Socio-political-cultural context influences the learning of chemistry

I totally had a Revelation (big R) today while reviewing lewis dot diagrams and covalent bonding. In case you don’t remember high school chemistry (I certainly don’t most of the time, leading to mad confusion and many a desperate google attempt (“atom order in molecular formulas” NOTHING. “writing molecular formulas” NOTHING. “how do you know the element order in molecular formulas?” STILL NOTHING. Give up, say it’s complicated), it goes something like this:

1. Say you have carbon dioxide, CO2, and I ask you to draw the Lewis Dot Diagram. First, you need to know how many valence electrons are present (C has 4 and each O has 6, for a total of 16).
2. Then, you need to draw a skeleton structure O-C-O
3. Finally, you need to add dots to ensure that a. the valence shell for each atom is complete (this means 8 valence electrons) and b. you have represented all the valence electrons the elements have together(16). This can be done with single and double bonding.
4. It boils down to this—atoms forming molecules is like the pooling of resources to make sure everyone is happy. They don’t have enough on their own, but sharing gives them access to the electrons they need.

Seems pretty simple, right? There are a set of rules and if you follow them, you will get the right answer. For some reason, this concept was causing major confusion that I could not identify until today. I realized that the kids were hung up on HOW MANY electrons each element, individually, brings to the bond (C only brought 4, so why in the world would we want to give it 8? Oxygen brought 6, so that’s ALL it gets! We don’t want any freeloaders!).

In trying to simplify the ideas for them I realized that covalent bonding describes the heated political debates of our time! Covalent bonding is downright socialist! It’s amazing: through sharing and the pooling of resources (some give more than others), covalent bonding happens! Oxygen gives 6 and C gives 4, yet they both end up with 8. They share in order to meet their needs! The students who were confused kept getting hung up on how many electrons an atom OUGHT TO GET based on how much it was ABLE to bring to the bond. If that doesn’t describe capitalism and the republican point of view, I don’t know what does (“More money: more access”. “I don’t want my tax dollars going to that!”).

I thought this seemed like a particularly American point of view and I wondered if perhaps covalent bonding was a little more understandable in countries whose political discourse is different. Do Canadians have trouble with it? I want these answers!