Today was sort of a slow day, material wise. I didn’t present much. We practiced math problems that combined stoichiometry and gas laws. I hope that it was a good processing day =). Tomorrow I lose about half of my first period class (which is the slow class anyway) to an honors breakfast, so I am doing a lab on Friday. Tomorrow I plan to spend time helping them revise their drawings for classwork, to help them prepare for the Test. I also really need to plan the next unit. Being half a week ahead is better than a day ahead, but not quite comfortable since there are only certain days I can stay late to set up and practice demos and labs.
I knew this already, but I re-learned it. Always do problems yourself first before you use them as examples, no matter how simple they seem.
Also, there is more than one way to do stoichiometry. On Tuesday one of my students put up her answer on the board, and it was a completely different method than I had ever seen. It skipped moles. I have always converted the starting material to moles, than used the mole ratio to figure out how many moles of my product I will have, and then converted to grams of product. I’m not entirely sure how to describe her method. Most of the students really get it, so I don’t want to reteach it and confuse them, so I have the weird experience of evaluating and assessing a method that is counter-intuitive for me.
Despite the long weekend, I have not been super prepared this week (only week three!). I can’t get much done with baby around, and baby naps so erratically. Ah well, what else is night time for?
