i may just have had bad teachers but i to this day have no idea what chemistry at pre-university level were supposed to teach. the labs were all about watching things change, with no explanation as to why. and the theory parts were all about balancing reactions. none of it connected.
Very similar to my experience. It was even worse for organic chemistry where they just parroted out the outcomes/mechanisms with not much explanation. But maybe it’s also difficult to explain chemistry without some solid physics prerequisites
My high school chemistry teacher was a professional chemist working as a teacher so she’d be home when her kids got home, and yeah I think I had a different experience. Several of our labs were more thermodynamics related. One was to create a temperature based can crushing method. But yeah she’d ask us what we thought would happen and tell us to go figure out. That said we did have the “learn to titrate” labs too, but we were told that’s what was happening.
my first chemistry lab (like actual chemistry, rather than as part of the “sciences” subject) involved us mixing three components we were not given the names of in a test tube, then we would go out to the school yard and while we were holding the test tubes with tongs the teacher shoved a match into each of them to show the efficacy of the black powder we had just unknowingly made. there was so much glass everywhere.
like, it was cool, but i don’t think anybody learned anything from that other than how to make black powder, which i imagine most people with a dad learn at one point or another.
AP chem courses had some small value. Frankly I think all of chemistry throughout all years of school would be better taught as a crash course in a year in Middle school, with a refresher in highschool… Then teach more bio instead, it’s more valuable to the everyman
Yup, luckily in my case I got into amateur chemistry (tysm sciencemadness) but it pained me to see my friends not actually knowing anything and just memorizing everything by the letter
nah, that’s generally frowned upon among the people who do chemistry at home both because it’s not economically viable, will get you in jail and it may cause further restrictions on chemicals, which nobody wants or needs
I mostly do energetics/explosives on a small scale and the occasional organic synthesis
if you want, there’s an amazing yt channel called Explosions&Fire which perfectly encapsulates the whole spirit of doing chemistry in your shed
You ought to get the balance right for things to change the way you like.
Titration is a great example of using the inverse. You get the colour by creating the balance. Then you can calculate the unknown side from the balance with the known side.
Now you can use the knowledge that your your base/acid is of a certain concentration to get the reaction you want to do right.
As for the specifics, once you get to organic chemistry in Uni it doesnt connect to make sense either, unless you really dive into the deep end of it.
i’m saying i don’t understand the reply in the context of what i wrote. it may be a difference in terminology, but when i said “balance reactions” i was talking purely about on paper. we got a bunch of formulas and were to fill in the result like a multiplication table. i don’t know if i’ve ever had to do that in practice. labs were always just “n moles of chemical a, n moles of chemical b, observe the precipitation” over and over again. it was only years after school that i realized that precipitation occurs when a solution is saturated.
i may just have had bad teachers but i to this day have no idea what chemistry at pre-university level were supposed to teach. the labs were all about watching things change, with no explanation as to why. and the theory parts were all about balancing reactions. none of it connected.
Very similar to my experience. It was even worse for organic chemistry where they just parroted out the outcomes/mechanisms with not much explanation. But maybe it’s also difficult to explain chemistry without some solid physics prerequisites
My high school chemistry teacher was a professional chemist working as a teacher so she’d be home when her kids got home, and yeah I think I had a different experience. Several of our labs were more thermodynamics related. One was to create a temperature based can crushing method. But yeah she’d ask us what we thought would happen and tell us to go figure out. That said we did have the “learn to titrate” labs too, but we were told that’s what was happening.
my first chemistry lab (like actual chemistry, rather than as part of the “sciences” subject) involved us mixing three components we were not given the names of in a test tube, then we would go out to the school yard and while we were holding the test tubes with tongs the teacher shoved a match into each of them to show the efficacy of the black powder we had just unknowingly made. there was so much glass everywhere.
like, it was cool, but i don’t think anybody learned anything from that other than how to make black powder, which i imagine most people with a dad learn at one point or another.
AP chem courses had some small value. Frankly I think all of chemistry throughout all years of school would be better taught as a crash course in a year in Middle school, with a refresher in highschool… Then teach more bio instead, it’s more valuable to the everyman
Yup, luckily in my case I got into amateur chemistry (tysm sciencemadness) but it pained me to see my friends not actually knowing anything and just memorizing everything by the letter
So… cooking meth?
nah, that’s generally frowned upon among the people who do chemistry at home both because it’s not economically viable, will get you in jail and it may cause further restrictions on chemicals, which nobody wants or needs
I mostly do energetics/explosives on a small scale and the occasional organic synthesis
if you want, there’s an amazing yt channel called Explosions&Fire which perfectly encapsulates the whole spirit of doing chemistry in your shed
You ought to get the balance right for things to change the way you like.
Titration is a great example of using the inverse. You get the colour by creating the balance. Then you can calculate the unknown side from the balance with the known side.
Now you can use the knowledge that your your base/acid is of a certain concentration to get the reaction you want to do right.
As for the specifics, once you get to organic chemistry in Uni it doesnt connect to make sense either, unless you really dive into the deep end of it.
i don’t understand this reply.
You know how old scales worked by putting weights you know on one side, until things got balanced with the weight of the item you want to measure?
You do the same, but with acid and base, where you know the “weight” of one side of it.
i’m saying i don’t understand the reply in the context of what i wrote. it may be a difference in terminology, but when i said “balance reactions” i was talking purely about on paper. we got a bunch of formulas and were to fill in the result like a multiplication table. i don’t know if i’ve ever had to do that in practice. labs were always just “n moles of chemical a, n moles of chemical b, observe the precipitation” over and over again. it was only years after school that i realized that precipitation occurs when a solution is saturated.
Yea, this articulates my experience as well.
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