Predicting the products of chemical reactions and then balancing those same reactions can be intimidating for grade-level chemistry...

“We actually did real chemistry!” That was a quote from a girl in yesterday’s lab.  She actually did real chemistry.  And what a feeling...

Sometimes it just all works out right.  The timing of the lessons and the timing of a lab.  This year, I introduced a simple new lab...

Chemistry can feel dangerous to a student.  There are so many pitfalls that you and I so easily avoid, and yet the students repeatedly...

Progressions are important.  If I dove straight into a max effort weight training and health kick, I would get disappointed in the...

Something wonderful happened yesterday.  My room was full at lunch.  I mean really full.  And all of them were helping each other to...

Something beautiful happened in the last test of the semester.  Less kids failed.  I mean a lot less.  And it wasn’t an easy test.  In...

We are teachers.  We like to know that we know stuff.  Kids think that we know stuff.  If you wear your lab coat out of the room,...

Sometimes the simplest ideas actually work.  Shocking, I know.  Having just taught about the idea of buffers, I felt like the students...

There are many ways to teach the inverse relationship between wavelength and frequency of photons.  Videos. Slinkies. But I think this...

The electron configuration unit can get a little dry.  Electron configuration is a tough unit for highly connected labs.  Try using this...

I was listening to a bird hunting podcast about how to train your bird dog, and I realized that they might as well have been talking...

Tests used to be punitive.  I wielded them like a weapon, seeking out those who were underprepared and chopping them down like the...

The first time hearing about equilibrium can be confusing for students.  That’s why there are so many ways to introduce it.  Many are...

You should assess more.  You should grade less.  Those two statements seem mutually exclusive, but they aren’t.  The longer that I teach,...

Wish me luck.  I start dimensional analysis today.  For some (like many of us), it just makes sense.  And for others (like many, many of...

Don’t you hate it when you see a cool demo, but have no place for it?  That is the way I felt about the exploding gummy bear demo.  It’s...

This could be the most important question for students to be asking in chemistry; “How?”  At almost every level of chem, one of the...

It’s almost time.  AP scores come out very soon.  For some of us, it feels like Christmas slowly approaching.  For others of us, it feels...

If you have taught as long as I have, you have lived through at least two really annoying disposable water bottle fads.  Bottle...