CH 204 – Introduction to Chemical Practice Spring 2008 Instructor: Dr. Brian Anderson Office: WEL 5.220A Phone: (512) 4756729 Email: [email protected] Office hours: Monday 9:00 – 10:30 or by appointment – don’t hesitate to ask! Web Site: http://courses.cm.utexas.edu/banderson/ch204/ The course web site has announcements and useful information, pdf versions of my lectures (posted the weekend before the lecture), and pdf versions of all handouts given out in class. It also has copies of the unknown summary sheets, a TA list with email addresses, a listing of TA office hours, grading information, and an evergrowing course FAQ. Teaching Assistants: Not available at press time. http://courses.cm.utexas.edu/banderson/ch204/TAs.html TA office hours: Cubicle C (1st floor of WEL building). Hours TBA. http://courses.cm.utexas.edu/banderson/ch204/officehours.html Storeroom: Tiffany Murray WEL 4.134 Undergraduate Chemistry Office: WEL 2.212 Phone: (512) 4711567, (512) 471 4983 Address all questions regarding registration, adds, drops, etc. to this office. The last date to drop this course without possible academic penalty is Feb 11, 2008. The last day to drop this course for academic reasons is March 24, 2008. Required course materials and supplies 1. Leytner, S. General Chemistry Lab Manual; McGrawHill Higher Education, Spring 2008 edition (available through the University Coop). 2. A bound laboratory notebook with duplicate numb ered pages (sold at the Duplicating Office in WEL 2.228 or at the Coop). 3. Combination lock. 4. Calculator. What to expect in this class This is a handson course designed to teach you a variety of labora tory skills, including the proper use and handling of glassware, techniques and processes common to many scientific labs, and standard methods for recording observations and data. The c ourse consists of a weekly onehour lecture immediately followed by a fourhour lab. Most labs won’t take all four hours, but a couple of them will. We start late in the semester (because the Monday holiday throws off our weekly meeting schedule) and finish early, so the full semester’s workload gets smushed into about ten weeks. During those ten weeks, expect a workload that is a lot heavier than normal for a measly two credit class. The lab reports sometimes take students five or six hours to complete. Don’t wait until the night before they’re due to start. Get started early when TA and instructor help is readily a vailable. None of us are as easy to reach on weekends as we are during the week.Lectures The lectures each week will cover the theoretical background for the experiment being performed, and also provide practical tips for carrying out the experiment and sample calculations to help get you started on the writeup. You are strongly encouraged to take notes during the lectures since some of the material covered will not be in the CH302 textbook or the laboratory manual. There will also be short quizzes given at the end of most lecture sessions which will cover the previous week’s material, so if you work on your lab report in class instead of paying attention to the lecture, you end up getting your butt kicked on the quiz a week later. Quizzes Quizzes will typ ically be 3 – 4 questions and you will have about 15 minutes to complete them. The quizzes will cover material related to the experiment you performed the week prior in lab. Questions ar e drawn from the previous week’s lecture, the lab manual introduction to the experiment, the prelab and postlab problems, and experimental procedures and calculations required for the previous week’s lab. There will be a total of 9 quizzes (there is no class meeting, and therefore no quiz, the week after Experiment 10). The lowest quiz grade will be dropped and the rest will count towards 30% of your grade. If you do the math, this means that the 8 quiz grades you keep each amount to 3.75% of your overall course grade. Sometimes calling them “quizzes” has the effect of trivializing their importance to your overall gra de, so c onsider the quizzes as a comprehensive f inal exam that is given in weekly installments to make them easier to study for. If you would study for a comprehensive f inal exam that is worth 30% of your grade, then take some t ime each week and review the materia l for the quiz. No makeup quizzes will be offered for students who miss class. If you miss a quiz for any reason, that will be the one you drop. Laboratory The lab oratory is the backbone of the course, and accounts for 70% of your grade. Most of the experiments will be performed individually; the last three will be performed in groups of two. Do not hesitate to ask me or your TA whenever you have questions or are not sure how to perform certain tasks. You will not be
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