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About Her Life
Linda K. Ford was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1948. Like a lot of children, she was fascinated with the natural world. She recalls one of her early scientific experiments, made when she was seven or eight years old. She had read in a book that human intestines were very long if stretched out. So one day, she was playing outside, and her mother saw her run into the house, only to come out a moment later with a yardstick. Following her to see what she was up to, her mother found her in the road near their house, measuring the intestines of a rabbit that had been killed by a car. (She doesn't remember exactly, but thinks they were probably about 10 to 12 feet long.)
Ford also became involved in education very early. While still in junior high school, her teacher recruited her to be an aid in a summer reading program for elementary school children. She eventually went to college at Ohio Wesleyan University, where she created a tutoring program in which college students assisted students in the town's public schools. By the time Ford was a senior, over 200 of her fellow students were tutoring school children in the program.
After graduation Ford went to the University of Chicago to work on a Ph.D. in chemistry. But she wanted to work with people as well as lab apparatus, and after only a year she quit working on her Ph.D. and began working on a master's degree in education. When she finished her studies in 1971, she took her first teaching job in a Chicago high school. Of her decision to become a teacher instead of a research chemist, she has said, "The classroom gives me the necessary balance between my love of science and my need for strong social interaction that puts joy into my day."2 In 1973 she got married, and not long afterward her husband was transferred by his company to Cincinnati, bringing Ford back to her old hometown in Ohio.
Ford has been in Cincinnati ever since and has taught at several schools in the area, both in the city and in the suburbs. She also taught at a technical college on the side for a while. Wherever she teaches, her lessons are always creative, often focused on the real-world aspects of chemistry and involving the latest technology and instrumentation. She teaches separation by having her students distill vodka, spiked with salt to make it undrinkable, of course. She uses the chemical reactions that power hydrogen fuel cells to teach how nature prescribes the fixed proportions in which chemical elements can combine. Ford wangled a gas chromatograph for her students to use in lab activities, and she often pairs her students with professional scientists to carry out lab activities using sophisticated instruments not usually available to high school students.
In all of this, Ford never forgets to put on a good show. For Halloween she appears to her students as the Great Chemtini, performing feats of chemical “magic.” She's been known to show up dressed like the “Brazilian bombshell” Carmen Miranda for her famous Methane Mambo demonstration. And she brings poetry into the chemistry lab, reading Jack Prelutsky's eerie poem Will o'the Wisp while demonstrating how to make phosphine gas.
Ford teaches at the Seven Hills School, a private high school in Cincinnati. In 2003 she was awarded the James Bryant Conant Award, the highest honor awarded to high school chemistry teachers by the American Chemical Society.
1 “Cincinnati Educator Wins National Award for Chemistry Teaching,” American Chemical Society press release, 4 March 2003.
2 “An Interview with Linda Ford, 2003 Award,” Journal of Chemical Education 80:4 (April 2003), 370.
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