Every class:
- Lab notebook — bound, not loose paper, not a binder
- Pen for writing, and a sharp pencil and ruler for graphs
- Scientific calculator — one that does scientific notation and logarithms. A phone will not be permitted on tests
- The periodic table and data sheet issued in this room
- Charged laptop
- Your Chemistry Journal, if you keep it separately
About the calculator
Get one you can use without thinking, and use the same one all semester. You will spend the whole of Unit 3 moving between numbers like and numbers like 0.0374, and a calculator you are fighting with is a calculator that will lose you an exponent.
Two things to find on yours in the first week: the key that enters a power of ten directly, and how many digits it shows before it switches to scientific notation. Both will matter more than you expect.
Lab days
Check the class page the night before. If it links an investigation, it is a lab day, and the following are not negotiable:
- Closed-toe shoes. You will be sent out, and there is nothing I can do about it
- Long hair tied back before you come in, not at the bench
- Sleeves that can be rolled or fastened; nothing dangling from wrists or neck
- Bags at the front of the room, not underfoot
- The investigation page read, not skimmed — including where the waste goes
Why the shoe rule has no exceptions
Everything that goes wrong in a lab goes down. Broken glass, hot liquid, and corrosive solution all end up on the floor, and the floor is where your feet are. This is a school board requirement and not a preference of mine, so please do not spend a lab period negotiating it with me.
About the notebook
Bound, in ink, in order, with nothing torn out. That combination is what turns a pile of notes into a record: readings written as they happen rather than reconstructed afterwards, mistakes struck through with a single line and initialled rather than scribbled out, and the odd observation kept even when you cannot explain it.
Two habits specific to this course. Write the raw reading as the instrument gave it, before any arithmetic — a calculated answer with no reading behind it cannot be rechecked. And write the resolution of each instrument once at the top of the page, so that three weeks later you can still say what your numbers were worth. Measuring Well explains why both of those pay off.
The habit is the same at every level of science. Research and industry notebooks settle patent disputes and safety investigations, and they do it on exactly these properties — contemporaneous, unaltered, honest.
Related: Safety in the Lab, Writing a Lab Report, and Significant Figures in Practice.