May 12, 2008 -- FINAL GRADES ARE IN!  The last grades were entered around 1:15 a.m., so depending on when the University updates its online records, you may be able to see your grade as early as today.  You can pick up lab notebooks once finals are over, and the stockroom will hold them until the end of the Fall 2008 semester.

I enjoyed this semester and I hope you did too.  Have a great summer, and watch out for ninjas!

May 10, 2008 -- FINAL GRADES ARE DELAYED.  I had hoped to post them by today, but a few snags have held them up.  I have 99% ready to go, but can't post any until they're all ready. Please be patient -- I'll probably post them Monday, May 12 and you can view them Tuesday. Also, my internet access at home is sporatic right now -- I'm having line noise problems that TWC won't fix until Wednesday.  In the meantime I've got a bag of ice on my cable modem because it handles noise better when it's cold, and loses the signal when it warms up.  So if I'm slow to respond to e-mails, it's because I'm offline.

April 12:  Experiment 10 is finally here.  I put that in boldface because I know one or two of you are probably happy to hear that.  Please keep your spontaneous outbursts of uncontainable joy to yourselves so as not to ruin the genuinely somber mood the rest of us are faking.  The lecture slides are online.  We'll do Course/Instructor surveys during lecture this week, and TA evaluations in lab. Everybody checks out after Experiment 10.  Make-up week is next week during yourt usual lab time. There is no class meeting during make-up week. For answers to other questions, see the End of Semester FAQ.

April 6:  Experiment NEIN!  We're working in pairs again this week, and the experiment should take about as long as last week's did.  Once again the experiment is really made up of some individual smaller experiments -- two titrations, and then mostly just some careful dilutions followed by single pH measurements. The lecture slides are up, along with a cheat sheet from Dr. Leytner to help you with the report, and a Post-lab 9 Help Sheet on the Freebies page.  Post-lab Nein will be graded with NO PARTIAL CREDIT, so get these right.  Use the help sheet, and if you still have questions, ask me or one of the TA's.   Significant digits count for a half point in each problem.   If you are in Kal's Monday night lab, he will be out this week.  Kate will fill in for him.  You'll love her, she's wonderful.

March 29:  This week's experiment will be done in pairs.  In fact, all the experiments from now on are done in pairs.  The Experiment 8 lecture slides are online.  We're doing four separate small reactions in lab this week, but they all involve measuring temperatures every 15 seconds over a period of time that can range from six or eight minutes all the way to 20 minutes.  Don't worry, we'll be using digital thermometers for this, so you won't have to squint at your lab thermometer.  You must record all of these time and temperature values directly into your lab notebook.  Not into your lab manual and not onto random scraps of paper towel.  Bring a watch with a seconds timer if you have one.

Achtung!  Attention!  ¡Cuidado!  Post-lab 8 will be graded with NO PARTIAL CREDIT.  Make sure you get these problems correct!  There is a Post-lab 8 help sheet on the Freebies page that will help you stay on track with these problems.  Start on them before the weekend.  If you have any questions, ask me or one of the TAs.

March 22:  The lecture slides for the second half of Experiment 7 are now online.  It's another short lab this week, but there are lots of calculations to be done afterward.  Dr. Leytner has made up a cheat sheet that will help guide you through these calculations if you need help.  It's available on the Freebies page.  There is also an Unknown Summary Sheet for this lab, which will include your results from both Experiment 6 and Experiment 7.  There is a quiz this week covering Experiment 7.  If you can handle Beer's Law and dilutions, you should have no trouble with it.
       As temperatures warm up, we see more and more people wearing shorts to lab (and losing points for it).  If you're prone to wearing shorts in warmer weather, throw a pair of sweat pants in your lab drawer so you don't end up wearing a bunny suit and losing your TA safety/technique points for the day.
       By the way, if you were in lecture on Wednesday night when the guy from KLRU was taping, it's for a show called Docubloggers.  They have a weekly TV documentary show and a companion web site (docubloggers.org).  I will be on both the show and the web site sometime during the upcoming season, but I don't know how or where he intends to use the classroom footage.  I'll post something here when I know more.

March 13:  Experiment 7 will be broken into two weeks. The first week we will do parts 2 and 3.  This will be the most straightforward experiment since the Coke lab, and you should all be done before 90 minutes is up. But heads up, heroes -- when you come in next week, you'll have to have Post-lab 7 finished and ready to turn in just like a pre-lab, and there will be a quiz next week!  Yeah, I know we won't have finished Experiment 7 yet, but you'll have done everything I'm going to quiz you on anyway, so why not get it while it's fresh?  The lecture slides for this week are now posted.

