In 20 minutes time i will finish the second part of the 10th grade chemistry experiments, the one neutralizing HCl. It ought to be entertaining, we'll see how this works out.
I fell asleep today at my desk. Nothing like a good afternoon nap after lunch. I'm becoming George Costanza.
I woke up to realize i put too much soap in the dishwasher, and suds were foaming out of the machine. I went and picked the mop up and mopped the whole thing dry. I really ought to consider buying dishwasher detergent to avoid this in the future.
Chemistry guy asked me to prepare and test a rate and activation energy experiment (NaOH + crystal violet), as he thought it'd be a good idea that i try them and see if they amounts were correct and so on. He also suggested i should try all experiments first, to see if all goes as the manuals predict. That should give me something to do, but it's a little late in the year to do ask me to do that, most topics have been covered and most experiments have been done already.
The activation energy experiment was kind of fun. I prepared .1M NaOH and luckly found 2.5E-5 crystal violet solution in one of the cupboards, that stuff is a pain in the ass to make. I measured 10ml of each, cooled them to 10°C, mixed them and measured the temp and absorbance at 595nm for 2 minutes. Nice steady increase in temp, and nice steady decrease in absorbance 595nm.
The students use laptops hooked on to Vernier LabPro, an interesting device for data collection. There's like 30 probes you can attach to the machine and it reads out nicely on a computer screen, Texas Instruments graphic calculator or a palm handheld. I have about 15 different probes and measuring devices on my shelves, i entertain myself a lot with these.
The most convenient ones are the motion detectors, temperature probes and pH probes, mostly because most of my thermometers have no batteries in them; motion and sound detectors are just plain cool and pH probes are way more precise.
We'll see how this works out today, should be interesting.
