What Makes My Day?

Getting an email from a former student like this (former student’s name and current place of work removed):

Dr. Gilbert,

My name is Former Student. I’m not sure if you remember me, but I was a  Gen. Chem student of yours about 4 or 5 years ago at Linfield. I won’t exaggerate when I say that Gen Chem was the proudest “C” I ever earned. Your class was tough and you and Dr. Reinert both had high expectations of us. At the time, I didn’t truly understand what its application in my future would mean,  only that i needed it for the next step in my education. Well, college has been over for a few years now and looking back, Gen Chem might have been the most useful and applicable course I took at Linfield. It wasn’t just the stoichiometry and gas laws; It was the way you taught us to analyze, think, and problem solve. Also, no 8am lecture is complete without kegs of “whoop ass” (one of my favorites, by the way). So, thanks for the mind molding and development of my scientific thought processes! These days I’m working as a RN in a Transplant Intensive Care Unit at A Big University Hospital here in a large city on the east coast. We admit highly unstable liver, kidney, and small bowel transplants from the operating
room in hopes of keeping them alive and providing a better quality of life for these chronically ill people. As a nurse, my job is essentially managing and applying a variety of different pharmocological therapies and treatments based on laboratory values and patient assessments. I analyze results of arterial blood gases and a multitude of other tests to prompt the physician when acid/base disturbances and electrolyte imbalances occur. Yesterday, as an example, I administered 3, 50 meq ampules of NaHCO3 to correct a patient in a metabolic acidosis with a pH of 7.05. How cool is that?
Chemistry in action…

If you have pre-nursing students (or any students really) who are wondering why they have to take general chemistry, this guy does a great job of stating why.  It ain’t really the chemistry you’re learning – it’s the analytical and critical thinking that are important, and that’s good for whatever you want to do.  Of course it probably helps that this student has been working in the real world for a while.  That tends to put many things into perspective.  Which is why I’ve avoided it for as long as possible!  Feel free to pass this on to any students who you think might need to read it.

How to Increase Problem Solving Abilities

Melanie Cooper from Clemson University was yesterday’s speaker at the chemistry department colloquium.  Her talk was about research in chemical education about what increases problem solving abilities in general chemistry students, most of which she has published in the J. Chem. Ed. vol. 85, pg 866 (2008) (sorry, not a free article).  I’ll highlight what she and her co-workers found, but for the full story you really should just read the article.

One of the first issues she dealt with was exactly what she meant by problem solving, which she quotes from Anderson as “What you do when you don’t know what to do.”  Her talk, and the JCE paper referenced above, both center on students solving open ended, ill-defined problems (so, not something like, how many Ne atoms are there in 1 g of Ne?).    Students in her study were applying previously acquired knowledge to case-based problems.  The results of the study debunk five common myths about learning and problem solving.

And the Name of Element 112 is…

So, Cp (Copernicium) is named after an astronomer. Seems strange to me.

Three Day POGIL Lab Workshop June 2009

I am serving as the local host of a three day POGIL (process oriented guided inquiry learning) workshop on labs for the next three days. If you follow the link, you can learn a lot about POGIL. This is the third three day POGIL workshop that Linfield has hosted, and the fifth workshop that I’ve been part of either as a participant or participant/host.

If you really want to know a lot about POGIL, follow the link above. Briefly, POGIL is

Formation of HCl – One Water at a Time

At some point, all students who take General Chemistry learn that acids are species that donate protons in water. For example, hydrochloric acid is formed when hydrogen chloride gas is dissolved in water:

Formation of the hydronium ion (H₃O⁺) results in a decrease of the pH of the solution. Yeah, if you’ve had General Chemistry, you definitely know that. But did you know that until recently, we didn’t know how many water molecules it took to make this happen?

Thermodynamics in Song

Over at the World’s Fair, they’ve posted a song about love and thermodynamics.  This made me wonder, are there more thermo songs out there?  A quick search turned up just one (scroll down to the Flanders and Swan section).  If anyone who reads this knows of more, please post them in the comments section.

Significant Figures – Eat Your Peas!

I don’t know why using significant figures correctly seems to be a problem. The rules are simple, and, as posted at Good Math, Bad Math for those of us who make our livings by measuring things, they are necessary:

The idea of significant figures is that when you’re doing experimental work, you’re taking measurements – and measurements always have a limited precision. The fact that your measurements – the inputs to any calculation or analysis that you do – have limited precision, means that the results of your calculations likewise have limited precision. Significant figures (or significant digits, or just “sigfigs” for short) are a method of tracking measurement precision, in a way that allows you to propagate your precision limits throughout your calculation.

So, just because your calculator or spreadsheet spits 10 digits out at you, it doesn’t mean you get to keep them. Your results can only have as much precision as your measurements.

Now, don’t get me started on units.

Pressure Packed Lab!

This week’s experiments in general chemistry are vapor pressure measurements. Some of us were trying to think up some music to go with the experiments, and we came up with the following pressure, or pressure-related songs: