Final Blog Post of the Year: Week 34

Maddie,

I'm really schocked this is my last Honors chemistry blog post. Has it really been a whole year?  I really did like having Honors Chemistry in the "middle" of the day, The Class, while at times was a bit unfocused,  was really quite interesing and insightful, i  felt that i really LEARNED this year, not  just " learned". I strugged at times to  comprehend the material but ifelt by the end i had somewhat of a handle on everthing we have larned  this year, though i will say this is a creddited to my aweseome group mates Margo, Chris, and John, i would be  nowhere without them. I liek that we actually spent time in the lab instead of just  sitting in class, having Mr. Abud lecture us while the lab was so tantilizingly close yet so far, i also liekd how we all took part in activities like the cookie lab which we all got to do  something ,i wasn't jsut one person, it was the whole class. I'd rate the calss, on a 1-4 scale, a 3.5 because while i feel i did learn as a whole and took away  valuable knowledge in the year i feel that some class periods were utilized  in the ways they could have been. I feel the stard-style aprrach to learning was sucessful nad more pinpointed then other science classes i've been in.  If i went back  to talk to myself in December i'd say " You Will Survive." because i was convinced for a while that all the different stuff with active grade and blogger and google drive a nd twitter would make me tear my hair out in fustartion. But my hair is dstill intact and ive made it through the year sucessfully. Having a phone that was allowed in chemistry was lovely, but distracting. The fact that we can get so much done with   devices does outweigh the fact that we can check social media with the same devices, i cannot say i  never checked my tumblr in class but it was a smal lammount of time in comarison to whewn i was using my phone for science. These blogs, whiel fun to create, did not really improve my learnign experience. Did i make  connections and conclusions using blogger? Yes but I don't really prefer to  use  apps like bloger, but then agian i'm not toally comfortable with posting things and such, as i have only a tumblr and  i dont publish anything on there. Reassesment is the best concept I've had a teacher ever come up with or incorperate into their teaching. There were times when i get fpur 2.5's on my assesments and iwas devastated. But i felt a bit better knowing that i could  study and fix  my mistakes, which were often little stupid thigns that i  overlooked. I could fix things for the better, rather looking at the bad grade and cringing at it. and i liked ActiveGrade, ya know once i  knew how to  work it after the first quarter or so. for  next year, I think i  would recommend stricter policies on devices, liek if you're caught on a social site its a warning then,  and after school session with Mr. Abud, and then lastly you have to use one of his devices that doesn't have the ap pyou wnat in it or whater.  Another thing i wish Mr. Abud would incorpate would be  more review  right before assesments and such but it wasn't bad this year, i felt throughly prepared for most of my assesments.
I'm actually a bit sad about  the end of the year, Maddie, i hope were in a class next year, because you too were one of the reasons i enjoyed chemistry

Here's me in my chemistry shirt!!

Week 32: TEACHER OF THE YEAR!

Madison, can you believe Mr. Abud won Michigan Teacher of the  year? I really believe it's a attestament to the hard work he puts into his job, teaching us. He clearly is an inavator in  the classroom with his new teaching methods ( including phones, in most classes i get a cold stare for looking at my phone, but in Chemistry i use it for worksheets and i have a whole periodic table on my phone, one that icannot lose thankfully).
 Heres a link to the Grosse Pointe Patch  Article about Mr. Abud's honor :http://grossepointe.patch.com/articles/grosse-pointe-north-educator-named-michigan-teacher-of-the-year-4d95c7fb

But dont read the comments, parents in GP can get Dirty and snippy. but i digress. This is a chemistry blog and were discussing the sucess of our AWESOME TEACHER! I really think he's deserving of the honor.

Besides the festivities on thursday we started to get into Thermodynamics, but since we were simply left with worksheets after the initial lesson, the sucess of my understanding of Thermodynamics was nonexistant, unfortunately. T understand the principles of  potential and internal  energy  verses total enery and how one afftects the other and so forth but the other problems on the sheet left me confused. oh well, i can simply ask the michigan teacher of the year!

Week31: Back on Track!

Okay After gettigng all my late work out of the way, i now can focus upon  THIS week's reflection.
We discussed the synthization of copper this week and even preformed it. I sadly wasn't  there everyday ( thanks to AP Exams....) so i don't think i truly understood the experiment.

