Chemblog!

Congratulations to all 10 in the Varsity Chem class! You each got a 5 on the AP Chem exam! Thank you all for your tremendous dedication and sacrifice throughout the year. I hope that your success and the lessons learned this year will help you in your future quests.

I haven't seen the official AP score report yet but I have been informally informed that we may have very good news forthcoming!

Wow, the College Board must need money; they have opened up the phone lines for AP scores already!
So far, Varsity has its first FIVE! Updates soon...
let's make that 2, TWO, "FIVES" ah ha ha...I feel like "The Count" from Sesame Street!
more updates soon...
three, THREE "FIVES" aa aah aaah!
keep it going! more to come...
okay now, for the 4th of July, let's make that FOUR "5's" !!!! yes!
updates soon, I hope!

BY THE WAY, an unprecedented REVOLUTIONARY event has occurred in biology; this is probably going to be as big as the invention of the computer:
ARTIFICIAL LIFE!

I wish you all a happy and healthy (they go together) summer! School is a four-letter word for the whole summer but keep your minds active and try to learn the things that you didn't have time for during the school year (like remembering how to have fun, haha). Good times.

Here's how we did on the Regents:
ALL's WELL THAT ENDS WELL!
Class averages:

D: 95.2 % scales to a 93.3
I can see from almost all of the test booklets that you put in an awesome effort. Thank you all!
G: 95.0 % scales to a 93.3
Congrats on a great performance. Again, the clarity and conscientiousness demonstrated on almost all of the tests deserves several hearty rounds of applause (and raises in allowance!).

E: 86.2 % scales to an 84.6
(probably THE highest (or very close to it) Regents-class average in NY!!! Way to go window-sill gang!!!) Nobody failed. Repeat. Nobody failed. IN FACT, there were only four scores below 80% .
Go back to play! Commence enjoying the summer!

Thanks to all of my classes on the successful completion of our chem course. I hope that you learned that hard work, real schoolwork, has value and meaning, that it can make you a better student and even a better person, and that you do not have to shirk any challenge in your future. Best of luck, continued success, and happy vacation to you all!

so good! We have TWO perfect scores, one from Honors, one from Regents!...more updates later!

now make that THREE perfect scores! and TWO unbelievably near misses; question 63 states that the volume of Ne was 24.4 L NOT 22.4 L; that was a total psyche-out but it shows the IMPORTANCE of CAREFULLY READING, UNDERLINING, CIRCLING key data and TRIPLE-CHECKING YOUR ANSWERS! Oh well, getting 84 out of 85 is something to be extremely proud of!
TWO, make that THREE more 100's were prevented by not checking the melting point of LEAD directly on Table S AND converting the Kelvin temperature to Celsius. Anyone can make that error but that mistake is easily caught upon reviewing your work.
Again, super scores (!!!) but they could have been the ultimate with just a little more explicit checking.

NOW, for my rant AGAINST the NY State Regents Board:
LOOK AT THE UNFAIR SCALE that they make us use to grade the Regents:
Chemistry Regents scale June 2007
Notice that there are NO 99's ! No 97's! No 94's! No 91's!
Take ANY score above a 76 (divide the number correct by 85 to get the true percent correct answers) and see that your score was scaled DOWN by about THREE POINTS!!!
So, just know that I KNOW that you did better than your NY State Regents "scaled (down)" score. NOTICE ALSO that people who got ONLY 56% of the credits got a 65 scaled score !!! So, those who did very well (you guys) were significantly penalized, and those who "failed" were lifted over the passing bar. Way to go NY Board of Regents. Don't bother complaining to them either; they will NEVER change no matter what happens. It is a nameless, faceless bureaucracy that answers to nobody.

Here are the class averages for the multiple-choice part of the Regents:

D: 47.4 out of 50 (happy tiiiimes!); THREE students got 50 out of 50 (those bonus Regents exams and review sessions HELPED!); FIVE students got 49 out of 50!

G: 47.2 out of 50 (niiiiiice!); TWO students got 50 out of 50 (frequent bonus Regents and review session attendees, of course!)
FIVE students got 49 out of 50!


E: 43.3 out of 50 (highest Regents-class average! kudos!);
ONE student got a 50 out of 50. TWO students got a 48 out of 50.

