If you recall, I was very concerned back in January that my inorganic chemistry course was going off the rails. Flo has invited me to give a follow-up report on why I don’t think the class was a trainwreck after all.

This week was the first week in the lab for me and my three summer research students. One of my priorities was to think about how to manage three students working on three different projects. 

I needed a system that allows the students to track their results and their thoughts about future work while I also contribute my ideas / suggestions for experiments. 

For the past two years, students in my advanced inorganic course have prepared a periodic table of cupcakes as part of our campus-wide celebration of student scholarly work.  Whether or not making cupcakes qualifies as scholarship is up for debate, but we do incorporate a scholarly component. For more information about this year’s effort, see the learning object about our periodic table trivia contest.

The 2017 Symmetry challenge has come and gone and I wanted to give a big thank you to all the participants. In the end there were 12 intrepid scholars who contributed their symmetrized objects to the challenge, from three schools. Sadly, I have to report that no one from my class submitted the challenge. Perhaps the stakes were too low... er... should I say the "snakes" were too low?

So... I love to work the Expo at an ACS meeting.  I usually pick up T-shirts and hats for students and indelible ink pens for the lab...Notepads and Magnets and Stickers...OH MY!

As usual, it was an exciting and exhausting ACS meeting. Our sessions were good. The poster session seemed to be pretty well attended, but I admit, it was hard to judge that based on the location of our posters. For the second straight year I had hotel issues; last year it was a power outage and this year an evacuation due to the fire alarm going off. We had an excellent social gathering at the Pin-Up thanks to Anne Bentley. I even got to sneak off to Oakland to see an Angels-A's game.

You may have seen my Tweet about looking forward to the announcment of the most read author of 2016. I really am! Hopefully it will be a friend of VIPEr. And I am really excited about our sessions which will all be held in room 2016 in the Moscone Center. We start off Sunday morning at 9 am with eight talks in the coordination chemistry session. This will be followed at 1:30 by nine talks in the organometallic chemistry session. That wraps up at 4:45 pm and I'll have to slither pretty quickly to Hall D for the poster session from 5:30-7:30 pm.

How many of us have cringed at the basic lack of chemical knowledge on display on your friend's Facebook page?

What is our responsibility to teach in these circumstances?  Maybe none at all.  This is a social space after all.  

But in our classrooms and teaching labs, our responsibility is different.  

I've been thinking a lot about how we teach chemical safety lately.  As I set up a new laboratory at UM Dearborn, a decade and a half into my independent career, I am trying to take the opportunity to make my workspace  and my work habits safer, both for myself and for the next generation of students who will move through my lab.

In January I wrote about the most adopted/favorited Lit. Discussion LOs and at that time I promised to make this a somewhat regular series on BITeS. Not wanting to disappoint my vast audience, I thought it was time for the second in the series, this time taking a look at the most adopted/favorited Problem Sets. Once again, there are some ties, so the numbering might look a little odd, but trust me, there will be 10. Just a reminder, this list comes from you, the loyal VIPEr users.