When Chemists Attack

This blog has been very quiet lately.  Sorry about that, but when you’re preparing for five labs a week in addition to lecture courses, things get a little … hectic.

That said, we’re four weeks into the semester down here, and we’ve started our labs.  I normally push the start of labs back a week, so as to avoid having people add my class after we’ve already done a lab and discussed lab safety.

The Labor Day holiday pushed the start of the “real” experiments back even farther – ample time for everyone to pick up one of these.

… so why is it that half of the class comes to lab without even having attempted to buy a laboratory notebook?  It’s not like I’ve forced students to buy something exotic like the $25 lab books I had to buy when I was an engineering undergrad.  Just about every store in the area that sells school supplies stocks these composition books!

Or were these folks simply not paying attention?

You know, if we could figure out how to solve America’s attention-deficit-disorder problem, that would go a long way to solving our other problems.  Just sayin’. 🙂