December 10 - FINAL GRADES ARE IN.  I just submitted final grades to the University. You should be able to see them starting tomorrow under UT Direct.  You can pick up your notebook from the stockroom starting on Monday, December 15.  They will have them available until the end of the spring semester.  Good luck with finals, and have a nice break!  Auf Wiedersehen, meine Kinder!!

November 22 - Please check the End of Semester FAQ before e-mailing me questions.  And please don't ask me about your final grade before all the assignments are turned in and graded.

MAKE-UP WEEK INFORMATION:

Go to your own lab at the start of lab time to turn in your Lab 10 report and pick up graded assignments.  If you do not have a make-up lab to do, you should turn in your notebook along with your Experiment 10 report.  Tear Experiment 10 out of your notebook before turning it in.  Make sure your notebook contains copies of all the graphs for all the experiments.  You can tape or staple them in.

If you have a make-up lab to do, then you will keep your notebook for another week.  Turn in your lab 10 report, and then go to room 4.124.  All make-up labs will be done in room 4.124.  Your TA may or may not be working the lab during your make-up lab time, because we have students from four or five labs in there, but we only need one TA at a time. Some of the waste bottles will be in room 4.124 whre we are working, and the rest will be in room 4.116 next door.  If you don't see the waste bottle for your experiment, it is in 4.116.

The materials for each experiment are NOT in the lab.  You will need to go to the stockroom and tell Tiffany which experiment you are doing, and she will give you a plastic tray containing all the reagents.   Return it to her when you are finished.

Make-up lab reports are due one week after completing the experiment, as usual.  There will not be anyone at the labs during this time, so just bring your papers and your notebook to the stockroom and Tiffany will get them to your TA.  No late make-up reports will be accepted!  The TA's are on a tight grading schedule after make-up week, and we will not delay reporting final grades because somebody didn't do their lab report on time.

November 12 - The end is near!  Experiment 10 is all that remains between you and the glorious freedom you have craved since Experiment 2 went horribly, horribly wrong all those weeks ago.  The lecture slides for Experiment 10 are posted.  The end is near, I say!  I have also posted an End of Semester FAQ that I hope will answer any questions you have about make-up work, turning things in, finding out grades, and so on.  Please check there before e-mailing me questions.

I will be out of town on Thursday and Friday after Experiment 10, so I will not have office hours after Experiment 10.  I will have e-mail access in the evenings.

November 7 - The lecture slides for Experiment Nein are now onlein.  This week's experiment is also done in pairs.  It's a fairly long lab, especially if you do the graphing during lab, which I recommend because you can probably get it done faster and more easily in lab than you can working by yourself at home.  There is also a cheat sheet on the Freebies page to help with the calculations for Parts 3 and 4 of the lab report.   Make sure you know the calorimetry equation and can do Hess's Law problems for this week's quiz.  There are only two quizzes left, so study for these and give that 30% of your grade a boost.

October 31 - Quite a few things to mention this time:

1)  There are errors in the lab manual for post-lab problem 5.  The printer made some creative changes to problem 5 which render it absurd and unsolvable.  The correct problem is listed on one of the later slides of the Experiment 8 lecture slides on the Lectures page.  We'll also talk about this one in class.

2)  We will be working in pairs to collect data in the lab for the rest of the semester, but you are still responsible for doing your own lab report all by your own self.

3)  This week's lab consists mostly of measuring temperatures every 15 seconds for what will seem like an eternity, but is really less than half that long. Bring a watch with a second hand or some other timing device with you to lab.  All data must be recorded directly into a lab notebook, either yours or your lab partner's.  You were supposed to be recording all your data directly into your lab notebook all semester long, but until now I've let you get away with writing it into your lab manual instead.  Well, no more, I say!  Starting this week all data goes directly into the lab notebook.  You'll notice there are no tables in the manual to copy the data into -- that's because some of you will be collecting data longer than others.

4)  There is an unknown summary sheet for this lab on which you will report the identity of your unknown metal in Part 2 of the experiment and its specific heat capacity.  Make sure you report the specific heat capacity you determined based on your data from the lab.  Do not just copy the value out of the lab manual or you will get a 0.

October 26 - Sorry for the delay getting this week's material posted -- it's been a busy busy week for me, and I'm still trying to get caught up.

This week's lab is the longest one of the semester.  It's not hard to do, but it does cover two new topics -- dilution calculations and spectroscopy (Beer's Law). The lecture slides for Experiment 7 are (finally) online.  There is a cheat sheet on the Freebies page to help you with the calculations, and there is also an unknown summary sheet for this lab, on which you will report your results for both Experiment 6 and Experiment 7.

October 17 - Lots of announcements this week:

This week we will begin to analyze the green crystals we made in lab last week.  If you missed last week or for some other reason do not have crystals, talk to your TA when you get to lab. The lecture slides for Experiment 6 are posted on the Lectures page.  We will balance redox reactions this week without determining oxidation numbers, but if you want to understand how to determine oxidation numbers, I have posted some instructions on the Freebies page under Experiment 6.

I will be out of town this week from Wednesday through Friday, and will not have office hours on Thursday. I will have limited e-mail access in the evenings, so if you e-mail me, don't expect a reply until the evening at the earliest.

