Wednesday, September 22

Today’s chemistry class was very interesting. The period was shortened due to late arrival, but we managed to learn so much! We started out the day a little differently than usual by getting our lab notebooks back. Although we turned them in on Tuesday, Mr. H worked through them quickly to get them back to us before our test. On the subject of the test, Mr. H would like to remind everyone that the Unit 1 test will be on Thursday, September 23. He explained to us how the test would be 35 multiple choice and 3 short answer questions. One student asked questions about knowing labs for the test, and Mr. H reassured us that knowing specific details from labs was not necessary. Mr. H also gave us some very great advice regarding studying for the test. He said that if we signed onto our moodle account and went to the Chemistry Honors 173 Metacourse that we would find some great test preparation worksheets. I did this and found that they were incredibly helpful. One other resource that Mr. H hopes we will use to study are the links on the Delicious page. If you go to the class website, you will find some links to those articles.

The next activity we did in class was to talk about the previous nights Webassign. Many students, myself included, noticed how some of the questions on the Webassign were particularly difficult, namely the last problem. It was requested that we go over that problem, so Mr. H generously took about 5 minutes to explain it. Here is the work that was done:

After explaining the problem, Mr. H went on to say that spending more than 30 minutes a night on a Webassign was unneeded. He explained how missing one question on one Webassign for one night for one unit for one semester was completely okay. He also added how sometimes he will make a Webassign less points than he originally planned, like making a 10 point Webassign into a 7 point Webassign.

After the Webassign talk, we went over Kyle’s blog from the previous day. Mr. H was very impressed by how thorough his blog was.

After this, Mr. H asked us to take out our new unit packets, and thus we started unit 2. This packet is titled Atoms, Molecules, and Ions. It has a picture of the periodic table on the front page. We then proceeded to begin lab AMI1: Probing the Black Box. Each group of two was given a small circular box with a silver ball inside. Our job was to figure out the structure inside of that mystery box. Some possible structures were:

or

or

For this lab, we were told to only fill out the purpose and the data section with a picture of what we thought the inside of the mystery box looked like. Mr. H said that we would do a conclusion section as a class on either Friday or Monday. The class ended here, and as we gathered our belongings, Mr. H reminded very animatedly to study for our test the next day. Today’s class was very productive and fun!