Monday, May 27, 2013

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!

Sunday, May 19, 2013

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