First of all, I want to thank you for the maturity and diligence that you demonstrated today. To see "all" ( 99.9% !) of my students voluntarily stay for at least 2.5 hours and to have many of you "go the distance" makes me so proud of you.
My initial glance at the part I grades:
VERY GOOD! I am REALLY IMPRESSED especially with the REGENTS class multiple-choice performance (Honors did great so far, too)!
SIX students are still in the running for a 100!!! These students all frequently attended the Regents review sessions.
About a dozen of you got only ONE wrong; the questions involved:
a CATALYST gives a reaction an "alternate pathway" that has a LOWER ACTIVATION ENERGY. Anyone who drew a PE diagram showing the catalyzed and uncatalyzed paths naturally got this right. Also, the "alternate pathway" phrase is VERBATIM from the review book and the NY State Regents standards AND I repeated that mantra with "finger quotes" (though not rock n' roll finger quotes) in class, many times.
Also, some of you did not convert Kelvin to Celsius correctly. That is an error that anyone can make but usually gets corrected on a double-check. Oh well, 49 out of 50 isn't bad.

This exam was SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult than last June's exam, though not difficult at all to pass. The exam was similar in difficulty to the one in January; there were REAL chemistry questions, some of which forced you to think or draw out what was happening. Most of the quantitative questions REQUIRED, for the FIRST TIME IN YEARS, an ACTUAL CALCULATION instead of the bogus "correct numerical setup". As I warned, do the test the right way and you are prepared for changes such as the ones just mentioned!

For each of the past three Regents, I posted this timely advice; as I scrutinized the Regents exams then, I could see that the advice was taken to heart and spectacular results ensued. So, let's do the same this year:
Most students are not as good test-takers as they could be. When they get through a test, they just sit and squirm or stare at the ceiling and do nothing until time is called. Here's what you can do instead:
Here are some tips on how you can thoroughly check your Regents exam if you finish before our classes' 2.5 hour minimum test time (though I encourage you to go the distance and put in an "A-game" 3-hour effort; yes, you will hear a stampede of failing students rushing out after two hours so that they can register early for summer school).

1. After you SLOWLY and carefully re-read a given question, carefully read your response and make sure that it contains the KEYWORDS from the question and, most importantly, that your response ANSWERS the question. You can always add clarifying details to your answer. Do not let space be a concern. You may write outside the boxes as long as you draw an arrow showing the continuation of your answer.

2. Make sure that your answer is EASILY readable/legible. PRINT BLOCK CAPITAL LETTERS IF YOU HAVE TO. Carefully cross out anything that you are editing out and clearly write in what you are correcting.

3. DRAW PICTURES/DRAW DIAGRAMS/ DRAW PICTURES/DRAW DIAGRAMS!!! to enhance your explanations EVEN/ESPECIALLY if you did not initially do so!. This may be the single best tip that I can give you. A clearly drawn and LABELED picture can organize your thoughts and it also paints a thousand words.

4. Plug your numbers back into the question to make sure that they produce the correct total. Check all values that you (mis)READ off of the Reference Tables.

5. Add SPECIFIC EXAMPLES of anything that you are writing about in general.

6. Directly above your solved quantitative answer, write the GENERAL EQUATION for the specific calculation that you did and make sure that you placed the numbers AND UNITS (that you correctly labeled from the question) in the correct location in the equation and that you didn't leave out any part of the equation.

If you follow these tips thoroughly, you WILL improve your test score ; also, performing these steps will keep you engaged and productive for the entire allotted Regents time.

A lot is riding on your performance. I will see and check everyone's complete test including scrapwork. You should display/demonstrate every sound test-taking technique that you now know.

My classes last year certainly followed this advice and we lived happily ever after with TEN perfect scores, nine 99's and a 97 class average, too.

More kudos and plaudits to those of you who have taken bonus Regents exams over the past four weeks. I am surprised that only about six students frequently took advantage of these opportunities. Those six students now regularly and easily score in the mid to high 90's on each exam (we did get a 100 today also!) and, as a result, their quarterly averages have significantly increased. This increase will be compounded when these students naturally do very well on this year's Regents exam (that's what has always happened in the past, anyway).

For those who have not taken advantage of these bonus tests, there is still Wednesday's exam for you to display your level of preparation and knowledge of Regents Chem. Thoroughly marking up your test and Reference Tables, providing examples and illustrations, and writing clearly and carefully (use LOTS of scrap paper, 20 pages if you must, to outline your thoughts BEFORE you write in the test booklet!) are all factors that will demonstrate your degree of preparation for this test. My past students boldly displayed these skills and their results were beyond stellar. Let us continue this tradition of excellence.
Cheers!

