What a high it was when I did titration in high school and managed to get so close that the liquid appeared colorless unless you held a white sheet of paper next to it.
It was tinted, but just barely.
The chosen one!
Same, but my professor said I needed to keep titrating and that it needed to be a very specific light pink which she never bothered to specify in the entire semester. 🙃
I did this once too I was using half drops with a DI water squirter to rinse them into solution
I also managed to did that once, but after a while (20 seconds or so) the color started to fade and we had to add more, and overshooting miserably
i may just have had bad teachers but i to this day have no idea what chemistry at pre-university level were supposed to teach. the labs were all about watching things change, with no explanation as to why. and the theory parts were all about balancing reactions. none of it connected.
Yea, this articulates my experience as well.
You ought to get the balance right for things to change the way you like.
Titration is a great example of using the inverse. You get the colour by creating the balance. Then you can calculate the unknown side from the balance with the known side.
Now you can use the knowledge that your your base/acid is of a certain concentration to get the reaction you want to do right.
As for the specifics, once you get to organic chemistry in Uni it doesnt connect to make sense either, unless you really dive into the deep end of it.
Very similar to my experience. It was even worse for organic chemistry where they just parroted out the outcomes/mechanisms with not much explanation. But maybe it's also difficult to explain chemistry without some solid physics prerequisites
My high school chemistry teacher was a professional chemist working as a teacher so she'd be home when her kids got home, and yeah I think I had a different experience. Several of our labs were more thermodynamics related. One was to create a temperature based can crushing method. But yeah she'd ask us what we thought would happen and tell us to go figure out. That said we did have the "learn to titrate" labs too, but we were told that's what was happening.
my first chemistry lab (like actual chemistry, rather than as part of the "sciences" subject) involved us mixing three components we were not given the names of in a test tube, then we would go out to the school yard and while we were holding the test tubes with tongs the teacher shoved a match into each of them to show the efficacy of the black powder we had just unknowingly made. there was so much glass everywhere.
like, it was cool, but i don't think anybody learned anything from that other than how to make black powder, which i imagine most people with a dad learn at one point or another.
AP chem courses had some small value. Frankly I think all of chemistry throughout all years of school would be better taught as a crash course in a year in Middle school, with a refresher in highschool... Then teach more bio instead, it's more valuable to the everyman
Quantitative analysis flashbacks form this, I learned the fastest way to figure out how much reactant you need to figure out the tipping point of the ph was to just run quickly adding large jumps of aloquates on the first attempt ,let it turn dark, then on the next one go ahead and add a safe amount of reactant I found from the first attempt then go super slow with the drip rate after. Was pretty consistently one of the first to leave lab
Micropipettes ftw!
using mouth pipettes for dimethylmercury
To quote an old teacher "a little benzene never killed anyone, and it's great for cleaning lab tables"
Turned out that actually, he was half right.
What about for a 20+ mL titration? Also how would you quantify the exact volume for the endpoint if it's when the plunger is half depressed?
Its not really hard how boring it is.
