Greetings loyal BITeS readers. It's hard to believe that it is once again time to start planning for our Undergraduate Research at the Frontiers of Inorganic Chemistry oral and poster sessions at the spring ACS meeting. This coming March we return to the place where VIPEr officially launched on the internet, New Orleans. This year my co-organizers are Lori Watson and Chip Nataro, but we all know it is me who does all of the hard work.

I'm just starting the third week of my Foundations Inorganic Course, which I like to call GenChem III. This is the course where I tell my science majors the "why?" behind all those pesky Periodic Trends we made them memorize in GenChem. I teach my course pretty heavily focused on bonding and much less on Periodicity. But we do spend some time early on in the course on the orbitals, shielding effects and the repercussions on periodicity.

It's that time of year when there are lots of eager young faces looking at me in my general chemistry lecture. And with those faces comes a long list of names that I have to try and attach to those faces. Of my many faults, perhaps the worst is my ability to remember names. I am very bad at it, especially when I get more than one new name at a time. An additional complication is that I only see these students on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so the long layoff really hurts.

The leadership team for the Summer 2017 Workshop (Barb, Chip, Shirley, Hilary and Kate) is pleased to announce (just in time for the beginning of the fall semester!) 13 new learning objects that were developed during our “An IONiC Workshop on VIPEr and Literature Discussions” at Franklin & Marshall College in early June.

About 1 year ago I was invited to attend an editorial board meeting for Organometallics. It was incredibly interesting to be on that side of the discussion and I got a lot out of it. For me, the most significant was the hatching of an exciting new idea about teaching--a virtual issue with a VIPEr theme. I was very excited that the editor-in-chief of the journal, Paul Chirik, was supportive of this idea and I knew that I needed to make this happen quickly.

I don't like to toot my own horn, but I have some pretty big news to announce to the community. I have just received word from the National Science Foundation that I am receiving a new grant! Oh sure, the leadership council will claim to be responsible for this funding (especially Joanne Stewart, Barb Reisner and Jeff Raker the PI's), but we all really know that I am the one pulling the strings with this whole organizaiton. What does this mean for you, our loyal BITeS readers? Plenty! We have some bold ideas for shaping foundation level inorganic courses. We will be holding more workshops.

Going to a Gordon Research Conference, I expected I would come back and write a BITEs post about some of the great chemistry I saw and how I was inspired to do a million different experiments. While that is partly true, the conference proved to be extremely educational in a way I did not expect. It started early in the conference when a tenured faculty member at a research university told a story of how older male colleagues would whistle at her on days she was a bit more fancily dressed.

In response to a talk I gave at the Mid-atlantic ACS Regional Meeting, the friendly VIPEr folks asked me to write a BITes about my POGIL-type materials for inorganic chemistry. Very briefly, POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning) is an active-learning model intended to supplant traditional lectures. Students work in groups on carefully written materials (“Activities”) that guide them to a more independent development of key concepts and course content.

We're right in the midst of summer research season and around the chemistry department at Lafayette that can only mean one thing, video scavenger hunt time. As a department we try and do one fun event a week with the students. That can be things like a movie, mini-golf, bowling, etc. 14 years ago I came up with the idea of creating a photo scavenger hunt for the students and it was quite a hit. This morphed into a video scavenger hunt 11 years ago. From its humble beginnings it has grown quite significantly.

My inorganic chemistry lab manual has all sorts of policies, procedures, experimental instructions, and examples of what to do in the lab and for the writeups. My manual is quite specific in how I want lab reports to appear, and what I want in them. For example, I want a reaction scheme, a reagent table, an evaluation of possible characterization methods (with limited time, which methods are the best to do first?), a detailed experimental section and a complete, open-ended, discussion that analyzes the data from their synthetic reaction.