Latest articles, blogs, and events from the chemical education community

For this month's blog post, I was asked to share a bit of a narrative about my life as an international school teacher. So consider this fair warning: If you came looking for a direct connection to chemistry and/or related pedagogy, this month will be a bit different.

Two years ago, I saw a post here on ChemEd X about popping a balloon with an orange peel--and from this seed grew one of my favorite weeks of the school year.

When you incorporate non-traditional pedagogies and grading systems into your classroom like Modeling Instruction and standards-based grading, you need to be concerned about buy-in from students and parents. Implementation without buy-in leads to frustrated students, parents and most of all teachers.

The ACS Committee on Chemical Safety has released the 8th edition of "Safety in Academic Chemistry Laboratories. The publication provides advice for first- and second-year university students. Free access is available in PDF format at www.acs.org/SACL.

Teaching Science: Liability and You! I.    Safety Issues in Doing Science!

Over the last ten years I have taught general chemistry at several junior colleges, frequently to students who have limited background in chemistry and weak mathematic skills.

In a previous blog post, I shared a book Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction, by Dr. Peter Atkins. For my summer reading I wanted to get back to reading some chemistry non-fiction.

Chad Hustings blogged this past school year about building his own Hoffman apparatus for each group of students.

I recently watched a video in which a chemist (who goes by the nickname “NurdRage”) activated a chemiluminescent reaction by vapor deposition. You can see a short clip of this experiment below: