The River

I have been expanding on my environmental chemistry unit idea. The only problem is that I am not sure if six weeks is enough time. That is what I have between Spring Break and the end of the year. It would encompass just about everything we will do. Electrochemistry, Acid/Base chemistry, concentration, ions and metals, [...]

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Lab Today

Today lab was pretty good.
However, the pre-lab needs work. It apparently was not clear enough what reaction was happening, and what product they were forming. Most of my students didn’t realize what they were making, why they were filtering, etc. Maybe that is typical of high school chemistry labs. It drives me crazy.
I realized that [...]

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Flexibility

If there is one thing I can safely say that I am doing very well, it is being flexible. I have had a number of things get in the way of what I had planned, from the students not knowing something they should have been taught, not having my photocopies made, programs updating within 24 [...]

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The Search for Labs

My search for labs has intensified, because while lecturing on molarity and solution stoichiometry, I found myself saying things like, “now, if we were in a lab, and you were going to make this by mixing these two things, you would do this, because…..” and so on. How awful is that. So hard to follow, [...]

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Environmental Chemistry

Looking for labs, I found some great ones on water quality. (I should of thought of this myself, they do a huge unit on this in FOS 1)
Edited to add: Here is the link with the lab that inspired me.
Potentially encompasses acidity, metal ions in solution, redox, organic, absorbance (turbidity), and the environment.
I am “fortunate” [...]

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Games

Criterion for a worthy classroom game: the game must proceed naturally from the joy of the discipline, and not be foreign or imposed upon it.
Bad game: a standard computer game where you have to solve a math problem to get more bullets.
Why do I care about games? Apparently when kids solve puzzles and play, their [...]

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The joy of stoichiometry

I want to come up with some good equations, give the students one or two pieces of information (e.g. grams starting material) and make them tell me everything they possibly can about the equation. I mean everything. Classify the reaction, name the compounds, identify them as ionic or polar, calculate their molar mass, and calculate [...]

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A Voice of Experience

One of my teachers got back to me right away with math ideas.
There are two videos that he made last year, mini-documentaries that I found inspiring. And yes, I did spend my Saturday night watching them. (family was asleep or at departmental parties).
Here are the links, but I will also keep them on my video [...]

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Not enough time

I didn’t make my goal this week of one lab or one demo. I have ideas, but no time. I also don’t always know what we have or don’t have.
I have been emailing old teachers for help on teaching math to my students. This was inspired by Friday. On Friday we spent the entire period [...]

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Molarity

I have tried to teach molarity in an open-ended way, so that they can see the logic of it, and experience a little bit of how scientists solve methodological problems.
Today I put all their solutions from last week on the board, and told them that they were almost all right, because most of them had [...]

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