Scenes from chem lab.
If you’re new here, I went back to college this fall as a degreed undergrad to take some science classes I need to get into grad school. These are freshman chemistry and sophomore biology at a decent 4-year university. I like to bitch about my classmates because I’m 36 years old and impatient with their shenanigans.
In chem lab last week, we were testing various conditions that would make luminol react in solution. We started with two oxidants (hydrogen peroxide and bleach), to which we had to add bases and acids to test the effect of pH on luminol, and then we added metal catalysts (iron, copper, and zinc) for the same purpose. The fun started when we had to test the effect of solution concentration.
We had our little test tubes with bleach and peroxide from stock solution. We added water to dilute them, then added the luminol, then dumped them out and put fresh stock solution in new test tubes for the next part of the experiment. Then…
Lab partner: “Well now we must make the solutions stronger to test higher concentration.”
Me: “We can’t make them stronger, they’re from stock solution.”
LP: “So we just add more!”
Me: “That won’t make the concentration go up.”
LP: “Yes it will, we just add more!”
Me: “THAT WON’T INCREASE THE CONCENTRATION.”
LP: “Yes it will! If you add more to what is here, there will BE MORE.”
Me: “More volume! Not higher concentration!”
He stared at me witheringly and then called over the TA. I shit you not. He called over the TA and asked the TA to explain to me how we needed to add more stock solution to our test tube of stock solution in order to attain a higher concentration.
The TA went another way with it though, and explained to Lab Partner that he needed to calm down and think things through a little better. It was gratifying.
By the way? Lab Partner is a senior engineering major. Hope he never designs any bridges in your neighborhood.
Another time, way back at the beginning of the semester, we had to do a filtration procedure, where you put a filter paper cone in a funnel on a clamp and pour a solution with some solid in it through the apparatus to get all the chunks out, and the filtered liquid would drip into a beaker below.
This was a very slow process because it was a thick solution. It drip-drip-dripped very slowly through the funnel. So guess what my genius lab partner and a few other brain surgeons in the class decided would be a good way to speed it up?
Why, move the funnel apparatus as high up on the clamp stand as possible, as far away from the beaker as possible! Because somehow, in some alternate universe with vastly different laws of physics than we know here on Earth, that would make the solution move through the funnel more quickly.
I am not making this up.
When Lab Partner started doing this, all spastically as is his way, I told him that all he was accomplishing was making the drips splash harder into the beaker and even out of the beaker entirely. Pretty much, he was just making a mess. He was steadfast, and kept telling me to just watch. “It goes faster!”
I asked him if the solution in the funnel knew where the beaker was and he stared at me like I was being obtuse. I asked again, how could the distance between the two possibly have any effect whatsoever on how fast the solution came out of the funnel because after all, it doesn’t know how far it has to fall, and it doesn’t care. He shushed me and told me to watch.
Pressing on, I asked him if there is some sort of magical force field between the funnel and the beaker, and if he was positing that the beaker was sending a message to the liquid in the funnel, hey I’m far away, you better get through that funnel quickly! I wondered out loud if he knew some special law of physics I’d never heard of. He shook his head and kept repeating, “just watch, just watch.”
It was painful. And the thing is, it wasn’t even only him. Several other groups at our counter were doing the same thing. I was struck speechless and had no choice but to stand there and search for an argument in my brain that did not involve calling anyone “retarded.”
It only went on for about a minute because as soon as TA saw what all these Mensa members were doing, with their funnels high in the air, making the drips splash all over the place, he came over to us and asked why, and some of them actually attempted to present their finely-honed Einsteinian theories about how much more quickly the process would go this way. TA and I and the rest of the class that weren’t acting like crackheads all stared blankly at them for a full 10 seconds. One girl across the room loudly said something like, “I hope none of y’all are science majors.”
Sadly, most of them are. One of the guys so convinced about this technique is a biochem major and at least two of the others are chem majors. Or at least they think they are, now. Wait until they get to organic chem. Oy.
And you know, I’m no genius myself. I make mistakes in that lab all the time, especially with math, and I have no idea what’s going on half the time. What freaks me out about this stuff these students are doing and thinking is that there is a giant hole in their brains where basic common sense should be. I mean, basic.
I have seen the future, and it is scary.
I really thought you were going to say “punch a hole in the filter paper” But, it turns out, your story was way better. I have to say I don’t remember anyone in my labs doing this.
November 17th, 2008 at 1:41 pmOh, there was one time in a UV experiment, where each group had to go to the stockroom to check out a cuvette. So, this cuvette thing must be special, because you had to leave your ID to check it out. One group of decided that the proper way to check the absorbance of their solution was to POUR the solution into the hole where the cuvette goes. They transferred their solution from the regular test tube into the cuvette, and then poured it from the cuvette into the intsrument. I freaked, but thankfully there was a hole in the bottom of the thing so it just drained right out.
November 17th, 2008 at 1:43 pmI am a chemistry professor at a small community college. I deal with brillant students like this every semester. And then I get to deal with them again next semester and on and on until they pass or give up. Every day I ask myself, “What the hell are they teaching in high school?”
November 17th, 2008 at 1:46 pmI hate to be a weenie, but you have just illustrated why THOSE kids are going to work for MY kids. Common-sense-thank-God comes through the mother’s milk and nurturing. My wife is at your level of science understanding and I’ve always worked technical jobs, so my kids understand “TANSTAAFL” and The Law of Unintended Consequences. I have cautioned them, however, not to try to build anything based on their mom’s laws of the universe without checking with me first, but OMFG are their peers willfully ignorant.
And these clowns are going to pay our retirement. We are SO screwed…
November 17th, 2008 at 1:46 pmI’m guessing that these chemholes had some vague understanding of head pressure and thought they were applying that principle. Of course the head pressure is generated by the fluid after it leaves the filter. Bright side of this story is that the TA is already building a case to “filter” out some students.
November 17th, 2008 at 1:46 pmI am TRYING to keep politics out of my Rachl posts … BUT …. you’ve just explained, simply, how so many college “students” voted as they did.
November 17th, 2008 at 1:48 pmHell, if you can’t understand gravity, or the difference between quantity and quality … well, it stands to reason you can’t understand economics or the absolute value of “Hope”
Ummm. We’re in big trouble…
November 17th, 2008 at 1:48 pmAt least it’s just the students infected with this crap… My family moved my sister to another school after one of the teachers at her old school had taught my brother’s class in history that in the Civil War, more women “died of a broken heart” than men were killed in battle. Not that more people died of disease and infection than were killed in battle (which is true), not even that more women were killed at front from causes like we saw in “Cold Mountain,” no, women died “of a broken heart.”
And this was a PRIVATE school…. don’t get me started on the idiocy my cousins were “taught” in the public school they attended.
