Monthly Archives: November 2011

Second Round of Midterms: CHEM 121 (I don’t like your midterms at all)

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Last night I might have written one of the worst exams in my life. I thought my Computer Science and Math midterms went terribly, but really yesterday was no comparison. By the time the exam was over I was so depressed that gave up on eating dinner and went to bed at 11:00.

Perhaps my expectations were too high, usually I go into a midterm thinking that I am going to fail it, but I prepared myself for Chemistry (or so I thought 0_o). I memorized, memorized and memorized some more. I thought, “hey Chem 121 is kind of evil, they make you memorize the most useless type of things, but I will just go with it and do as they tell me to, whatever”.  I could draw all the orbitals, and all the graphs, I had memorized close to every single chemical reaction that popped up in Chapter 6 and made cue cards for pretty much everything. I had done practice midterms with relative ease and every question in the book. I was certain that I wasn’t going to fail and might have even had my mind set on getting over 90% this time around. Going into I felt semi- relaxed and fairly confident. I was kind of excited to finish my first round of midterm and pretty certain I would finish them on a high. However…

As soon as I got into the room I started to feel a little anxious. For one thing there were no left handed seats. Usually they fix this by putting a couple of left-handed chairs up at the front… but there were NO LEFT HANDED SEATS and they weren’t prepared to do anything about it. This made me feel fairly unsettled. The fact that the prof was having to shout at the top of her lungs to organize everybody started making me feel even worse. She was like a drill sergeant and scary. I started to feel like we were cattle in a herd. I started to feel stupid. I could feel my heart starting to beat a little quicker. Actually I was getting upset, I was losing focus. Then it was time to rip open our exams. I flipped through the pages and was feeling ok until I got to the last two 16 marks… and I wasn’t entirely sure how to deal with either of them. Xenon… a Xenon reaction??? I knew XePtF6 had been synthesized but didn’t have anything much else about Xenon memorized. That completely threw me off. I knew that I would lose 8 marks right there on the spot, I don’t think I even got part marks. So I decided to start with the stuff I knew for sure and started drawing orbitals, my hand was kind of jerky, I was so nervous. Scribble, scribble, scriblle. Melting points and boiling points. I get those confused too. Suddenly there were 20 minutes left had time to work on the last two questions. Sadly I don’t think I got either of them right and with that I am in severe danger of failing my first university exam. My mood went from an n=10 -> n=1 … or you know what, make that n=-1000. Like half the people I talked to I was so depressed after the midterm that I didn’t eat dinner. It was disappointing.

So just a tip for any Chem 121ers next year. Memorize the entire book inside out. There is one sentence in the last section of Chapter 6 that I didn’t memorize which cost me those 8 marks. If you want an A it might be useful to be able to recite the books of by heart, word by word, letter by letter. Seriously eat every single word and be prepared to regurgitate it at any time. Do NOT just memorize the concepts, the important reactions and think that you will do well, memorize every single word in the textbook no matter how useless it seems.  =/ Lesson learnt.

This is me after the midterm.

However on a positive note, Chemistry labs, while stressful are really fun. The actual course content is pretty interesting and most of the profs are great. + You get really cool demos in class.  Just don’t expect the midterms to go well, they are insanely hard.

License to Complicate

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This morning when I woke up my hand already was cramping. Late nights spent writing,calculating, recalculating and rewriting assignments have left me slightly exhausted to say the least. These days I find that I am learning so much stuff that I find it hard to find time to think for myself.

At night when I am tired and confused about what I am learning. I stare at my pen, the page, and the table and think, “What are these atoms that I am learning about?” These things that we see all the time and yet never really “see”? How many things out there exist that we cannot see? What really is this thing called seeing?

There is something scary/wonderful about learning in that it lets you see things in a new light. It lets you appreciate things that you take for granted in new ways. Science itself pieces together the fragments that we do know (or at least that we think we do know) and brings them together to explain. And while no theory is every complete or entirely correct, it is amazing that a theory can explain things at all.

