My epic fail of a chemistry teacher

[xII_Music_IIx]

okay, so i'm in chemistry this year and i'm all like, "yeah alright we can blow stuff up and junk" but my chem teacher seems so clueless....all we ever do is damn book work, we've done like three labs since september(experiments, whatever you wanna call it) when he said we'd do at least one a week, and all my friends are having fun making slime in their chemistry classes...so

topics to discuss:
chem teachers(love 'em, hate 'em, which do you think?)
experiments(or labs) you've done in chem class
should i switch to another chem class?

[ll Saso ll]

i would switch into the other class if he is really that lame smile

[LadyLight]

What level chemistry are you taking? High school general chemistry, honors chem, AP chem, college level chemistry? If people in your school taking the same course are doing experiments that you are not, I would suggest requesting to change classes. I tutor chemistry and I see a big difference in students from classes with proactive teachers and those from straight-up lecture teachers.

[iKNiGHTMARE]

I not in Chem yet. Im in Biology and already we've done a lab where we grow bacteria and kill daphnia. It was fun. XP
If you don't like the class, then switch. It's your opinion. :3

~Teddy

[Dryctarth]

I can understand your excitement about getting to blow things up, but as a senior chemistry major I can assure you that you very likely won't get to blow anything up. Explosions are safety hazards, cost money, and don't really teach you anything. Now they still look cool, and I can almost guarentee you that blowing stuff up is the secert goal of all chemists, but at some point even us chemists get infected with some sort of responsibility and stop admitting we want explosions.

As for your teacher, I sympathize. I've had plenty of bad teachers, but all I can say is that they exist. But consider this: running a single lab experiment involves a whole lot of work for the teacher. For you it's pretty simple, but for him or her it involves finding the experiment, testing it, making sure there are enough supplies for as many as five classes' worth of experiments, making all important preparations, generating paperwork for the students to fill out, reading said paperwork and grading it, and the actual work of watching everyone in the laba nd troubleshooting them constantly. That's a fair amount of work for one class and many high school teachers teach up to five classes a day. And then there's the question of whether it's even worth it or not. A high school chemistry experiment can teach you about conservation of mass, but it can't teach you about orbital hybridization. You can learn appropriate technique for handling chemicals and equipment, but a lot of the abstract theoretical stuff in chemistry can only be taught by book learning.

Even in higher level chemistry such as organic synthesis, you do most of the learning by memorization and in class rather than from a lab. The lab will teach you how to work with labratory equipment and will give you some skill in various techniques in the lab, but it isn't going to teach you what reactions yield what results. That's what research with a professor is for and by that point you should know enough basic reactions that you can figure out reactions and syntheses for yourself.

If you really feel you aren't learning anything, then consider switching to another class. But maybe you should test your knowledge of chemistry against someone from that other class and see what they're learning. If they're doing a lot of labwork, they might not be as far in the book as you are and in that case, it might be in your interest to stay in your current class.

[xII_Music_IIx]

Dryctarth

I can understand your excitement about getting to blow things up, but as a senior chemistry major I can assure you that you very likely won't get to blow anything up. Explosions are safety hazards, cost money, and don't really teach you anything. Now they still look cool, and I can almost guarentee you that blowing stuff up is the secert goal of all chemists, but at some point even us chemists get infected with some sort of responsibility and stop admitting we want explosions.

As for your teacher, I sympathize. I've had plenty of bad teachers, but all I can say is that they exist. But consider this: running a single lab experiment involves a whole lot of work for the teacher. For you it's pretty simple, but for him or her it involves finding the experiment, testing it, making sure there are enough supplies for as many as five classes' worth of experiments, making all important preparations, generating paperwork for the students to fill out, reading said paperwork and grading it, and the actual work of watching everyone in the laba nd troubleshooting them constantly. That's a fair amount of work for one class and many high school teachers teach up to five classes a day. And then there's the question of whether it's even worth it or not. A high school chemistry experiment can teach you about conservation of mass, but it can't teach you about orbital hybridization. You can learn appropriate technique for handling chemicals and equipment, but a lot of the abstract theoretical stuff in chemistry can only be taught by book learning.

Even in higher level chemistry such as organic synthesis, you do most of the learning by memorization and in class rather than from a lab. The lab will teach you how to work with labratory equipment and will give you some skill in various techniques in the lab, but it isn't going to teach you what reactions yield what results. That's what research with a professor is for and by that point you should know enough basic reactions that you can figure out reactions and syntheses for yourself.