November 17th, 2008 at 1:49 pmWell, I’ve been reading your blog for a year and with this post I have finally come to a decision. I love you.
November 17th, 2008 at 1:50 pmObviously not a ChemE. At least I hope not.
For the funnel stuff and speeding up, I can understand where they are coming from. As wrong as it is, and as stupid as it is. They’ve somehow applied the laws of acceleration to the rules of filtration. So while yes the drops are going to hit the bottom at a higher speed because they have fallen faster and been effected by acceleration due to gravity for a longer period, its not as if you would notice this difference in speed anyways. And it will as you noted have absolutely no effect on the filtration.
November 17th, 2008 at 1:53 pmThat reminds me of a factory I worked one time that had to meter pulverized limestone at a specific rate into molten asphalt. Slightly more complex, but the idea was roughly the same. The plant manager kept ordering my mechanics behind my back to change a sprocket size in order to move the metered limestone faster on a screw conveyor, after it was metered, thinking that this would allow more to go in to the batch. It’s hard to explain, but the idea is essentially the same as your scenario.
After a day and a half of this, I finally had to coral the manager and in a private corner teach him some basic common sense. He was smart enough to be convinced, but my mechanics never were.
So, it won’t stop in chemistry class, Rachl. Idiocy is the dominant force in the universe and it takes vigilance and strength of character to overcome it.
November 17th, 2008 at 1:53 pmPete in Midland - That was the first thing that popped into my mind…
November 17th, 2008 at 1:55 pmOk now, go easy on labeling ALL engineers
I’m a Civil Engineer and I can tell you that I sucked at chemistry. That’s why I stay away from anything requiring it, even though there is good money in it. But I never did anything as stupid as what you just described.
Anyway, you lab partner sounds like a Grade A idiot. Unfortunately, there are lots of those running around with engineering degrees.
My last job was with a local government. I had the joy/pain of reviewing every engineering plan for new development in the city, residential and commercial. I quickly learned that there are degrees of engineering “skill”.
Just knowing who stamped the plans would get my secretary either a long groan or a crisp smile.
Maybe one day I’ll get the chance to review one of your lab partners “designs”
Oh yeah, great story. One day my boss and I had a meeting with a local engineer about a project. The meeting ended when the “engineer” basically asked how to do his job and my boss replied, “I don’t know, people usually hire engineers to figure it out…”
November 17th, 2008 at 1:57 pmIn this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
November 17th, 2008 at 2:00 pmMy alias got caught by the comment moderator.
Doh!
November 17th, 2008 at 2:06 pmBasic physics sez the dopes got it the wrong way around. The closer the funnel apparatus is to the ground, the greater the gravitational force (and therefore pressure) on the material against the funnel. So by clamping the funnels up higher, they decreased the pressure on the material, causing the filtration rate to be slightly lowered. In principle, anyway, because the difference in gravity between the two positions is negligible.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:10 pmReminds me of the argument I had with a friend who insisted that hair grows faster when it has been cut. I never could explain to him that the tips of his hair two inches away from the roots couldn’t send a signal back that is was time to kick in some growth hormone.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:12 pmThis certainly affirms my belief that there are too many universities and university students in this country. Obviously, we need fewer science majors and more… I was going to say carpenters but I don’t think I’d trust some the people you described to hang joists.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:13 pmA similar problem appears when today’s kids try to do simple arithmetic. The other week the clan of which I’m patriarch took my daughter (same age as you, Rachel) out to eat for her birthday. The check came in around $120 and was to be split two ways. First they split it $69-$69. When we told them this was wrong, they came back with a $40-$40 split. We chose not to pay this one and run. The third try worked with a $60-$60 split.
Some one of the wait staff figured this out on a cell phone calculator, twice wrong, once right. At no point did anyone think, “Half of about 120 is about 60,” or the like.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:22 pmLab partner is a senior? In engineering? Did they change the rules at that school or something? When I was an engineering student there freshman chemistry was a prerequisite for applying to the School of Engineering. I think your lab partner is lying about his academic standing.
That kind of foolishness and stupidity used to be extremely painful and often fatal. Thank god for the nanny-state and helicopter parents; otherwise dude wouldn’t have survived long enough to blow up your chemistry lab. Be sure you know where the fire extinguishers are in the lab, Rachel.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:24 pmAaah, you take it up a level. Basic physics aside, inuitive physics would ask how the fluid in the funnel would know what was going on underneath, but that seems to be asking too much. It does explain why people still qualify for Darwin Awards. There’ll never be an idiot shortage so long as there’s people. Like maya I was waiting for a poke-a-drain-hole story.
What was the old saw? Biology comes from chemistry. Chemistry comes from physics. Pyhsics comes from math, so math is the purest science, right? Wrong. Math comes from Logic.
Disclosure: I’m a logician. Giving that as an occupation will get you kicked off any jury panel. In all cases at least one lawyer will not want a juryman applying logic to their arguments.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:27 pmWhat kills me is the absolute certainty they have that they are right.
On a happy note, at least the TA got it right. That’s not always a given.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:28 pmAnother quantity vs. quality story:
When my sister was about eight years old, her teacher was “teaching” a few kids how to make Jello. She was afraid there wouldn’t be enough of the finished product to go around, so she told the kids to add extra water. When all was said and done, they basically had a bowl full of chunky Kool-Aid.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:37 pmI’ll have to avoid all bridges, tall buildings, highway overpasses and weight bearing structures from now on.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:41 pmI used to work in a manufacturing plant, and our chief mechanical designer was a Russian emigre. He had come to the U.S.A. a few years earlier and had a solid enough grasp of the English language that he could tell some pretty good stories about life in the Belarus region of the U.S.S.R.
In Russia, he had worked in a plant that manufactured harvesters for the state-run farms. One of his supervisors came up with the idea to take a set of blueprints for a normal-sized harvester, and quadruple every dimension, the theory being that they could harvest much more grain in the same amount of time.
Thousands of man hours, and God only knows how many rubles later, they had their huge prototype harvester ready to test. They drove it into a muddy field, and it immediately sank into the mud above its axles. It sat there rusting for seven years before he left Russia. He’s convinced that it sits there still.
Marko
November 17th, 2008 at 2:44 pmRe: Your conversation with your lab partner.
I wanted to ask if that didn’t sound just like the political arguments we’ve heard recently, but that would be just a paraphrasing of what pete in Midland already said above.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:44 pmBoy, did he have it wrong. If you want it to drip faster Don’t look at it. Everything goes slower if you are watching it.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:47 pmKids these days.
Well, I am finally into a thread early enough to warrant commenting.
On TV issues, I wish I had the chance/time to follow up on some of those recommendations as you steered me so right on Firefly! My goal is to catch up a little bit on Sarah Connor on hulu, and see about Rome after that.