We started with an Iron  Nail sumperged in copper chloride after weighing out  the copper cloride and adding water. Imediately the nail took on a Red color, assuming the nai lwas oxidizing, or rusting, we  set it in the  corner of the room and left it overnight. i thought it  was cool how  immediate the  change was. When we returned the next day,  the nail was covered in a  red... algae like substance, and  i was worried something was wrong becuase the water was a  urine  yellow color. we  removed the liquid from the   test tube and them removed the nail. the Algae stuff  decreased in size when removed from the liquid, and took on an even briger reddish hue. IT didn't look like rust anymore. we removed all we could from the liquid and from the test ube and offf the nail and Mr. Abud expalined this was what pure copper looked like.

IF the copper was not a solid, what was  the liquid now? We noticed th thee mass of the nail shrunk too, and we concluded  the liquid was  iron chloride, and not copper chloride. this  Synthesis of copper is a warm up to the snythesis of silver, which we'll do and make silver coke bottles next week i am truly excited for this!!

Week 30: I was studying for Exams.

 Last weekend i became best friends with my AP US History Review textbook,  there were two instances  where i fell asleep with it, so needless to say, my prorites werent as rightly alinged as they needed to be, i neglected this Blog.

Now were getting into using BCA Tables to predict how much product we cna create with the reactants we have primarily worked in moles,  how many moles of X and y produces how amny moles of z, but were  branching into more... realistic adaptions going from grams, converting to moles, and them back to rams to get the final answer.
 We did a few problems on this type of eqations.

I had some trouble with this on my assesment on friday, as i get stuck when i comes to the converstions and usually end up with weird answers that differ from everone elses, it's probably because i don't round right or something,

Another issue i have trouble with, Maddie, is identifying the limiting and excess factors in the equation, i mean i get what they do, but to instantly see which is which  is harder for me. I think i need to practice these equations more to fully master them.

I know the picture is kinda sad but i  came from my phone, to find the limiting reactant i usually have to draw out the equation with dots, it's silly but it works for me.  do you have any input on how ot help with this? Thanks Maddie.

Week 29: I'm terribly sorry this is Late.

Maddie, I want to appologize, the last two blog reflections i have done ARE LATE. I know!  I'm a bit off Track with all the material we have been doing!


Though this week, the cookie Lab was due on  Monday and i took on the responsibility of baking, i had gotten back from Canada that mornign so i was a BIT flustered! I followed recipie "F"  which oddly called for three table spoons of Vanilla, while i thought of this a strange, nothing else seemed to out of preportions so i simply kept bakign as  usual. Getting the baking cocoa into the batter was a bit difficult and my dad was adamant about me "blending" the cookies ( i did  it to appease him, dont EVER try it, it was  messy and about 90% of the batter stuck to the  mixers, which guess which lucky gal got to scrape it off? This one.) eventually  we made about 40 cookies or so, out of the supposed 54 it was intened to yield, i thought nothing of it till the next  day.

When we all " sampled" one another's recipes, we could tell when something was... off about some of the cookies, most often in size or color, but in one case a batch of cookies was WAYYY too salty. In the end, we picked the "true" recipe and discussed how excess and  limiting factors effect a  recipe, and  chemicla equations are the "recipes" of chemistry, i feel it was a good way to ease into the lesson.

Later in the week, we worked more on chemical equations, usuing worksheets and learnign about different  "types" of equations, i  find them all so interesting, i really like stoichiometry as a whole, i wonder if you can spend your life doing it? maybe but Mr. Abud says you're graded in college by your precent yield of  experiments and that, that scares me!

  Well i've looked through my phone but  i mustive done soemthign bwith the pictures of the  cookies i made, so i don't leave this blog blank, here's the "actual"  recipe that  we vall recieved  deviated versions for the cookie lab instead!

http://www.verybestbaking.com/recipes/18476/Original-NESTL%C3%89-TOLL-HOUSE-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies/detail.aspx

Week 28: Balancing Equations and Burning Butane!

Maddie,

Happy Saturday! I hope you're enjoying your weekend!

I feel this week we really comprehended different types of chemical equations as well as how to balance them.The three worksheets we got last week were quite helpful in undetstanding chemical equations as a whole.

A Single repalcement is when a ionic compound is broken up by a cation or an anion to form another ionic compound with a different byproduct. A double replacement is where two ionic compounds come togethr and basically flip flop so that the cations are  paired with new anions, and there is no byproduct in this  type of chemicla equation.