If you really feel you aren't learning anything, then consider switching to another class. But maybe you should test your knowledge of chemistry against someone from that other class and see what they're learning. If they're doing a lot of labwork, they might not be as far in the book as you are and in that case, it might be in your interest to stay in your current class.

about the stuff in the second paragraph and other stuffs:
1. he prints out packets and gives it to us(not much work involved there)
2. there are barely enough materials for one class
3. he has like five teacher assistants so all he basicly does is sit behind his desk lol
4. yeah i guess finding the actual lab is dificult sometimes...i have trouble finding art projects for little kids lol
5. i bet some chemists are chemists just so they can do stuf others wish they could *evil grin*

[Dryctarth]

xII_Music_IIx

about the stuff in the second paragraph and other stuffs:
1. he prints out packets and gives it to us(not much work involved there)
2. there are barely enough materials for one class
3. he has like five teacher assistants so all he basicly does is sit behind his desk lol
4. yeah i guess finding the actual lab is dificult sometimes...i have trouble finding art projects for little kids lol
5. i bet some chemists are chemists just so they can do stuf others wish they could *evil grin*

1. Packets need to be put together in the first place. And the content needs to be organized and checked for clarity. Then the packets need printing, collating, and stapling. Then they need to be graded and recorded once you've finished with them. It might not be very hard work, but there's probably more of it than you may think.
2. Fewer materials mean fewer labs. Switching to another class may or may not help out with that.
3. TA's are helpful, especially if they can run labs. But remember that your teacher exists outside of your class as well, so you can't be certain how much he does or doesn't do on his own.
5. Perhaps, but you could make that argument for any profession. I don't know anyone who is in their major or career just so they can do things other people wish they could do. Besides, being a chemist doesn't mean you can do all sorts of neat chemistry things. Chemistry's unfortunately not about explosions and fun destructive things.

[underweargnome]

I'm looking into becoming a chemistry teacher in about a year or so. I'm not at the point yet where I forget what it's like to be a student.

While it is a lot of work to prepare a lab from scratch, a lot of teachers just re-use the same labs year after year. Maybe that's more boring for them, but it's the same exciting new labs for new students. So really, not having enough labs as a chemistry teacher is just laziness unless you're a new teacher- and that's when you should be busting your a** to look as productive as you can be anyways.

Labs generally don't teach all that much. You go in, you make something explode, you watch something change colour or precipitate out of solution- it's everything you already know. But it's the fun part. If you study and don't do any labs, chemistry is going to be pretty boring. The labs are what make it worth reading the text book for (which often has ideas for very similar labs in it).

[cypherdtraitor]

My school is pretty poor. We've done 2 labs this year, but there really isn't much point, because we don't have an analytical scale. All we have are crappy triple beam balances that are off by half a gram or -, its really unpredictable and the don't zero correctly.

Bottom line: Learn what you can from bookwork, watch the labs on youtube so you can be ready for college, and maybe check out http://teachertube.com/ .

Life sucks, but you make the best of it. smile

[Darkphantom]

My Chem teacher was awesome O_o I don't know what your talking about.

To give you some idea when he was applying to university he wrote on his application to the question. "Why do you want to be a chemist?" he responded, "I like explosions"

Usually every Friday he would do some silly experiment, I remember some of them when learning about Polymers we polymerised a cup of a hydrocarbon with hydroxyl groups on every carbon and the result was silly putty. Cue him at the end of the lecture gathering everyone's experiment up and turning it into a basketball of bouncing silly putty. Named bob the blob

Another particularly silly experiment was when he got sulphuric and hydrochloric acid this resulted in him nitrating (Ie making explosive) random items given to him he nitrated someone's pencil some cotton wool (making gun cotton) and as a grand finale someone's labcoat.

I pointed out that I'd wished I brought in one of my scented candles, as Fat based products would cause a huge explosion on par with dynamite, he said he would have considered my proposal for about a second.

[Lord of the Azure Sky]

Oh I still remember my teacher in grade 8. He was sorta crazy, and a real hardass but it was really fun. He made a fireball in class by coating a balloon with baby powder (flammable) and poked it with a candle.

He wondered "how flammable are these curtains?" and lit them on fire abit to see.
Shot the fire extinguisher out the window, and at the grade 7's when they were noisy in the stairs.

Then in highschool there was no blowing stuff up, but those teachers were really fun in their own quirky ways