“It’s been a really good way to understand ionic compounds

2017-02-25 8

“It’s been a really good way to understand ionic compounds
and bonds and all the things you can do with chemistry,” Jarret Haven, 16, said of studying “The Martian.” “It’s really opened up my mind.”
For Mr. Weir and his publisher, getting the book into schools opens up a lucrative new market
that could turn “The Martian,” which was already a blockbuster that sold several million copies, into a perennial best seller that guarantees a built-in audience every year.
He also calculated how many calories Watney would need to stay alive, how much water he would need to grow potatoes,
and how he could manufacture water out of oxygen and hydrazine, a compound used for rocket fuel.
Next month, Mr. Weir will address science teachers at the National Science Teachers Association’s conference in Los Angeles,
and his publisher will give away around 500 copies of the classroom edition of the “The Martian
“I got a lot of emails from science teachers who said, ‘Man I’d love to use your book as a teaching aid, but there’s so much profanity in it
that we can’t really do that,’” said Mr. Weir, 44, who is cheerful, hyper-analytical and casually profane, much like his protagonist.
In a science class at Northwestern High School in Mellette, S. D., sophomores are using the novel as
a jumping-off point for some hands-on experiments, like splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.
The novel was pretty easy to amend, by simply replacing the foul language with tamer words like “screwed,” “jerk”
and “crap” (Mr. Weir said there were “occasional squabbles” when he tried to lobby the censors to keep some of the less offensive swear words in.)