Rachel, you have sucky lab partners. I was usually pretty decent at lab because I grew up as the youngest of 6 kids so there was always an experiment of some type going on (without Mom’s knowledge). The other thing is I was usually smart enough to know when I was being completely stupid - open your eyes LP.
I think that this is the gizmo that your genius lab partner should have been designing.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:48 pmRachel,
Your post is giving me flashbacks to when I was a physics lab TA. I had tons of pre-med students in the class and the vast majority displayed the complete lack of common sense on display above. I distinctly remember the following conversation that I had with one student after I gave her a failing grade on a lab writeup:
She then had the gall to go to the professor and complain about me. God love him, he actually said “You’d better do what PG says if you want to pass.” Needless to say, the quality of her work picked up after that.
Eh, that was actually a tangent about laziness, rather than idiocy. Unfortunately, all such events kind of blended together in my brain. There were just too darned many of them.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:52 pmGood grieving Jesus, is that what you are doing in College Chem? At the end of my senior year in high school we were doing qualitative and quantitative analysis. The deterioration in our educational system is extremely scary.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:54 pmIs there any hope that the new planets astronomers have found are suitable for intelligent life? This one is doomed. I want to emigrate off planet.
“I’m a Civil Engineer and I can tell you that I sucked at chemistry.”
When I was a chemE major (glorified plumbing, yes) they told us that to be a civil engineer you only had to know that sewage flows downhill and that you can’t push a rope…
November 17th, 2008 at 2:54 pmActually, my own most recent experience with lab partners (albeit it was HS AdvChem in 1965) was a felicitous one. He recognized we weren’t in the same league and just did whatever I told him. We got on fine.
Edit: I figured geek would have some relevant words. Good story and good comeback, o/t or not!
November 17th, 2008 at 2:55 pmYou know Rachel I like to bitch about our corrupt and clueless leaders. But it’s stuff like this that makes me think we, a once great nation are well and truly fucked.
The parents ditching their kids at the Nebraska hospitals last week before the law changed? How do you say God help us! In Chinese?
November 17th, 2008 at 3:02 pmEveryone knows that the liquid has more potential energy when you raise the funnel, hence it flows faster…duh!!!
Really, it could be kids who are “too educated.” They know too much, but don’t have it properly organized (and no common sense).
I wonder if the LP would have understood this:
You: What force is drawing liquid through the funnel?
LP: Gravity?
You: Yes, now does the earth’s gravity change on the funnel when you move it up?
LP: Huh???
You: Well it would change imperceptibly, the gravity force would weaken as you move away from the earth. So, if the change were measurable, then the flow would actually diminish by raising the funnel.
November 17th, 2008 at 3:26 pmI love your TA. There is nothing more sweet than a subtle TA smackdown of an idiot student. I saw this happen to my lab partners a lot when I was in college.
I teach a chemistry-related (but not chemistry) class in the spring, and I have to tell you, if I had a buck for every time I had to yell at someone not to walk in with their Big Gulp and gulp on it while we’re working with cyanide or sulfuric acid or some other deadly chemical, I’d be able to retire now. (One of these days I’m going to wind up rushing someone to the hospital. And I KNOW it’s gonna be my ass on the line even though I practically make them get someone to sign off as a witness and get notarized to certify that they’ve read the damn safety statement I hand out at the start of class.
If it weren’t for the fact that I could lose my job and get seriously sued, I’d be really tempted to just let Natural Selection sort things out.)
November 17th, 2008 at 3:33 pmIn our society intent has become equal-to or better-than actual fact. Youth indoctrinated into Political Correctness from birth and taught in Outcomes Based Education methods see intent as worthy of merit, no matter what the results. Youth lack life experience, and are suddenly slapped with it after they have been pushed through school full of margin learning/cheating planning to be an instant success upon finishing college, paid for by the gov’t and/or parents, and then having to blame everyone in the world(except themselves) when they are not. Then they become victims of some nefarious injustice, and are ripe for plucking by victim mongers in socialist parties. We are now there…
November 17th, 2008 at 3:34 pmPhysics and Chemistry is a dangerous combination and should not be entrusted to a room full of idiots. Sooner or later, something will explode.
Either that, or someone will poison him/herself with chlorine gas.
November 17th, 2008 at 3:36 pmI worked in the aerospace industry, as a manager of an inventory control operation. All it took was one, one mind you, enthusiastic young college graduate to come in and sell the “BIG BOYS and GIRLS” (the powers that be, if you will) a new inventory management system that would forever change their efficiency and business lives as they knew it. I didn’t bitch or moan or complain, but I did explain, why, point for point, what wouldn’t work, why, and which areas were lacking and why.
Needless to say, they bought the “package” hook line and sinker. I helped set it up to what they thought was standard as best as I could, and when things started going awry, I resigned. Less than a year later I was begged by the company to come back and make things right. Like they were before. Now granted their were a few small changes that the “salesman” sold them that made small improvements, but as an overall package it didn’t work for shit, and because young grad was such a good salesman, and knew that the higher ups had no knowledge on how to run the system in a smooth manner, they were sold a bill of goods.
Enthusiasm seems to trump common sence now days.
This is now how we will have the Government we will have on Jan. 20th.
Did I go back and help them straighten their mess out? *big grins*
November 17th, 2008 at 3:36 pmNo, see, gravity is like a rubber band connecting things to the Earth. If nothing holds them up, the rubber band pulls them down to the ground.
If you lift the funnel higher, that stretches the rubber band tighter, so it pulls harder. That’s what the engineering senior was trying to tell Rachel.
Of course, if you use a rocket to lift an object so high that the rubber band snaps, then it becomes weightless. That’s what happens when we launch things into space.
No, I’m not serious!
November 17th, 2008 at 3:40 pmOf course, you must all know that if you turn a thermostat way past your desired hold point, you will cool or heat your room to the desired hold point much more quickly than turning it just to the hold point
November 17th, 2008 at 3:41 pmYay! someone said potential energy! Thank you mockmook!
November 17th, 2008 at 3:41 pmTry teaching them about vacuum. What do you mean nothing?
November 17th, 2008 at 3:42 pmI seriously weep for our future.
November 17th, 2008 at 3:42 pmb-man:
kinda like cranking the fan power to high in a freshly started car in winter will get the inside hot instantly? God I hate it when my mother does that.
November 17th, 2008 at 3:43 pmNow in my 70s I make easy Bucks straightening out this kind of simple horse shit.
November 17th, 2008 at 3:46 pmThen I go back in 3 months and do it again.
actually, putting the funnel higher up would make it filter more slowly: F = GMm/R²
ha, i just noticed that link is to the “school for champions”
just what Lab Partner needs?
