This semester I’m co-teaching our CHM 100:  Chemistry of Art Objects course for the first time.  This class is designed for non-majors and is co-taught with David Dempsey, the Associate Director for Museum Services at the Smith College Museum of Art.  We have 15 students in the class; many of them are not science majors and have little to no chemistry background.  My role is to teach the essential chemical concepts, while David focuses on the application of chemistry in art materials.

So, I've just tried something for the first time in our AISS course (Accelerated Integrated Science Sequence) to teach the idea of bonding overlap, andtibonding overlap, and orthogonal (non-bonding) interactions. 

Howdy y'all. Flo here. I am busy getting all set for the upcoming ACS meeting in Dallas. During the meeting we will be celebrating that most evil of holidays, St. Patrick's Day. Celebrating the person that drove my ancestors from Ireland just sends shivers down my spine (a very serious thing for a snake). So while you partake in a day of revelry, I will be holding a quiet vigil in honor of all things serpentine.

This spring I am doing something new in my sophomore inorganic class. Before I go into detail, a little background is needed. This class has a fairly academically diverse population. The prerequisite for the course is General Chemistry II. I have senior biochemistry majors that have had two semesters of P-chem as well as first year students that have only had General Chemistry II. I also have a fairly high population of chemical engineering majors. As I said, academically diverse.

This summer the IONiC VIPEr folks are going to be running a 5-day NSF-funded workshop on “Bioinorganic Applications of Coordination Chemistry” at Northwestern University.

Flo wants to see you at BCCE!

Greetingssssss everyone. Flo here. Welcome to a new feature of VIPEr -- VIPEr BITeS (Blogging Inorganic Teaching & Scholarship). VIPEr BITeS will be a venue for longer posts on a broad spectrum of topics.