Another  part of chemical equations are synthesis and decompsition. Synthesis is where two ( or possibly more)  Ions are put together to for an ionic compound.  An Ionic compoung that returns to it's individual ions is called a decomposition,while thse processes are two sides of the same coin, they are both very different and easy to mix up, i almost putsynthesis when it was actually decomposition on the assesment on friday, Margo noticed the slip up and saved me!

Combustion is my favorite chemical reaction! This is when  the product of the reaction is  Water and Carbon dioxide,  and that's all! I think that it's so cool that there is a seperate category for this reacttion.

Finally Balancing the equations is always about having the same ammount of molecules that you started with  on the left side to end up on the right side,  so i usually draw a diagram with little  dots, some colored  in and osme left blank, to sort out how many of each molecule i need, and to correctly balanace the equation,  during our group assesment, the liuttle tiny dots were how we showed " particle diagrams for each reaction!

   The best part of ChemTeam this week was lighting the  t-shirt strip doused in Butane and becuase of the string, we could "hold the fireball" The fact that  it was burning the butane and NOT our fingers was  the coolest thing  to me! Look at the picture i took, it looks like Mr. Abud can shoot fire from his hands! ( don't make him mad, jk!)

W33k 27: Chemical Reactions, Colecting Hydrogen Gas, and why air bags deploy so quickly!

Week 27

Now that i know Madison is going to start reading this i will adress it to her!


Hi, Madison! Happy sunday! All the chemical reactions we experimented with this week were quite facinating!  Now that we all have a basic grasp on the elemts and ionic bonding, we now an delve into chemical reactions, another important ( and inevitable, things DO blow up!) part of Chemisty.

When we all mixed Clacium with Hydrochloric acid ( as only half of the groups had finished on friday) wek  saw   gas comming from the bottle, as  gas is a common byproduct of a chemical reaction. After testing the gas's combustability, we determined taht the gas was hydrogen and the chloride and calcium bonded to one another forming calcium chloride. The  calcium and  hydrogen didn't form anythign together because they are both positive elements, and because Hydrogen is diatomic and it can bond with itself, the equation balanced itself in the end.

What was happening was the pull between the clacium and the chloride was stronger tha th e pull between the hydrogen and the chloride, so  the chloride bonded ( ionically) with the calcium and the hydrogen to bond with itself asnd become pure hydrogen gas. After becoming both calcium chloride and hydrogen, the byproducts of this chemical reaction were not as harmful as the orginal hydrochloric acid ( whic is a positive  Hydrogen bonded with a negative Chloride) whic can bnurn though skin.

 Later in the week we began to  draw out what  happens in a chemical reaction, with the help of worksheets and skill practives.  there are several types of rections, single reactionsthat only one element replaces one part of the ionic bond and a double replacement reaction  where two ionic bonds swap which element they are bonded two, in the simpliest sense. Combustion reaction ALWAYS produces Water and carbon dioxide, becuase a hydrocarbon  reacts with aon oxygen. Synthesis and decomposion  reactions are oposites of one aother. Sysnthesis is where two elements form to create a  ionic bond. Decomposition is where an ionic bond is broken up into it's elements.


Another important  part fo writing Chemistry formulas is balancing the equation which makes sure that the number of  atoms doesnt vary from one side of the equation to the other. I had some diffuculty with this nadi asked Harris but ifeel he was quite confused with  it himself. Maybe you understand it, Madison, and you can teach me how to  do it correcctly.


Lasttly because we are talking about reactions and such, and because i was geeking out about this, i thoughti should share how airbags deploy so quicky. It's actually thanks to a chemical reaction. Inside the airbag chamber ther is noth Nitrogen gas and a gas called Sodium Azide, which  is one Sodium Atom and three Nitorgen atoms. Because this is an unstable compound, and Nitrogen is diatomic the littlest ammount of pressure ( say a person flying into the steering wheel, not little but there would be pressure on the air bag then) causes the Nirtogen to bond with itself, causing the airbag to inflate  rapidly with nitrogen gas, along with Sodium nitiride ( Na3N). I  saw this on a TV show where a guy got blown into the air by sitting on  an airbag, and scientists expalined how it was possible and such. I thought it waso ne of the coolest things i have seen on TV in a while!!!

Here is the  video of the  man sitting on the airbag  that  Scientists were trying to explain the science behind :http://www.youtube.com/watchv=uUZJkti1A3M