Pick up something sitting close to you, a pen perhaps and drop it. Drop it again. How terribly exciting: it falls, nothing new. However, how much do we actually know about the pen falling? If you think/learn about the physics behind the pen falling you find something beautiful. The fact that something as natural as a falling pen can be explained using a simple equation is incredible. Falling, as we know it is measurable to some extent. The pen accelerates down at ~9.82 m/s^2. That means every second it’s velocity increases by 9.82m/s, forming a parabola if you take consecutive pictures. If we don’t know much about physics all we see is a pen falling in a straight line downwards. But if we do know a bit, even just a tiny bit then we can “see” something quite different.

But there are some things about explaining that I do not like. Explaining the world around us in terms of science leaves very little for the explanations of the self. Through science people can be explained as bundles of organs, cells, chemicals. We can comfort ourselves in thinking that things are systems that can be explained rather than complete mysteries that enshroud us. People can become subjects, animals can be tested, brains can be picked apart, with time things can be dissected. These thoughts leave part of me empty, they seem to take away some of the awe in the world. Maybe there is comfort in not knowing things. Such as what makes things right. What makes things wrong? What is love, what are feelings? Wy do we keep pushing and pulling. And why of all things do our hearts keep on beating?

Perhaps a pen on paper will never be truly explain the nature of things. And while science powers on, while science attempts to gain insight on things, perhaps sometimes it is nice to have things that we do not understand. Sometimes, maybe the self is created by the things that we do not know.

I am a Tree Killer/ Use of Notebooks

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I do write on recycled paper, but the amount of paper that I am going through for my Math and Physics classes is making me sick. I really need to invest in a miniature white board and a miniature marker to do my practice problems on… but then again I am left handed so that wouldn’t really work. Technically I could invest in a whiteboard and learn to write in mirror writing… but then doing problems would just get even more difficult. And I could write notes on my computer, but I can’t learn that way!!!

Just for entertainment here are some other uses for my notebooks:

This is what I learn in Psychology

This is what happens in Math.

This is what I learnt in computer science the other day... apparently

More computer science... very important information..."No wait, is it data?"

I don’t doodle in Physics.

Chemistry is mainly drawing anyways…

Who knew that silly-absent-minded-doodling skills would get so much rehearsal at University?

So far on notebook use these are the stats:

Physics: 2, 80 page notebooks and halfway through a ~250 page notebook

Math: 1, 80 page notebook and slightly more than halfway through a ~250 page notebook

Chemistry: 1.5 80 page notebooks +CHIRP

Computer Science: 1 80 page notebook but a huge amount of space on my hard drive (my computer is not very happy)

Psych: not even one notebook!!!

 

Midterm Mistakes =)

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Meh, so overall my first round of midterms went pretty well, definitely getting better as the weeks wore on. I am onto my second round of midterms, having just finished Physics today (which I think went ok). Here are some funny things that happened on my first batch of midterms:

Chem 121: Guess the element.

This was the last question on the midterm and I had no idea how to do it. Something was reacted, vacuumed, recrystalized e.t.c and ended up being a white solid. >_<

Starting out I thought… hmmm maybe it is Rubidium it sounds pretty nice.

And then I was like, “Wait no, maybe I should guess Magnesium it is white when it is burnt…”

And then I thought “Nope scrap that let me just guess Calcium, that seems like something that they would put on an exam!!!” and I went with it.

…All three guesses were wrong, hence the red line through my wonderful guessing game, but hey I did get 1 mark for the scribbles up top!… Yaaayy for part marks!!!

Math 100: So this midterm was the one where the average was around 60% with EXTENSIVE scaling. Thank god for scaling, I ended up with an A+ which was nice… but I had massive math fail with one question. We had to use the squeeze theorem to prove that the limit of a function was 1/2. I was rushed for time and each time I found the limit it NOT 1/2!!! Panicking I tried again, nope it wasn’t working. I tried again, nope, nope, nope. Scribble, scribble, scribble. In the end I gave up and just wrote = 1/2 at the bottom, praying that the marker wouldn’t notice my limit calculating fail! Here is the response:

“all limit calculations are wrong!!” (Please note the double exclamation marks, oh no!!). Also note that not only did I get a little mini x for it being wrong, but the little x was not quite severe enough so I got an even larger X on top of the mini x!!! =) =) =)

P.s.: your marker will see EVERYTHING!

Now, onto studying for Math midterm no. 2!!