Getting Help

In order of speed

1. Ask in class, at the time. If you are confused, so are three other people who have not said anything yet.
2. Check the concept page. Most “I don’t get it” moments are answered there, and the backlinks show you which class we did it in.
3. Work through Getting Unstuck. It is a twenty-minute routine, and it resolves a good share of what looks unresolvable at first — particularly if the real problem is that the units have not been written down.
4. Come to a help session. Times are on Help Sessions. Drop in; no appointment, no warning needed.
5. Email me. Say what you tried. It makes the answer far more useful and it usually saves an entire round trip.

Bring the specific thing, and bring the numbers

One calculation that comes out wrong beats “the mole”. One step of a titration where you lose the thread beats “solutions”. The narrower the question, the faster and better the answer — and narrowing it yourself often solves it before you get to me.

Bring the working, not a summary of the working. “I get 0.0421 and the answer is 0.0842” tells me in one glance that a factor of two went missing, which is a thirty-second conversation. “I did it wrong” is a ten-minute one.

Help with a result, not just a method

The most useful conversation of the week is often somebody arriving with data that did not do what they expected — a yield above 100%, three trials that agree beautifully with each other and not with anybody else, a precipitate that will not settle. That is not a failure to be fixed quietly before anyone sees it. It is the interesting case, and it is exactly what Mistakes Are Data is about.

Bring the notebook with the raw readings in it. A calculated answer on its own can only be checked for arithmetic; the readings can be checked for chemistry.

Ask early

Chemistry builds, and this course builds harder than last year’s did. A shaky grip on writing formulas in Unit 1 becomes a wall when you need a balanced equation for stoichiometry in Unit 3, and by then the gap is four weeks wide instead of one. Nobody has ever irritated me by asking a question too early.

If the difficulty is not the chemistry — a week when things are hard for other reasons — say so, in whatever words you like. We will sort out the work; that part is always solvable.

Related: How Chemistry Class Works and How Marks Work.