Unless you've spent the past few days under a rock, grading a pile of exams, or overhauling your institution's general education program, you have probably already heard about the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. 

The Division of Inorganic Chemistry has provided support for a symposium focused on Advanced Teaching in Inorganic Chemistry at the spring ACS meeting in Philadelphia (March 22-26, 2019). Bringing many voices from diverse institutions will generate a valuable exchange of innovative pedagogic ideas and recognize the incredible creativity involved with our teaching. We welcome submissions from the undergraduate or graduate level, submissions of new lecture/discussion activities, laboratory experiences, or research-based projects.

Do you recognize the lyric? It was from one of my favorite songs I did as a duet with Sir Elton John before he decided to replace me on tour with Billy Joel. 'Cause I live and breathe this Philadelphia Freedom. Although I am currently in Maryland, I am looking forward to heading to the City of Brotherly Love for the spring ACS meeting. Although Philly in March??? What was ACS thinking?

Have you heard of LibreTexts? It’s a growing Open Educational Resource (OER) platform that hosts OER across the undergraduate curriculum, especially chemistry! The goal of LibreTexts is to decrease the cost of education by replacing expensive textbooks with free, high quality, online materials.

Over this past year we introduced the idea of the 1 Figure Learning Object a.k.a. the 1FLO in honor of our snakey mascot Flo. The idea of a 1FLO is to take a single figure from a paper and develop a series of questions for students to answer. This not only gets students to actively engage with the literature, it also aids them in learning to apply their knowledge to new material.

In two weeks I'll be flying to Dallas to take my daughter back to college. I'll be there for 6 days mostly to help her buy things for her new apartment and help move in. From there I go to San Diego for a whirlwind ACS meeting. Why is this BITeS news? Well, I'll have lots of times on planes which means I need something to read, and I think I just figured out what that will be.

For as long as we've been in our "new" (now 14 year old) building, I've curated a bulletin board across from some of the faculty offices. I often see students reading whatever is up there as they pass the time while waiting for office hours... or to speak to a professor... or just because. As you can see from the picture below, the bulletin board has a mixture of papers, things from C&EN Magazine, and comics.

I know it’s July and the upcoming academic term is the last thing you are thinking about. Nevertheless, in eight weeks, many of us will begin to see traffic build outside our offices as students descend upon campus. It sounds daunting, parking is going to get worse, ungraded exams will pile up, and the line at the coffee shop is going to be never ending. I get it… but there’s an opportunity to make a change coming, to do something different in our classes that only comes at the beginning of each term, a chance to experiment!

With great sadness, I share the news of the passing of one of the most creative, inspiring, and vibrant inorganic chemists I ever knew: Richard A. Andersen. Dick was my graduate advisor at Berkeley in the 1980’s. He died on Sunday, June 16, 2019. I miss him already.