November 17th, 2008 at 3:46 pmFunny you should mention that. I recall a lab course in which the professor gave us a stern lecture on that very topic — that you should never have any beverages on your lab bench, because you might get confused, pick up the wrong container, and take a big swig out of it. Made sense to me.
Then one day I had a question during the middle or our lab period, so I went to the little workroom off our big lab where he was spending his time while we did our procedures. When I stuck my head in the door, I saw him with his feet propped up on the desk, watching a little TV set, and drinking iced Dr. Pepper out of a beaker.
November 17th, 2008 at 3:47 pmhmmm, seems mockmook beat me to it
November 17th, 2008 at 3:50 pmYou need a drink.
You need a mixed drink.
You need a properly mixed drink.
This post does nothing to allay my post-election malaise. My art class of just a few years ago yielded even stupider classmates. I mean… permanent-Obama-supporter-because-they-can-never-get-a-job stupid. So they do “art.”
November 17th, 2008 at 3:50 pmRubberband gravity?
I think too many young people get their understanding of physics from roadrunner cartoons.
Even in the ranks of commenters here, I’ll guarantee you that a sizable percent think that if you run real fast off the face of a cliff that you will move horizontally for a short distance before you start to move downwards. They get this idea from cartoons, and that visual presentation is very powerful and hard to overcome.
November 17th, 2008 at 3:52 pmYou mean that’s not true either!?! Well, crap.
November 17th, 2008 at 4:00 pmLo , there do I see the beaker.
Lo , there do I see the beaker draw farther and farther away.
Lo, there do I see the line of my drippings, back to the funnel.
Lo, the beaker calls to me. It bids me to send my drippings faster, in and about the beaker, where the drops may live forever.
You reckon without faith, oh Rachel. Faith can move mountains. It can also speed up drippy drops. Unless of course its ketchup or molasses which operate under a different law of physics. And wait till you see treacle… ewww.
Plus there’s anthropomorphizing. After all drops don’t like to be hanging in the air; its scary and unstable. They are happiest at rest as evidenced by their practically endless attempts to reach a bottom and stop there, so if you move that rest point farther away, it is hardly surprising that they pick up their pace to get there.
-drip- -drip-
November 17th, 2008 at 4:01 pmOnce, in a chemistry class, one of my professors was discussing ions and dissociation reactions. The particular reaction involved HCl, and the professor wrote one of the products as H-.
Yah. Aich frickin’ minus.
I raised my hand and asked if that wasn’t really supposed to be H+.
Nope, it was H-, he was sure of it. And this guy had somehow managed to become a tenured professor.
It’s not just the students that are screwed-up rockheads in our education system, I’m afraid.
November 17th, 2008 at 4:20 pm1. OMG.
Inspector: The bridge is dangerous and must be closed!
LP: Nonsense! We’ll just add more bridge thingies! It’ll be fine. Just watch!
2. Double OMG.
Made me “LOL” to beat all. And yet, I weep for future generations.
Nah, not really. They can just go fuck themselves. I don’t want to get into politics, but
. . .
[ominous and subtle DOT DOT DOT there]
. . . and that’s their own fault for voting that way in the first place.
3. All the conversations reminded me very much of my attempted conversations with my various neighbors. It’s a security beaker.
November 17th, 2008 at 4:22 pmI beat you both to it.
You more or less described the gluon force that binds quarks together, which increases with distance. If Rachel wants to be really generous (and I mean really generous), she could assume that Lab Partner confused particle physics with gravity.
November 17th, 2008 at 4:33 pmI love playing games with grabitty. I especially like if you shoot a bullet, (horizontally, of course) and drop a bullet at the same time, they will both hit the ground at the same instant. I love it when people finally understand this, the blank look on their faces.
November 17th, 2008 at 4:41 pmI’m guessing that this lab guy was thinking more like “terminal velocity”. I’d put money on it.
“Du-uhh! See, if you’re up high, you have a chance to increase your speed as you fall!”
November 17th, 2008 at 4:46 pmVery true….but then there’s these wonderful things called “pumps”. I love pumps.
Also, with the right kind of pharmaceuticals, you can indeed “push a rope”…
November 17th, 2008 at 4:47 pmNo, no, the correct phrase for that is “stuff a marshmallow into a piggybank.”
November 17th, 2008 at 4:51 pmAh, the visuals…
November 17th, 2008 at 4:52 pmEvery time that I led the lab with lasers (interference patterns), I’d unplug the darned things and put signs on every desk and on the board which said “DO NOT LOOK INTO THE END OF THE LASERS OR THEY WILL BLIND YOU!!!” Invariably, I’d catch some dipshit looking into the aperture from a distance of about 4 inches. If I hadn’t unplugged the freaking things, I’ve had had blind-in-one-eye retard students, instead of the regular sighted kind. After I got done yelling at them, they listened. For a while.
However, not because I’m a prick… okay, that last part is a lie. I finally got so disgusted with my students that I charged up a few Leyden jars and left them at each lab station, with signs stating “DO NOT TOUCH”. I also spoke directly to each student, telling them to not touch them the jars. Then I’d turn around to the board to write some notes and, seconds later, I’d hear “OWWFUCK” from behind me. I didn’t turn around, but merely stated to the chalkboard: “Following instructions can be quite helpful.”
I have to admit that I hate linking to my blog, so I won’t do it. However, I’ll copy something that I posted there some time ago:
I’m certain that the story is apocryphal, but the lesson still stands.
November 17th, 2008 at 4:56 pmBrings back bad memories. I had one semester in sophomore physics where the professor decided that only one lab report from each two-person group was to be turned in for each lab, and that the author of the reports had to alternate each time. Our entire lab grade was based on the reports, half of which we had no control over. I ended up writing them all, letting my idiot partner just sign his name to half of them. I had to decide that bringing his grade up was better than letting him bring mine down.
This was in a small school where the professor, not a TA, taught the lab, and he was just too lazy to grade a report from every student. Another problem was that we could leave when we were finished, so my partner wanted to be quick and sloppy in order to get out as soon as possible.
November 17th, 2008 at 5:02 pmCrap. Moderation heck again.
November 17th, 2008 at 5:04 pmDoesn’t luminol react with blood? (I’m a true-crime show junkie.)
Kill my lab partner. Kill my lab partner. C-I-L-L.
November 17th, 2008 at 5:20 pmI know what the lab partner was thinking when he put the cylinder higher on the beaker stand…
GRAVITY!
The higher you go, the more pressure, the quicker the drip will fall.
Duh!
Makes perfect sense to me…the theater major.
Here is my hypothesis:
Many times my job was to get on a ladder to move and adjust lighting. I can guarantee that the higher up I went, the quicker I fell down. (I rarely paid attention to that sign that strongly recommended I not stand on the top of the ladder.)
Maybe Rachel’s lab partner should be working back stage rather than doing something that might negatively impact an entire population with stuff like E. coli or SARS.