The following is an excerpt of a post from one of NY's most dedicated and experienced Regents Chem teachers, Mr. Mark Rosengarten. He nicely summarizes some of the common errors that his past students have made; learn from this list and avoid these errors on Wednesday (forewarned is forearmed!):

I have been focusing on those areas for the last 15 years
to figure out a way to make those topics more accessible for the
students. Know what I found out? Those kids who take the time to learn
it do just fine. Here are the specific weakness areas I have been
addressing, that show up in item analysis year after year after year:

1) Molecular formulas. The kids have the most trouble remembering how
to determine the molecular formula given the empirical formula and the
molecular mass. Most of it stems from a refusal to just acquaint
themselves with the definitions of empirical and molecular formulas,
because if you understand the definitions, the calculation makes all the
sense in the world. One thing that throws them is that a molecular
formula can sometimes be an empirical formula, and unless they really
are good at knowing how many bonds an atom can form and take that next
step to actually drawing the molecule, they continue to be confused
despite my continued efforts to refine how I present it and how they
work on it.

2) Mole-mole problems. Again, despite endless refining of teaching
methods here, students often do not make the connection between
mole-mole problems and the use of the coefficients of the balanced
reaction. We start off with the analogy of making pancakes, and we use
a recipe's ratios to scale the recipe up or down before we move on to
the mole-mole problems.

3) The difference between molecular polarity and bond polarity. I have
even split the two topics up into completely different units and bring
it together. They always want to go with the symmetry. They look for
the easy way to remember, and that does not always work.

4) Colligative properties. You would think this is a simple game of
simply memorizing that boiling point goes up and freezing point goes
down when solute is added, and the effect is magnified at greater
concentrations. I show them the chart on the antifreeze container, show
numerous videos, do demonstrations, but it comes down to them just
remembering!

5) Electrolytic cells. Ever since my song "You Start At The Anode", my
kids have become champs at voltaic cells, but they simply do not get
electrolytic cells. I have a fuel cell car model that includes an
electrolytic hydrogen generator that I use to model the process, but
they still cannot grasp the concept.

6) Natural decay reactions. They are excellent at them when reminded
(endlessly) how to do them, but test them on it (write the decay
reaction for I-131) and they will write the half-life. If they do
actually write what looks like the decay reaction, they put the decay
particle on the left side. I have demonstrated this using a nerf foam
ball gun...the gun with the ball represents the unstable nucleus, then
you draw the arrow...then I fire the gun to show the decay particle
exiting the unstable nucleus, and that the two particles are now
separate. I show them video clips of the process. Makes no difference.

7) They are champs at nuclear fusion (Why Does The Sun Shine, by They
Might Be Giants, does a great job at this), but they cannot for the life
of them remember artificial transmutation or fission, or the fact that a
tiny bit of mass is destroyed in the reaction and converted into vast
amounts of energy. Tried about a million things to get this across.

8) Atomic number and mass number, what they mean and how to find them.
Same goes for nuclear charge, number of electrons in an ion and the
charges of the subatomic particles!!!! This is simply studying. I have
come at it from all different angles to try to appeal to everyone's
learning style, but it slips through their minds like some vague
slippery thing. Given them practice, and throughout the year.

9) Half-reactions for diatomic species. Even my honors students have
difficulty with this. I approach it by using drawings, basic
configurations, dot diagrams...any way I can explain it, I tackle it.
They have a very hard time with it.

10) Acids and bases...just the fact that acids yield H+ ions and bases
yield OH- ions confuses them to no end, despite the Reference Tables and
repeated demonstration and evaluation and diagramming.

11) Electrolytes vs. nonelectrolytes. Acid solutions and ionic
solutions are electrolytes, molecular solutions are not. End of story.
Acid formulas start with H+ or end in COOH, ionic compounds contain a
metal and nonmetal or polyatomic ion, molecular formulas contain all
nonmetals. DOH! I bring the concept of electrolyte and nonelectrolyte
to most units, starting from day 1. I don't know how else to teach
them. I have to say that this year the students have done much better
with it than ever before, due to massive repetition of the concept.
WHY? Because charged particles in motion can carry electrical charge.
If they are not in motion (ionic solid) then they can't carry charge.
If they contain no ions (molecular) them they cannot carry charge.

These seem to be the main ones I contend with. There are other smaller
issues, but I chalk most of the others up to a lack of doing assigned
work, inattentiveness and copying off of other students' papers. If you
don't DO, you don't LEARN. Pure and simple.

Mark

Each year, Mr. Rosengarten hosts the Regents Review Live show on public television and he also provides other chem teachers with a lot of instructional materials. Kudos to him; let us heed his words and put in the ultimate effort on Wednesday's Chem Regents.