First off, don't worry, I won't spoil anything if you haven't seen it yet. And if you aren't sure what I mean by 'it', I am talking about Star Wars Episode VII. I am a little bit of a fan. It all goes back to 1977 when I saw it for the first time with my father in Texas. It's one of my only memories of him. But I remember that opening crawl. It was just Star Wars then. No episode IV A New Hope. Han shot first. It was amazing. I remember the chills in The Empire Strikes Back at the 'No, I am your father'. I had the toys. A Death Star play station. An AT-AT.

This semester I’m teaching a section of our first semester general chemistry class with 76 students.  Almost every class, I do an in class exercise where students work in groups and report their answers using a free online response system called Socrative that I learned about from one of the participants at our summer IONiC/VIPEr workshops.

I am an admitted tech geek.  Often a first adopter of new tech for the classroom, I love to experiment with the tech that our students use so comfortably.  These experiments aren't always successful though.  

Today in class we talked through the first tutorial to appear in Organometallics. The story behind this can been seen in the previous BITeS post. Our discussion in class was quite interesting. Unfortunately, the timing of the publication of this tutorial did not allow me to be quite as prepared as I will be in the future, but it was still a useful discussion.

A recent post in BITeS discussed the article in Inorganic Chemistry focused on the different flavors of inorganic chemistry courses taught to undergraduates. If you haven't read this paper, I strongly encourage you to do so. The editor, Bill Tolman, recognized that this paper was important to the inorganic community and therefore worthy of publication in Inorganic Chemistry. The paper was also recently promoted on the Facebook page of the journal.

The deadline for San Diego has passed, but it is not too late for you to be included among the presenters in the IONiC Teaching and Research at the Frontiers of Inorganic Chemistry sessions! This Friday (October 23^rd...aka Mole Day) the MAPS portal for abstract submissions will be open for 24 hrs. It will close at 11:59 pm EDT.

Dear friends of VIPEr,

On September 28, 2005, the following email was sent to seven inorganic chemists at seven schools that were part of an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Career Enhancement Initiative. The original group, the Inorganic Chemistry Curricular Initiative, consisted of five inorganic chemists (including three current members of the Leadership Council) from the cluster, and one “external” member who brought much-needed expertise in the realm of solid state chemistry.

If you have looked over the program for the spring meeting in San Diego, you may have noticed that once again we will be hosting the Undergraduate Research at the Frontiers of Inorganic Chemistry symposium. This will mark the 9th consecutive year of this symposium and we are looking forward to another great series of talks. There is one minor difference this year (or at least the members of the LC think it is different)--the oral sessions are listed as by invitation only.

While I realize that the last person you want to hear from at this crazy-busy time of year is someone on sabbatical, I’m hoping that I can channel some Zen-like calm your way. This is the first sabbatical leave that I’ve taken that hasn’t involved moving my entire family across long distances.