November 17th, 2008 at 5:20 pmArtistic = stupid?
Wow.
November 17th, 2008 at 5:28 pmI was the chem major who knew the best short cuts way back in 1971…we were making test tube esters: put smelly acids and alcohols together and end up with - pineapple! But it was taking forever since we were sharing reagents. The directions were clear, as I remember them, to mix the reagents in the test tube, add sulfuric acid and warm gently, then waft the odor delicately towards one’s nose. But I was a chem major, see, and I knew if a little acid was good, a lot of acid was better, and you could probably skip the whole warming step, and I was right! I mixed my chemicals and added concentrated sulphuric acid and gave it a swirl. I was right - no need to warm it at all. The tube was instantly hot and vibrating in my hand and the contents took flight with a roar, leaping straight up out of the tube and coming down all over the back of my lab partner’s chemically resistant apron (no lab partners were harmed in the making of this ester) whilst leaving a pleasant pineapple scent in its wake. I considered the experiment a complete success but Dr. Woodward thought otherwise and I had to write a short dissertation on the differences between dilute and concentrated acids. It was still fun, especially the looks on the other students’ faces. I knew chemistry was my calling from then on!
November 17th, 2008 at 5:52 pmPG - yikes. It’s one of those “too good to check” stories they told me about in Journo classes.
November 17th, 2008 at 5:56 pmWith the filtration thingy, I thought you were going to say that your lab partner wanted to add water to the solution to make it filter faster.
Your lab partner does not seem to have learned a valuable lesson - one I learned long before I got to college: being snide and/or rude when arguing about something you are “sure” of is a great way to be humiliated if you’re proven wrong.
If I am “sure” that the Mona Lisa hangs in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, and I belittle and sneer at my friend who tells me that, no, the Mona Lisa is actually in the Louvre, I will be embarrassed when we look it up and I find out I was wrong. And I don’t really like being embarrassed.
But then, I guess it’s not so surprising Lab Partner hasn’t learned that lesson. My 73 year old father-in-law hasn’t learned it either.
November 17th, 2008 at 6:13 pmI’m guessing they got their funnel physics from beer bongs. You hold the funnel up, so the hose is straight. To stop the beer flow, you bring the funnel down and bend the hose. Just a guess.
November 17th, 2008 at 6:30 pmT Rich… I think your vacuum contraption might be a tad overkill for the task at hand, but definitely a better approach to speeding things up than Rachel’s lab partner had.
November 17th, 2008 at 6:34 pmThis one warrants a link over here.
Wow!
November 17th, 2008 at 6:40 pm@My Awesome Mix Tape #6
I did not paint all artists with that brush, just certain students of my art class. Trust me, they couldn’t even enjoy art. They found out it was work.
November 17th, 2008 at 6:43 pmRachel, you are a relative genius…at a minimum.
November 17th, 2008 at 6:58 pmMy friend’s brother had a funny variant of that sign up in his classroom:
“DO NOT CONTINUE TO STARE DIRECTLY INTO LASER WITH REMAINING EYE.”
November 17th, 2008 at 7:00 pmI just look at these idiots coming out of college and think, “Mmmm, job security.”
These morons don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain so I’m not worried about losing my job to one of them. Experience and common sense matter a lot more than a piece of paper.
November 17th, 2008 at 7:41 pm“Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.”
November 17th, 2008 at 7:48 pmOK, confession time: I was the one who boiled the testube of nitric acid outside of the fume hood, causing a wave of coughing to proceed down the bench, until I grokked what was happening (i.e. how much of a dipshit I had just been) and promptly moved it out onto the balcony. It’s just lucky I didn’t pour it on some unfortunate’s noggin five floors down.
OTOH, I was also the first to call in the fire alarm when I noticed, from my dorm window about 1000 yards away, that there was a fire in one of the fifth-floor labs in that same building (and no, it wasn’t me that time).
Ya want people to pay attention to the safety rules? Have them read the MSDS procedures to follow when you splash HF acid on your bare skin. That’s some scary stuff. (Or even more exciting, take a look at some of the links off the Wiki page for Chlorine Trifluoride. That’ll clean your oven, for sure.)
I can’t resist one quote:
Handling concerns, however, prevented its use. Clark summarized the difficulties, “It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water—with which it reacts explosively.”
November 17th, 2008 at 7:53 pmGoddess, thy name is Rachel!
OMG, I was practically wetting myself here. How is it possible that these students have lived as long as they have?
I shudder when I think that the SENIOR engineering student is in the Frosh/Soph chem class. How many times does that mean he’s flunked?
November 17th, 2008 at 8:08 pmThese people are being delivered to kolledges frum hi skools ware they don lern neither.
True story. My daughter had to satisfy math distribution in college and couldn’t get out of it. Now she had math through calculus in HS and was appalled by her fellow students lack of math smarts. One on-going assignment was to ’share’ How I Used Math in my everyday life this week. Many projects were group projects - 3 people who think 1+1=3 and one who thinks 1+1=3 means you turn in 1+1=2.75. Consensus is very important, unless the three people are assertive enough to just turn in the majority answer of 3. And the final exam was a poster project. Her fellow students were overwhelmingly elementary ed students.
November 17th, 2008 at 8:18 pmAhhh Chemistry - dear to my heart. One thing that has kept me chuckling all these years was a professor who always said, “Hot glass looks exactly like cold glass.” My poor - poor idiot lab partner never retained this little gem and kept burning his fingers on hot glass. Repeatedly. Often. It boggles my mind how these people manage to feed themselves much less pass a University level class.
November 17th, 2008 at 8:48 pmMy tech theatre experience has been somewhat different. I’ve done lots of light hangs and strikes that involved going up on the Genie or on ladders, and during my early days as a techie, I even did a few stupid things like standing on the railing of the upstairs gallery, holding onto the light grid with one hand while I detached cables with the other.
The only time I ever fell and sustained an injury, I did it from a height of two feet. During a strike, I was removing windows from the back of the set, and in order to reach high enough, I stood on a prop bench instead of going into the shop to get a stepladder. The bench flipped out from under me and I made a bad landing on my right foot, twisting the ankle badly enough that I tore some ligaments. I was on crutches for weeks, and visiting a physical therapist for some time after that. So if you go by my track record, low altitudes are more dangerous than high ones.
I am a lot more careful about what I stand or climb on nowadays.
November 17th, 2008 at 9:31 pmI guess the old saying “No sense, no feeling” most definitely applies…
November 17th, 2008 at 9:39 pm“Lo, the beaker calls to me.”
Mee-mee-mee mee-mee mee-mee!
(And a Nobel Prize to Pat Berry for the rubber-band theory of gravity.)
November 17th, 2008 at 9:39 pmAh yes, Organic Chem 201.
