Don Showalter

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Donald L. Showalter is a professor and former chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Showalter received his bachelors degree from Eastern Kentucky University in 1964 and his Ph.D. in 1970 from the University of Kentucky. He spent one year as a research fellow at Oregon State University's Radiation Center before moving to UWSP in 1971. For a brief time (1973-1976) he taught at Iowa Western Community College before returning to UWSP, where he would receive many teaching awards, such as the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents Excellence in Teaching Award in 1994.

[edit] Teaching Style

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Showalter is a proponent of the use of demonstrations in the teaching of science, and has presented programs at Disneyland and the Smithsonian, and has also appeared on the series Newton's Apple. However, he is perhaps best known as Series Demonstrator on the informational video series The World of Chemistry with Roald Hoffmann, which is a popular teaching tool among high school chemistry teachers worldwide. Showalter is somewhat of a cult figure among those who watch the video series, as many consider classic some of the odd and often non-sequitur one-liners he delivers, such as "Wow! What a reaction!", "There it goes!", "Oh, my chemicals!", and "Look at that!". In context, his exclamation of "The beaker is frozen to the board!" is considered by many viewers to be comical. He also wears an exaggerated toupee, presumably on account of his baldness.

His eccentricity is apparent when he makes such plans as, for the purpose of demonstrating the difference atwixt heterogeneous mixtures and homogeneous mixtures, "Let's make a salad!" In one particular experiment, where Showalter demonstrates negative and positive charge with an elongated rod and two table tennis balls, he can be heard pausing as if to catch himself from laughing at the ambiguously implied phallic properties of the rod and two balls. These interjections are made especially amusing by his unique voice, a somewhat nasal Southern accent; in one memorable scene concerning litmus paper, Showalter provides the mnemonic device "Blue to red, acid," slant-rhyming "red" and "acid".