About Me:

I'm Mr. David Weinkauff or Mister W or "DW" or DeeDubs or Papa Dub.

I taught for about 13.5 years at Nerinx Hall High School. Prior to coming to Nerinx I worked for almost 30 years in the chemical industry - in all kinds of areas: catalysis, pharmaceuticals, nutrition chemicals, specialty fluids and solvents, polymer modifiers and plastics to name some. I was never bored because I continually had to learn new things.

In 2001, my first boss, the late Dr. William S. Knowles, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work on "Catalytic Asymmetric Hydrogenation and Synthesis" that we worked on in the 1970's.

My Approach:

Welcome on our journey through the world of Chemistry. On our journey we are going to be using a map -- the Periodic Table. This Table describes the regions of the Periodic Kingdom. Some regions we are going to visit and spend a lot of time in, and others we may pass through quickly. Some we will return to repeatedly, often from different directions.

This is a land of imagination, but it is closer to reality than it may first appear to be. This is the kingdom of the chemical elements, the substances from which everything tangible is made. It is not an extensive country, for it consists of only 118 or so regions (or "elements" as we will call them), yet it accounts for everything material in our world and, more broadly, the universe. From the fewer than 100 naturally occurring elements that are the center of our story, all planets, all galaxies, rocks, vegetation, and animals are made. These elements are also the basis for the air, the oceans, and the earth itself. We stand on the elements, we eat the elements, we are the elements. Because our brains are made of elements, even our thoughts and opinions are, in a sense, properties of the elements and, hence, inhabitants of the kingdom.

This is the kingdom we will be exploring. We may not get around to covering all the regions of the kingdom in great detail but we will have enough information so that you might even think about doing some further exploration yourself!

I have actually thought about trying to teach a Chemistry course with the ONLY resource being a Periodic Table.