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Blog posts

Teaching with ketamine 23 July 2011

Avid subscribers to this website will have looked at the pages on using the IB Data Booklet creatively to give them ideas as to how they can enhance their teaching of some of the concepts contained in... more

Getting hold of chemicals 9 July 2011

Those of you who have read ‘Uncle Tungsten’ by Oliver Sachs will know that once it was easy to get hold of almost any chemical that a budding young chemist might want to experiment with. When I was... more

'Chemistry man' 2 July 2011

I’ve been running a Chemistry workshop in Astana for this past week. The aim was to give examples of good practice to teach ‘the IB way’ rather than cover the IB in specific detail. The teachers... more

Falling life expectancy 22 June 2011

Chemistry often gets a bad press. Some obvious examples are environmental pollution such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the use of toxic defoliants such as Agent Orange or the siting of nuclear power... more

IB May Chemistry exams 14 June 2011

The two May IB Chemistry exams (TZ1 and TZ2) have recently been sat and marked and the results are eagerly awaited. Teachers were encouraged to complete G2 forms to comment on these exams but as these... more

Cows' farts 12 June 2011

A past Paper 3 question for Option E : Environmental chemistry asked students to identify a natural source of methane. Several students gave the journalistic answer “cows' farts” which earned them... more

Chemical passwords 28 May 2011

The very fact that you are reading this tends to suggest that you use the Internet a lot. One of the frustrating things that I find is that I am often required to give a username and a password to access... more

Alcohol in the body 19 May 2011

Many people’s jobs (e.g. health workers and airline pilots) depend on the fact that they abstain from taking alcohol. The chemistry behind the common methods used to determine the amount of alcohol... more

Isocyanic acid 16 May 2011

When we breathe in smoke from a wood fire we may be breathing in toxic amounts of isocyanic acid. Isocyanic acid is the simplest molecule to contain all four of the most common elements in organic compounds.... more

Tech-savvy generation 12 May 2011

I wonder how many teachers are taking on board the quantum shift that has occurred during the past fifteen or so years that has completely changed the way a whole generation communicates. Most of the... more