Chem 201 Archive – Alan Shusterman

Month: November 2019

  • Quiz Scores from Quizzes #1-3

    This is a report on scores for the first three in-class and take-home quizzes. As I’m sure you realize (and as I have been warning since the beginning of the semester), the material covered by quiz #3 was substantially more difficult than the material on the previous quizzes. This was reflected in the quiz scores which took a substantial and expected downturn. On the other hand, the take-home scores were much higher.

    I’ll give you the gory details about quiz #3 in a moment, but I want to say this: students’ first encounter with the acid-base equilibria and chemical reactions (usually nucleophilic substitution reactions) of organic chemistry has been problematic for as long as I have been teaching organic chemistry (over 30 years). I would like to think that there is a better way to teach this material, but I haven’t found it yet. Still, there are some silver linings in all this. Read on.

    (more…)

  • Halloween Spirits

    Who says Reedies are all study and no fun?

    Halloween was celebrated up and down Eliot Hall yesterday. Nearly everyone in class found their way over to the President’s Office to grab treats (mostly cookies, but also yummy hot cider, and more). And, 6 or 7 Chem 201 students showed up for the morning class already decked out in costumes. I coaxed Victoria “League of Her Own” Miller and Ana “Link” Jed into taking a picture with me. Thank you for playing along.

    Halloween 201.19

  • Near Misses – How Your Phone Can Undermine You

    I heard this story on NPR’s Morning Edition (6 Sept 2019) and I knew I had to share it with my students. You can read listen to the story (2:52) or read a full transcript at The Distracting Draw of SmartPhones.

    But let me cut straight to the surprising content, this story is not about using a smartphone instead of doing something else, it is about being near your phone while doing something else. The reporter, Shankar Vedantam, describes work done by a team of Harvard psychologists (their names are in the transcript – look them up):

    Vedantam: They had volunteers come in to take cognitive tests, but there was a catch. Some volunteers were told to leave their smartphones in another room. Some were told to leave the phones in a bag or a pocket. And others were told to leave their phones on the desk next to them as they took the test. Now, all the phones were on silent. But big differences emerged between the volunteers as they took the test, especially when it came to understanding and solving novel problems.

    And then one of the psychologists (Ward) delivers the punchline:

    Ward: What we found is that people did better on these tasks the farther their phones were from them. So those who had their phones in another room did significantly better than those who had their phones on the desk right in front of them. And then those who had their phones in their pockets or their bags were sort of in the middle, between those two groups.