We've been looking at the results of the Experiment 2 Unknown Summary Sheets.  The results for most lab sections this semester were far lower than normal, but the reasons for this are not entirely clear.  Sometimes there is a lot of scatter among one class's results for an unknown, and sometimes the results are more clustered but are centered on an incorrect value.  Some classes got solid results across the board, with class averages around 17 - 18 on the unknown summary sheet, and others averaged only around 5 - 7.   Things were complicated further by students who entered their results on the wrong page of the spreadsheet, which created further scatter even when their results were good.  But I think something probably went wrong in making up the samples, so at the end of the semester I will calculate everybody's final grade twice, once with the unknown summary sheet and once without, and will take the higher score.  If you are keeping track of your grade using the spreadsheet on the Freebies page, you can do the same by deleting the unknown summary sheet grade along with the 20 points in the cell next to it.

October 9 - No chatspeak in the lab reports!!  Do your lab reports in regular old 20th century English or the TA's will mark your nsr wrong.  They got too many lab reports to grade to waste time deciphering arcane abbreviations.  The Experiment 5 lecture slides are up on the Lectures page.  This week's lab is a short one IF YOU FOLLOW DIRECTIONS CAREFULLY.  If you don't, you will have to start over.  We have people screw this up every semester because they don't read the labels on the bottles.  Taking five seconds to double-check the label before taking any reagents will save you an hour of redoing the procedure.

October 3 - The lecture slides for Experiment 4 are online.  This week's experiment has more calculations than any of the previous labs have had, and Dr. Leytner has written up a Cheat Sheet that will walk you through them.  I'll hand this out in class, but it's also available on the Freebies page.
         Note that there is a change in the procedure for this week's lab. Part 1 of the procedure says to grab a vial of NaOH pellets and dissolve them in 1 liter of water.  Instead we will weigh out 7 grams of NaOH pellets and dissolve them in 500 mL of water.  There is an unknown summary sheet for this week's lab on which you will report which acid you got for your unknown and what its concentration is.

September 26 - Experiment 3 is one of the quickest and easiest experiments we'll do all semester, but the write-up can be a long one.  You'll be writing a lot of chemical equations to describe the precipitation reactions you see in lab.  I strongly recommend that you write out a couple of the equations before you leave the lab to make sure you're comfortable doing it.  Also, you'll need to know how to name ionic compounds.  If you don't know how to do this, check page 35 of Zumdahl or page F32 of Atkins and Jones, or just Google "naming ionic compounds" and click around until you find a site that makes sense to you.  I'll go over it very quickly in class, but it's something you should have piked up in CH301.  The lecture slides for Experiment 3 are online.  Also, I have posted an Excel spreadsheet Grade Calculator on the Freebies page that you can use to calculate your overall grade in this class as you receive graded papers back from your TA. I'll talk about this in class.

September 19 - Experiment 2 is ready to go!  This week's experiment is a lot more involved than the last one -- if you are not prepared, it may take you the entire four hours to complete.  You'll be given a mixture of salt, sand, and chalk dust, and will have to carry these through a series of reactions to separate them and recover each component separately.  Your goal is to determine how much of each of these is in your mixture.  The lecture slides for Experiment 2 are online.  I have also posted another Excel spreadsheet on the Freebies page to show you how to create your own formulas in Excel and do a lot of calculations quickly. If you already know how to do this, you can do pretty much all of the calculations for Experiment 2 in about one minute.  We'll talk about this in lecture.  Also, there is a quiz this week!  Make sure you look over everything from Experiment 1 -- significant digits, average and standard deviation, density, the whole nine yards.

September 12 - The lecture slides for Experiment 1 are up already!  Normally this wouldn't happen until the weekend, so that makes today a special day.  Besides, I probably won't have power for the next three days since Hurricane Ike is going to come in and wipe the state of Texas completely off the map (sorry about falling into panic mode -- I guess I've been watching too many weather reports). I have also posted a sample quiz on the Freebies page so you'll know what to expect when we take the quiz over Experiment 1 (which won't be for another week, if any of us are still alive then).  Along with that I also posted an Excel spreadsheet that covers significant digits and also explains a couple of very useful Excel functions.  If you're not familiar with Excel, definitely take a look at the spreadsheet, because Excel is easy to learn and will save you a lot of time, which is good because you don't have much left. Gotta go now -- the sky is falling and I must run and tell the king!

September 6 - The lecture slides for this week are posted on the Lectures page in pdf format.  They're posted as handout pages so you can print them off to take notes on during class, and they're also posted as full-size slides in case you want to refer back to them during the week, because sometimes the miniscule versions are too hard to read.  There's no experiment this week, we're just checking in to the lab.

If you don't already have a lab manual, lab notebook, combination lock, and calculator, get them right quick.  You'll need the combination lock this week when we check in.  You'll need all the rest before next week.  Don't wait till the last minute to get this stuff, because they sometimes sell out, and then you're screwed.

August 26 - Our first class meeting will be the week of September 8.  There are no Monday and Tuesday 204 labs or classes until September 8 and 9.  Make sure you have all the course materials, including a combination lock (not a padlock), for that first day.