March 1:  Only one more week until spring break!  And it's a fairly short lab this week -- all we're doing is drying our crystals from last time, and then titrating three samples from the crystals. If you come prepared and get right to work, you'll be done in about 90 minutes.  The lecture slides for Experiment 6 are now online.

February 23:  The lecture slides for Experiment 5 are up.  You won't be collecting data in this lab, but your sample will undergo a lot of changes over the course of the experiment -- you'll see color changes, precipitation, dissolution, gas evolution -- and you'll want to record your observations.  Fifteen percent of your lab report grade this week will be based on your observations, so write them down as they happen.  The discussion questions are also worth more points than usual.

February 16:  The Experiment 4 lecture slides are now available.  Dr. Leytner has drawn up a cheat sheet that will help you with the calculations for this lab if you get stuck.  (Alternatively, if you pay attention during lecture, you won't get stuck.)  The pdf is now posted on the Freebies page.

February 10:  The lecture slides for Experiment 3 are now up, along with an Excel spreadsheet grade calculator for keeping track of where you stand in this course, and a help sheet to save you some time on the discussion questions and post-lab for Experiment 3.   Also, Dr. Leytner has provided this link to an online Excel tutorial at UT that may help you pick up a few more useful tips.  It's set up so that you can skip right to the part you're interested in.  Give it a try at http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/technology/tutorials/office/excel/

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Effective immediately, if you show up to lecture after the quizzes have been handed out, you will not be given a quiz. 

February 2 - Groundhog Day!  The Experiment 2 lecture slides are up on the Lectures page. There is also another Excel Demo spreadsheet on the Freebies page -- this time I want to show you how to enter formulas in Excel so that you can calculate all the numbers you need to do this week's report in less than one minute!  Seriously, you can calculate the percent yield for each component along with the total percent recovery, and the averages and standard deviations for each of these all in less than 60 seconds.

HEADS UP -- I WILL BE GONE MUCH OF THIS WEEK!  I am leaving town on Tuesday, and won't get back until late late late Thursday night.  I am going to Oklahoma, and don't know whether I'll have Internet access or not.  So if you e-mail me questions during this time, you might end up waiting a while for the answers.

Wednesday night's lecture will be given by my Head TA and right-hand man Josh Biberdorf.

January 27:  I'm a little later than I had hoped to be in getting these lecture slides for Experiment 1 posted, but that's 'cuz I was busy working on a special treat for you.  Oh yes, wait till you see.  In addition to the lecture slides, I have posted a sample quiz 1 on the Freebies page, and I have also put together a first-of-its-kind Excel demo spreadsheet to help clear up some of the confusion over significant digits, average and standard deviation, and operations using significant digits. We'll discuss it briefly in class, and if you're uncertain about any of these things, you can play with the spreadsheet and see if things start to make sense.

TUESDAY MORNING LABS - EXPERIMENT 1: Orf is out this week.  Esther Maier will replace him.  Monica will also miss Tuesday morning this week.  Kal Vasudevan will replace her. Your usual TA will be back next week.

January 23:  The new, updated, complete, and hopefully final TA office hour schedule is now online.  I'm so hopeful that it's the final version that I even put the schedule in boldface rainbow colors! at no additional cost to you.

January 20:   A partial Office Hours schedule has been posted. We've still got a couple of wrinkles to work out before we have them all, so stay tuned. Also, I have updated the sample preliminary lab write-up and sample report on the freebies page.

January 16: The Teaching Assistants page is finally online.  Sorry for the delay -- it turns out that most of those guys who say they'll work for food really won't.  But thanks to a lenient Texas Parole Board, we are now fully staffed for the Spring 2008 semester! We'll determine TA office hours on Friday, and I'll have the schedule posted this weekend.   Learn your TA's name -- you'll need to write it on every piece of paper you turn in for this class.

January 12:  We are starting off with a kind of stumbling schedule because the MLK holiday is a week later than usual.  This is forcing our Monday lecture to meet earlier than it normally would.

MONDAY CLASSES will meet on January 14 for lecture only.  We will return on January 28 to do experiment 1 and then we will check in to our lab drawers afterward.  No other CH204 classes will meet this week.

TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY CLASSES will meet on Jan 22-23 for lecture, and will then go up to lab and check in.  Make sure you have a combination lock! And make sure you buy a lab manual before the Co-op runs out!

The course web site is not yet fully operational because we don't even have TA's lined up yet, but once things are taken care of (during the first week of classes), I'll update and activate the rest of the pages.