Start of the first semester, we synthesized diaminohexane. Not particularly hard to do, but lab partner was a klutz and just before we finished distilling the 1,6 diaminohexane which was our objective, he cracked the flask. No problem. We knew how we could demonstrate that we’d produced high purity reagent, and faked the results.
Last semester, we had to analyze reagent X and determine what it was. Wow, Aha! Trick question! It’s distilled water!
No, answers the TA. It’s the 1,6 diaminohexane you synthesized back 2 semesters ago. Epic Fail.
November 17th, 2008 at 9:59 pmSwear to Dog, this is a true story cuz you cannot make up this level of stupidity.
We had a big family party and I got a couple of stacks of new crisp $1 & $2 bills at the bank for playing poker and casino type games. I stuffed the leftover bills into my wallet and thought no more of it. A few days later I stopped at Mickey D’s for a burger and paid the kid taking orders with three $2 bills. He picked them up, carefully examined them and slid them back saying “Sorry but we can’t accept that.”
“Why not? I asked incredulously.
“It’s not real money that’s why” He snotted.
“What? Of course it’s real money, haven’t you seen a $2 bill before?”
“No, it’s not and you have to pay with real money.” He insisted.
Now I am annoyed so I ask him to get the manager. Unfortunately the manager was only ten minutes older than the counter kid and he too refused to accept the $2 bills.
An older black woman behind me in line assured them that it was real money but they were not going to be duped out of a 1/4 pounder, no sir-ree.
“Now either pay for the food or leave!” the manager pugnaciously demanded.
“Sorry, but that’s all the cash I have and this is ridiculous, isn’t there someone you can call?” I asked (this was before debit cards).
“How about the police?” the manager smugly replied.
“Fine, you just do that”. I stepped aside from the line. No way these nitwits were going to win this one. The manager was a little taken aback but he called and reported that a woman was trying to pass counterfeit money.
About 15 minutes later two of Oakland’s finest arrived, casting a curious eye on me cuz counterfeiters usually don’t wait around for the police. The manager showed them the $2 bills. They began to laugh. By now a small crowd of older folks were waiting to see the kid get his comeuppance.
The LEO’s then lit into the manager for wasting their time and that he should get a big farging clue and make nice with the lady so she doesn’t sue the pants off him.
That was one sweet burger.
November 17th, 2008 at 10:01 pmSelf esteem and global warming.
November 17th, 2008 at 11:02 pmThe bolded part of that quote is one of the greatest scifi novels ever written. The book is in 3 parts, each part prefaced by one third of the entire quote.
November 17th, 2008 at 11:22 pmSpeaking of Natural Selection, back in Residency I was working in the E.R. when a new batch of nursing students came in to ‘learn.’ Well, one of them decided to steal a patient’s meds in order to get high. She had a basic knowledge of Pharmacology and thought she was stealing Propofol, a powerful narcotic. Whoops, she instead took a whole bunch of Propranolol. We coded her for over an hour before we pronounced her dead. Be happy Rachel that your experiments are just determining your grades.
November 17th, 2008 at 11:24 pmI count three commenters with quicker geekflexes than me - I was gonna be the first to say that raising the filter cone would reduce the pull of gravity!
And I say raising the cone brings it into a level of the atmosphere with less density so there is less pressure on it too.
November 17th, 2008 at 11:37 pmEvery day I ask myself, “What the hell are they teaching in high school?”
Answer: How to put a condom on your penis with your mouth.
November 18th, 2008 at 12:39 am“Go ahead and do the same thing,” he told his students. The students freaked out and hesitated for several minutes. But eventually they took turns sticking a finger in the anal opening of the dead cow and sucking on it. When everyone finished, the Professor looked at them and said, “The second most important quality is observation. I stuck in my middle finger and sucked on my index finger. Now learn to pay attention.
Reference: “Young Doctors In Love”, specifically, the “testing for diabetes the old fashioned way” scene…
November 18th, 2008 at 12:48 amIt’s guaran-freakin-teed they think ‘The Obama’ the solution to the worlds problems.
November 18th, 2008 at 12:54 amIts a pity you didn’t ask your lab partner if his funnel hypothesis was linear in nature, and how high would one need to place the funnel for the flow to occur instantly?
I had a cow-orker once who maintained that magnets were a source of everlasting power if we could learn but to tap into it. (What, like a generator? Of course not.) When I asked what the hell he was babbling about, he provided an example, where a magnet could be attached to the ceiling…what force holds it in place? We could extract this force for motive power! (This line of argument drives me to distraction.) I asked if he thought we could then extract this same mystical power from Elmer’s glue, since when you get right down to it, the same forces are at work with a magnet stuck to the ceiling than a bit of plastic glued there.
Keep in mind as well, that many college educated folk think the reason Apollo moonwalkers didn’t float away is because they wore heavy boots.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:06 amI believe the smarts and stupids have always been with us — and people may be smart in some categories and stupid in others.
The real difference is how the people around them treat them.
I’m fine with all the people who think the Apollo moonwalkers wore heavy boots to keep from floating away, as long as they aren’t voting to stop other people from buying their own land and developing their own rockets.
Healthy society: the geeks are hard at work in their garages and the neighbors just think they are nuts. Unhealthy society: the only way to be a geek is to work for a large company or the government. Doomed society: the only way to be a geek is to work for the government.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:19 amIt makes as much sense as generating power from the rotational force generated by strapping buttered toast to the back of cats and dropping them from a height… since as you know, cats always land on their feet, and buttered toast pretty much always lands buttered side down…
November 18th, 2008 at 4:09 amI see you’ve studied quantum mechanics.
November 18th, 2008 at 4:45 amPutting aside too much commentary, I think all this means is that in the future your car will be washed, the lawn mowed, your burger will be flipped, etc. by a person with a “college education”. Yeah, they’ll bitch about the man, or affirmative action, or reverse discrimination, or the failings of government, and how they were misled into “spending all their money and time (neglecting to mention their parent’s wallet)” on their “advanced training”, but in the end, it’ll just be because they really weren’t what we once called “college material”. And they won’t want to do what they really ought to be doing, and working at it long enough to become skilled.
My father was a tradesman, back when people understood that even bright people didn’t always get to go to college. He made a good living, was a damn good family man, and raised a nice family. As we move breakneck into the next iteration of the service economy, I don’t see how the collective smarts have moved all that much. Rather, it gets harder to find a competent tradesman (fortunately I can do most anything), AND harder to find competent “professionals”.
Coincidence? I think not.
November 18th, 2008 at 7:06 amYeah, heard that one from my high school bio teacher back in ‘83. But it was a medical biochemistry class and a test tube of urine.
