Chemical Education Today
Especially for High School Teachers by Erica K. Jacobsen with Laura E. Slocum
Lost and Found
Erica
Laura
photo: Destination DC
Spending time looking for lost items can be a major pasttime. Keys, purse, and sunglasses can often go missing. In our Secondary School Featured Article house, you might hear phrases like, “Mom, I can’t find the ◭ The Box-and-Dot Method: A Simple Strategy for Counting sunscreen.” “Where’s my swimsuit?” “I don’t see the hamburgers Significant Figures by W. Kirk Stephenson, pp 933–935. anywhere in the refrigerator.” Inevitably, one just needs to look behind something or move aside an item or two that’s covered up the sought-for item. Some readers may think something’s gone missing as maintain the feature at a sustainable level they read this issue. Did you check for years to come. the table of contents? Did you flip Call for Activity Testers through all the pages? Still can’t find it? If you’re looking for a JCE ClassAs feature editor of the JCE Classroom Activity or Classroom Activity room Activity series, I am assembling Connection, you won’t find either. a group of people interested in testing Typically, these Especially colsubmitted Activities—functioning much The Capitol Dome can be seen at the U.S. umns focus on what you will find in as the current Tested Demonstrations Capitol in Washington, DC. Washington is the current issue of the JCE, rather “checkers”. Activity testers would receive also the site of the Fall ACS High School Day than what you won’t find. However, Activity submissions to review and test Program. For more information, see p 912. I’d like to share details about the in their home or classroom. Interested in history of the Classroom Activity seeing the Activity feature from the other feature and what you’ll see in future issues for Activities and side and becoming a valuable part of the peer review process? Connections. The first JCE Classroom Activity was published in Contact me at
[email protected]. September 1997 (1). An additional 101 Activities have followed during the next dozen years. Nine Activities were published each Laura’s Take on the Issue school year for the first ten years. In 2007, a move was made What Is That Colorless Solution? (p 953) brought lots of to publish six Activities per year, but to also offer Classroom smiles and wonderful memories to me as I read it. As a high Activity Connections articles to describe new extensions to school student, qualitative analysis was the experience that previously published Activities. Since then, ten Connections “hooked” me into chemistry. I absolutely loved being able to fighave appeared. This material remains available not only in subure out what was in the test tube that came from my instructor. scribers’ hard copies, but also online and on CD-ROM. PDFs My AP Chemistry students may not feel the same as I do about of every Activity and Connection are available online to JCE this article due to their more recent qualitative analysis project; subscribers by visiting the two links on the home page of the JCE however, some might see the project in a different light now High School ChemEd Learning Information Center (CLIC) at that it is August and not May. Their experience has been one of http://www.jce.divched.org/hs/. The first 50 Activities are availgrowth and newfound satisfaction; for a few of them—major able on CD-ROM (2). frustrations. Some students with the highest grades academically When the feature was in its infancy, it was important to have been among the weakest in lab. Their weaknesses became maintain a consistency; readers could expect to flip open their especially apparent during qualitative analysis when they had copy of JCE to a heavy cardstock page with a new Activity nine to use the knowledge in their heads with their hands. Students months out of the year. This often meant that JCE staff were identified their four progressively more difficult unknowns and called on to create Activities in-house. Indeed, only 20 of the learned more about chemistry and themselves in doing so. It has first 50 Activities were written by authors other than JCE staff. been 33 years since I first did qualitative analysis, the last 18 years As the feature matured and continued, JCE readers answered as a teacher. It is still my favorite lab. the call to submit Activities, and as a result, 44 of the last 52 Activities were written by outside authors. Thank you to all who Literature Cited shared your work in this way. With more than 100 published Activities available, there 1. Lorenz, J. K.; Olson, J. A.; Campbell, D. J.; Lisensky, G. C.; Ellis is less need to push for a certain number of Activities each year. A. B. J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74, 1032A–1032B. The feature will publish submissions as they are accepted, rather 2. Holmes, J. L. J. Chem. Educ. 2008, 85, 1006. than always generating in-house Activities to fill gaps. This could Supporting JCE Online Material still mean several Activities per year, but that will depend on you. http://www.jce.divched.org/Journal/Issues/2009/Aug/abs893.html We continue to receive Activity and Connections submissions Full text (HTML and PDF) with links to cited URLs and encourage you to consider how your own curriculum materiBlogged at http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/chemeddl/ als might be adapted to fit this feature. In this way, we hope to © Division of Chemical Education • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • Vol. 86 No. 8 August 2009 • Journal of Chemical Education
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