Log of lecture topics and notes is here.
TurningPoint lessons are here.
Office Hours
Here is the schedule of lecture and discussion office hours. Also shown are holidays, lab posts test, exams and lab exams. If these hours conflcit with your schedule you may also contact us to meet at another time. Our contact information is at
Lab office hours
The schedule of lab office hours is here (1 page PDF).
Understanding versus memorization
One of our overall goals is to help develop your critical thinking and reasoning skills, beyond the scope of chemistry concepts. The ability to skillfully utilize both quantitative and qualitative reasoning is essential in our modern society and requires training above and beyond what is typically taught and presented in high school.
We will help you learn how to study and how to teach yourself in order to master the various nuances of general chemistry. You may have not yet experienced how to understand material. Understanding is different than to simply memorize facts and mechanically use them to solve equations or address questions similar to those that you have already seen. One of the challenges in this course is that you learn how to “own” the facts, that is, to be able to use them in different, new contexts and to fully understand their implications.
Although you have already demonstrated that you have mastered the skills necessary to academically perform at high levels, you may still confuse spending time performing busy work with studying. A challenge for each of you is to adjust to the new expectations and to develop new, more efficient study approaches and to develop the long-term intellectual discipline and work ethic necessary to succeed.
Helping yourself, in six parts
There are six parts to helping yourself do your best in this course. If you put each of these parts into practice, you will give yourself great advantage.
- Prepare for each lecture: Before coming to each lecture, work through the topics to be covered in the text and notes, attempting problems as you go. This will allow you to be alert in lecture to things that are unclear, and to ask questions in lecture to help clarify them.
- Stay current with ALEKS: The ALEKS online personal tutoring system is closely coordinated with the lecture material. It is essential that you meet the weekly ALEKS mastery goals.
- Problems, problems, problems: An essential skill in learning is knowing what you do not understand, and one of the best ways to do so is to solve problems (perhaps 6 to 8) on a daily basis (OK, almost on a daily basis). Simply reading the text is insufficient.
As we cover material in class, solve a set of related problems at the end of the chapter. Try not to do problems that look simple or that you can solve by inspection; find problems that you cannot immediately solve. This way, you are identifying gaps in your understanding of the material and can get help during office hours on a regular weekly basis, thereby staying up with the material covered in class.
When you go to office hours, bring your work (get a simple notebook for your problem solving efforts) so we can more easily identify which step(s) gave you difficulty in the problem solving process. By the time an exam comes around, not only will have solved over a hundred extra problems, you will have identified and filled in most gaps in your initial understanding of the material.
Do not try to cram a large number of problems in a few days before the exam. Numerous controlled studies have shown that you cannot gain the necessary in-depth understanding of the material required for the class in several days before an exam. There will be a premium on understanding the concepts in order to solve the problems, not simply manipulating algebraic expressions.
To help in this process, we have placed many additional general chemistry texts (filled with additional problems and answers) under closed reserve (simply ask for one at the front desk) in the Science and Engineering Library (38 Cummington Street). - Prepare for each discussion: Weekly discussions go into detail on lecture and text material. This is the first place to work through your questions with your classmates.
- Make use of office hours: The weekly schedule of office hours is here. You may attend any of these, not just those given by your lecture professor or your discussion and lab teaching fellows. Office hours are sessions that are set aside for your benefit and you are encouraged to make productive use of them.
- Questions, questions, questions: Finally, email to ch102-questions@bu.edu is a great way to ask specific questions as they arise, without needing to wait for lecture, discussion or office hours. The more specific you are about what it is that is unclear, the more helpful we can be in replying.
Group tutoring
If, after the first month of class, you believe that you need additional help, group tutoring sessions may be arranged with Educational Resource Center, http://www.bu.edu/erc/tutoring/chemistry/ch102/.