****
I remembered another Chem Class Folly…this was in Orgo lab. One of the guys had got some crud inside a flask and needed to clean it out. So he rinsed it with ether, and then decided the residual ether was not evaporating fast enough, so he was going to light a Bunsen burner and use the heat to speed evaporation of the residual ether in the flask.
It was actually kind of fun, seeing the prof for the class vault over the desk and tackle the guy to the ground before he could do it….
November 18th, 2008 at 8:19 amYou know, 1/2 dozen chem classes and I think I may have met ONE person like that. ( Not counting occaisional off-days.)
Mine was the day I discovered I could “rescue” a failed titration experiment by heating the liquid until the color changed back and and I could re-titrate.
cough.
The TA’s withering “That’s very… clever.” Soon brought the brain back into gear.
November 18th, 2008 at 8:32 amActually, I’m thinking he thought there would be a siphoning effect, which of course doesn’t happen unless you have a flippin’ hose connected to the bottom of the funnel, so that the cumulative effect of gravity on the fluid column will reduce the pressure at the bottom of the filter, thus allowing the pressure above to force the liquid through faster. (See! I said it without claiming that the slight vacuum pulls it down! Heh. :-P)
Anyway, I too was waiting for the “hole in the bottom of the filter” trick, as happened in my high school chemistry class. And I got blank stares when I asked how it was supposed to act as a filter that way.
All that said, what I love is the ashless filter paper that you burn away to measure the mass of the precipitate. What can I say, I’m a pyromaniac…
November 18th, 2008 at 9:18 amsilly Rachel! your lab partner felt it would drip faster, never mind facts. you’re obviously not willing to be ‘part of the solution’!
(i know, lame pun.)
at my advanced age, i’m working on a degree in English (no, not a teaching degree). i plan to fly under the radar until i get lifetime teaching tenure after which time i will be beating my students with their own grammar books.
i shall infiltrate the “infil-traitors” and do my damndest to subvert.
November 18th, 2008 at 9:22 amAhh, thanks for the clarification Joan. I get the correlation now. :o)
November 18th, 2008 at 9:27 amThis is the problem with lower-ranked schools. Outside of the top 50, colleges have little reason to exist. People with sub-standard SATs are simply incapable of becoming educated or improving themselves academically.
November 18th, 2008 at 10:08 amThe ways Art cannot imitate Life. I’d have been willing to pay at least a $2 bill for the chance to witness that in person.
I can’t recall whether I mentioned this here or @ dogette’s, but one night I was in the McD where Girlchild used to work. (She was off-shift at the time.) Witnessed counter girl and two customers all engaged in futile attempt to communicate with each other in “Spanish.”
November 18th, 2008 at 10:24 amSeriously, I’m amazed he’s still breathing.
November 18th, 2008 at 10:43 amWhen I was in grad school at Big State U, I was a TA for an entry-level mechanical engineering class that was mostly fun little projects and learning how to present information in different ways. There were always a bunch of dim bulbs in there, but one year there was one student in particular whose purpose in life seemed to be to serve as a warning to others. In one episode, we had a lecture in which all 240-odd students were supposed to turn in index cards listing their height in inches so that we could demonstrate the resulting bell curve, and said student approached one of the TAs at break and asked him how to find his height in inches. “Okay, well, do you know your height in feet?” “Yes, I’m five foot seven.” (pause) “And do you know how many inches are in a foot?” “Yes, twelve.”
This student was nominally a junior in ME, by the way, and thanks to Big State U’s required grade inflation, he ended up with a B in the course. This is one of my main arguments against buying American cars.
November 18th, 2008 at 11:56 amOh, and by the way…
One of my favorite results from random Wikipedia wandering is this tidbit about the discovery of cyclamate:
“Cyclamate is an artificial sweetener that was discovered in 1937 at the University of Illinois by graduate student Michael Sveda.
Like many artificial sweeteners, the sweetness of cyclamate was discovered by accident. Michael Sveda was working in the lab on the synthesis of anti-fever medication. He put his cigarette down on the lab bench and when he put it back in his mouth he discovered the sweet taste of cyclamate.”
I don’t know what kind of crapass lab protocols they had in the thirties, but there’s just all sorts of wrong going on there.
November 18th, 2008 at 12:09 pmDearRachel,
1. Re: The lab partner being an engineering major. I was an engineer (EE) and had to take Chemistry as one of those required foundational courses that really doesnt apply to most engineering degrees (exceptions being ChemE and Biomedical Engineering); did fine (A) and it was okay, but I did not love it. You take it because you have to (much like Sociology and the other Liberal Arts courses that Make You A Well Rounded Student) but you dont care about it much because it’s not your bread and butter. So the guy was not smart in it, which is pretty typical. He was still a doofus.
2. Re: your line of reasoning questioning whether the liquid knew how far it was away from the beaker. You should read Isaac Asimov. He had a PhD in Chemistry and had written a short story, in the form of a technical paper, about a chemical compound that would turn from a solid into liquid (you Chemists have a fancy word for that process, but see #1 above) before water was poured onto it. It would not dissolve if the water didnt actually touch it, and the amount of water was immaterial to the process. (so, if you set up an apparatus to pour water towards the compound but have something prevent it from contacting it, the compound would not dissolve). A pretty amusing paper for you Chemists. As his last question during his doctoral process of defending his thesis, he was asked to critique the analysis of his sci fi paper.
v/r
November 18th, 2008 at 12:09 pmmike
Reminds me of the argument I had with a friend who insisted that hair grows faster when it has been cut.
Hair, no. But this is in fact true for fingernails! (only if you cut them very short)
November 18th, 2008 at 1:41 pmAnd you can cite a clinical study backing up your claim about fingernails, right, battlefrog?
November 18th, 2008 at 1:58 pmFascinating.
Too many comments to check beyond the first dozen to see if anyone mentioned the most obvious issue here: HE. I see this all the time in my physics lab. “Proof by emphatic assertion” can easily lead to the kind of herd mentality of the sub-geniuses you describe, and the TA handled it masterfully. Only thing better would be to say “you should listen to your lab partner, she seems to know what she is talking about”, but was probably afraid to bruise his ego enough that he would complain to the Dean.
I commented on this issue in the last paragraph of a blog about teaching lab classes. I think I wrote more about it somewhere else, but I’ve never tagged “gender” as a topic so I can’t find it. Your case is probably complicated even further by the possibility that he has thought from week 1 that he got stuck with his mother as his lab partner. Now imagine the day he applies for a job at an engineering company where his PE supervisor is female!
That physics mistake is an interesting one. It is extremely common to find students who can correctly solve a problem of a specific type in an exam context but get it wildly wrong in a different (usually real-life) context. Basic misconceptions about nature (conflating fluid pressure “head” with height, in this case) persist long after the use of certain equations has been learned and forgotten.
