections of society do not necessarily have much science training, or if they have it is long forgotten. As educators, I am sure all of us wrestle with choosing the sequence that we teach our crystallography concepts in our courses. This all connects directly to how we as a community formally define ‘a crystal’.