Posted by alexandra_k on May 7, 2014, at 16:20:20
In reply to Re: focus..., posted by alexandra_k on April 21, 2014, at 20:41:49
i spent about 5 hours preparing for todays lab, last night. it's not supposed to be that hard. fairly sure.
i wrote the instructions out again. instead of step one involving several different steps in no particular order I made it sequential. Starting with the first bit we needed to do. E.g., 'Take a 100mL beaker.' I'd feel happiest if I could collect together all the equipment I need at the start. Like how recipes start with a list of ingredients... Collect up everything you need so you aren't rushing about the place bumping and jostling everyone else who is all trying to do the same thing... But if I did that then when I left to fetch the chemicals I'm fairly sure people would view my pile as a convenient heap for them to 'borrow' from. Like how last week the demonstrators set up a couple models at the front so we could refer to that in our set-up. Then people kept taking parts they needed from those and otherwise fiddling about with them so you didn't know if they were reliable sources of information or not...
We are supposed to do 5 trials of titration. I don't see that happening in 1 hour. I find this lab easier because they are a lot more explicit about our instructions. Recording to 4 figures... Checking our readings at eye level... Copying will be detected this time... Saying to hold the pipette against the side to empty it properly. That that last little bit is calibrated into the measurement. Good. That was bugging me.
Then calculations... Which would be better if I was up to date and not behind... But behind I am. I'm getting better at balancing equations to convert one known mass into moles then figuring out the moles of the other and converting that to mass... But we are onto solutions... volume... concentration... I spent about 5 hours last night... And I almost understand what we are up to for the actual titrations. We had an internet exercise that took us through that. ONly took about 2 painful hours of guessing... Brute forcing it... 20 minutes of struggling with the printer... One practice one on our report... Which I worked out okay from the internet one. Thank god. That only took me around 1 hour... But I can't do the one we actually did the titrations for... I mean... My idea was to do everythign I could including setting up the calculations then I'd only need to fill in the values... But it's set the fields up all out of order and our textbook has a method (sort of) that I find simpler so I'm running with that (for the stochiometric coefficient conversion bit)...
Aargh.
Most people will turn up after having spent about 20 minutes randomly throwing things into the internet thing... Smile and laugh and copy their way around the labs... And come out with a far better grade for their lab than me. And have a more enjoyable time.
I could have spent all that time last night... Working through things from where I'm at instead of brute forcing things that are further ahead. But I guess the thought is that people won't prepare unless you give them marks for structured preparation. So... I must spend my time doing that.
Sigh.
I remember why I gave up on science at school. I also remember what it was like getting through that final year of high school just to get entry to uni... This year is sorta kinda like that... Our lecturers are fine, really. It is just... 'Intellectual peers'. That was what the physics guy said to me last summer when I said I wanted to drop - and do it properly later when I was ready. After he showed me I could probably pull a B- if I could sorta kinda do a few unit conversions...
Whenever they try and make everything easy for 'most' others they make things so very much harder for me. I won't be able to do the calculations in the lab because people will be too busy being all 'what did you get?' to each other... Demoralised already... Over it already. Fed up and we haven't even started...
I'm going to remember to take labels thsi week. So I can actually label the beakers as they tell us to do... And as nobody ever does... It will save me a bunch of mental stress anyway...
Maybe I will need to ask for special accommodations for labs. A quiet environment with reduced time stress. Fairly sure that with those accommodations... I'd be done in half the time. Of everyone, I mean. Uh... That makes it unfair to ask for those accommodations - right?
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1058481
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20140502/msgs/1065344.html