As for the “senior engineering major”, there are two possibilities. (1) He is at a school where you only need N of M prerequisites to enter engineering, and chemistry is not on the mandatory list. I find this unlikely, as it is not the case at the accredited schools I am familiar with, but Deans have been known to make exceptions. Lots of engineers loathe chemistry, and will put it off as long as possible. I know students who don’t take chemistry until after completing 3 semesters of calculus and 2 semesters of physics and every other requirement for the major. (2) He is in his 4th year, but has 3 or more years of engineering classes in his future. After all, he didn’t say he was a “graduating senior”. Oh, and (3): In my experience, the sort of male engineering major you describe has been a conservative McCain supporter.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:02 pmIn high school, a friend & I were arguing the behavior of gas when it’s compressed. He was quite convinced that compressing a gas made it colder. When I then asked him to explain how a diesel engine worked, his brain locked up.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:48 pmBack in 1964, when I was on my first job as a ChE in a phosphate plant, my phone rang. It was the maintenance engineer: “Hey, Ernie, I’m calibrating a flow meter by pumping acid into a tank and measuring the level change with a tape and a stop watch. What’s the conversion for cubic feet to gallons?”
“That’s 7.48, Bob.”
“No, I meant gallons of phos acid, not gallons of water.”
I forget what I said to him. I remember that I held the telephone receiver about a foot away from my face and stared at it before answering him.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:34 pmI once had a professor who made a real effort to cultivate common sense in his students. You can’t teach it - either it’s there or it’s not. The last question on a Fluid Mechanics quiz, for unlimited extra credit was to list the number of ways to measure the flow of water. You can imagine the number of responses a roomful of MIT students could come up with.
The following Monday, he said, “I asked that question for a serious reason. Show of hands. How many said a bucket and a stop watch?”
November 18th, 2008 at 3:59 pmPat Berry –
I’m sure you nailed it with the gravity-as-rubber-band. That is exactly the sort of intuitive-in-a-weird-way thing I see in my less, um, thoughtful students.
My favorite ever was a student who’d been asked to list three minerals on her first Earth Science test. She listed “water” and “oxygen” and couldn’t think of a third, I guess, because she left the last space blank.
At least she wasn’t trying to explain the concept of “mineral” to her lab partner. I hope.
November 18th, 2008 at 4:00 pmCCPhysicist
Are you actually trying to imply that men, especially conservative men, are not as capable of doing science as womyn? You sound like a feminist chauvinist sow to me.
November 18th, 2008 at 4:11 pmIt has been said that laughter is the best medicine, and I just want to thank Rachel, and everyone who has posted here, for giving me a HUGE dose today. I recently attended an online “College”, and noticed on discussion boards that most of my fellow students couldn’t even write coherent sentences. Then I found out some of these kids were getting A’s on these assignments. Rachel, you’re blog is going into my favs.
November 18th, 2008 at 5:15 pmAnd you will respect its authoritah.
November 18th, 2008 at 7:34 pmgray, are you trying to imply that pete up there in the 6th comment from Midland has observational data indicating that only liberals want to become engineers? My experience teaching them is that wannabe american engineers are a conservative bunch at my college, and that the most conservative ones are the ones most likely to ignore advice from others, including (but not limited to) female students and even female faculty members. If you think Rachel has amusing stories, you should hear the ones the chemistry FACULTY tell!
As for your attempted ad hominem, you are very wide of the mark.
Rachel is experienced and smart enough to ignore the guy and fight back, but I have seen younger women do poorly in lab simply because they followed the bad advice of someone who talked as if he knew something. Many instructors, myself included, tend to be slow to correct that sort of situation because we don’t find out about it until much later when reports are turned in. A student who buys the B.S. will not even think to ask the instructor.
November 19th, 2008 at 1:11 amBuy that boy a Melitta coffee pot! (and make him throw away his beer bong!)
November 19th, 2008 at 10:18 amCCPhysicist
Since all I knew of you was your one post (now two), my ad hominem was just a guess. If I missed the mark, please accept my apology. I don’t even know your gender for certain. It’s just when I read it, it struck me as anti-male and anti-conservative, which I am sure you are aware, is not all that uncommon among college and university faculty.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:45 amAh, sounds like this class is the proper training for the emerging New Space industry. I can’t wait to read your experiences when you do a physics and engineering class. It can only get better. You might bring a small recorder to class and make some fun YouTube tapes of the geniuses as they problem solve.
I suspect they will all have jobs waiting for them in Mojave and other pockets of NewSpace development.
November 19th, 2008 at 1:45 pmAccording to my daughter who is a chem major at a fairly large university on Long Island, her chem lab teacher, who I shit you not, rounds his sig figures at every damn step, instead of at the end.
She got a lab report back yesterday that was marked down because her totals were very slightly off of his - apparently less than 2%. She figured out it was because she used the EXACT atomic numbers and he rounded them.
Every kid in the class who has had high school chemistry has complained and he brushes them off by saying “His way is the only right way” and the others that are new to chem are going to have to be retaught.
November 19th, 2008 at 2:24 pmThoeting,
I *hate* instructors who have the “only right way” for coming up with approximate answers. I had a douche-bag instructor who made us show him that we rounded up to even least significant digits and down to odd digits. He treated the uncertain digit as though his fool-proof method imbued it with a perfect exactness. He acted as though his “method” was the most important thing in the whole course.
November 19th, 2008 at 3:43 pmWow. I have a new theory as to why guns are banned on campus…
November 19th, 2008 at 5:53 pmonthow, I don’t think you have it quite right - these are the people who will actually verify that Global Warming has really occurred…
November 19th, 2008 at 8:37 pm> I’m certain that the story is apocryphal, but the lesson still stands.
LOL. There’s a variant of it in the medical spoof movie “Young Doctors In Love” (1982), and I’m sure it wasn’t new even then.
In YDIL, Harry Dean Stanton (IIRC) “tests” a beaker of urine by “tasting” it. Hands it to whiz kid medical up and comer Michael McKean, who “tests” it similarly. Stanton arrogantly makes fun of him with the observation joke. McKean takes in the “joke”, then reels off a list of complications recognizable and directly attributable to actually having tasted it. Stanton peevishly grabs the beaker and tastes it this time. McKean reveals that he actually saw the trick, and did the same thing, leaving Stanton with egg on his face.
Not much in the movie to be worth watching, but that was one of its better moments, played by two very good actors. Oh, and tits. There’s a playboy PM with ginormous ones in it in a “bits” part.
.
November 20th, 2008 at 5:59 am> Artistic = stupid?
Can be.
Left-brain-vs-Right-brain.
And “Wisdom” is VERY left-brain. That’s why academic “intellectuals” (i.e., artsy right-brain types) so often lack any sense of wisdom (i.e., learning from one’s mistakes, or, better yet, from the mistakes of others — plus an inherent understanding of How The W