Tutoring: One time vs. Regular sessions

Given that summer is approaching, this is probably the best time to assess if your student/child/young adult will need tutoring for the upcoming year.

My tutoring clientèle fall generally into two categories:

• one time sessions

• weekly/routine sessions over time

Perfume is Amazing

This most recent episode RuPaul'd Drag Race featured a perfume challenge.

Jinkx is my favorite.

This episode warmed my heart primarily because I did something very similar with my chemistry students my first year teaching.

Stoichiometry

I've been getting a lot of tutoring inquiries lately. The first thing I ask is "what is your son or daughter having issues with?" Predominantly, it's been some variation on the word "stoichiometry."

Stoichiometry is a matter of translating amounts of one substance into another.

Example: If I have 6 pounds of ripe bananas, how many loaves of banana bread can I produce?

Observe that you're translating the amount of bananas into banana bread. Stoichiometry is the same concept. What you do need is a conversion factor. Say that per one loaf of banana bread, you need 2 lbs of bananas.

Here's how that example would play out:

BB stands for banana bread. The main thing I want you to observe is the set up of the conversion factor. The lbs of bananas are on the bottom so they can cancel units with the original given. On the top of the conversion factor is the loaf of BB because that is what we want left, and that is what we want to figure out. 

Now lets move on to some harder problems

Mole Conversions

I've been tutoring a lot of kids lately. One thing they've been having a little trouble with is mole conversions. I'm not talking about stoichiometry, I'm saving that beast for another post, but just the conversions between moles, grams, and particles.

I've found that a good approach is having a visual diagram with arrows. The more you leave the kids to figure things out and practice, the better they'll remember things. Here's my chart:

blog a million

This a project I've been wanting to do for a while. I know that I've had many blogs over the years, but I do like chemistry and I've been meaning to find a way to organize my notes over teaching chemistry, interesting lessons, tutoring materials, and also just a hodgepodge of useful chemistry that I work with at home.

I hope anyone who stumbles across this blog will find it helpful, useful, or at the very least mildly interesting.