Archive For The “education” Category
Unit 5: Counting Particles No real changes to this unit. I added Mole Challenges as extra hands-on practice. Unit 6: Particles with Internal Structure We generally followed a traditional sequence. Some changes: We discussed Coulomb’s Law, as they didn’t do it in last year’s physics classes. This helped with the sticky-tape lab quite a bit. This […]
As I headed over to my blog dashboard, I realized it has been almost exactly a year since I last posted. And, funny enough, I am exactly where I left off. I am back at Taft School, this time for a two-week AP chemistry workshop. The main difference is this time I actually will be […]
There’s a lot of AP-level chemistry in a simple 4-ingredient baggie lab. Calcium chloride. Sodium hydrogen carbonate. Phenol Red. Water. A common first year chemistry lab, but incredibly useful in third quarter of an AP chemistry lab. Dissociation, hydrolysis, precipitation, neutralization reactions, thermodynamics, net ionic equations. Inquiry. Its all there. And its cheap. And its straight-forward […]
This summer #chemchat (a twitter chat for chemistry teachers) launched on Wednesday nights at 8:30-9:30pm EST. Its a great opportunity to tweet with fellow chemistry teachers about a specific topic (inquiry, project design, dimensional analysis, demos, etc) to talk about the “why,” best practices, specific ideas that can be carried into the classroom. You can […]
Tuesday was a good day at BCCE. Highlights: I saw two talks on chemistry misconceptions. One dealt with oxidation-reduction reactions, and the issues some college students have using multiple representations to demonstrate their understanding of the reactions. Some issues seem very basic (such as representing an ionic solution at the particle level), while others were […]