At a Glance

Overview

Welcome back. Term 3 will be demanding for every Y2, and I anticipate each of you to encounter unique difficulties, for different reasons and at different times. For this, I prioritized building

1. flexibility,
2. breathing space, and
3. safety nets

into the learning and assessments. The principle is to alleviate pressure when your hardship is greatest.

For this to work, you need to actively participate. I suggest you to sit down with your planner / calendar, identify crunch times that apply to you, and plan out what you need to do ahead of time. Some of these personal crunch times (that I can think of) includes

If you expect difficult times, let's talk about it early.

Take good care of yourself and be kind to others. The grind after mid-term break will seem way more than 6 weeks. No one can sustain tip-top intellectual shape if they only get 5-hours-a-night sleep, hunched in front of screens all day, and subsists on Indo Mie.

IA

IA days

Between 24-26 Aug there are three days set aside for you to get a head start on the term.

Database IA as a Safety Net

Between three rounds of RQ critiques, classes on molecular modeling / PubChem property search / programmatic properties calculation, and IA exploration feedback, most of you are well on your way. For those of you who fell through the crack / unexpected find your plans disrupted, I suggest you to consider a database IA as a safety net. Database projects can support high assessment ceiling while you learn a different skill-set, and should not be seen as an inferior option.

I spoke with different teachers / examiners over the years. One of the sticking points for students is that they have trouble imagining what a database IA could be. Students read exemplars on boiling points --- and it seems like database IAs are all boiling points.

To that end, I developed a chemical property locator this summer. With this tool you can type in the name (or CAS ID) of a chemical compound and retrieve over 70 properties in a single query (if known). The tool had been reviewed by several senior examiners and a community of teachers, and following their advice underwent several rounds of upgrade / improvements. We are really positive about the possibilities that are opened up.

I don't expect you to remember what I taught in Term 2, esp if you were not expecting to do a database IA. In the coming weeks I will be consolidating the tutorials I've written on database IAs; you should then be able to follow the "Self-Guided Path to a Database IA", and showcase your chemical knowledge, analytical skills, and good taste and judgment in a database IA.

Assessments

For chemistry we will have 3 tests (75%), and around 6 quizzes (25%). This will feel quite packed, and assessments will jam up against other assessments (unavoidable with 11 weeks of class time). Some of you may be happy to "be able to show your improvements," while others may just be stressed.

To create flexibility/breathing space for you, I have negotiated a deviation from the Group 4 Assessment Policy. We will take the best 2 tests for the AG calculation. If you are super-stressed because you had SAT/CCE/EE/ToK piled up, know that you have some flexibility in managing your priorities. The tests will be similar in difficulty.¹

I will try to give you as much advance notice as possible. The dates for the term is fixed; the scope I will try to announce 2--3 weeks ahead. Tests 2/3 --- unlike Y1 --- will be very different for HL and SL. Given the coverage, you are going to find problems with the scope:

With the fast-burning Delta covid19 variant, we may encounter abrupt disruptions. Since the severity of the disruption is not yet known, I am unable to plan for it, but we will work together to make sure that the outcome is equitable and fair, while accurately reporting on what you have learnt and is capable of.

Test 1 details

Your first test is 2021-Sep-13, and this one will be same for HL/SL students, covering mostly the fundamental stoichiometry (topic 1) and what you learnt after the Y1 exam.

• Scope:
  • Topic 1 -- stoichiometric calculations
  • Topic 4 -- structure & bonding (emphasis on IMF)
  • Topic 6 -- kinetics (expect a data-based question related to the lab you did)
  • Topic 10 -- Functional group identification
• Structure: [10] MCQ, [30] short answers
• Bring:
  • Calculator,
  • Ruler,
  • A5-sized cheat-sheet

Topics

Sequencing

This term HL and SL students will start to diverge. HL-only classes will happen for 2--3 weeks at a time, coinciding with the busy parts of the term. In other words, SL students will get a breather when it is most needed.

We will be "covering" topics the traditional way where we do two weeks on Equilibrium, then two weeks on Acid-base etc. You will need to manage yourself; if you have not understood the first class fully in a timely fashion, you may find yourself lost for an entire topic.

SL students: you are welcome to join the HL classes, to learn, and also to do other things and be able to ask questions (e.g., chem IA, ToK). However, the precedence of my attention will be going to the HL students.

Classes & Organization

We are likely to be in a "flipped classroom" model, where the "new stuff" comes from video/reading and we use classes to practice/do activities building upon those video/reading. Again, you will need to manage yourself or risk finding yourself not knowing what is happening (and end up drifting in class watching other people). The pace will be decidedly less gentle than last year.

The College administration is quite sanguine on all classes being face-to-face all term. I am rather less optimistic, and we will keep the MS Teams channel open for both class discussions and private messaging.

However, Teams fundamentally treat information as a flowing stream, and we really also want a good-ol-pond. I will be building up this set of web-pages --- similar to how early parts of your Y1 worked --- so you can go back to find different material more easily. Alas, I switched to a more expressive/expansive tech-stack (so things like the Chem Property Locator becomes possible), but this would require much re-building from scratch.

If you are looking for things on the previous site, try here.

Term 3 Warm-ups

The following 16 activities/exercises should help you warm up the engine. They are arranged in a progression that starts basic and arrives at recent Paper 2. (And yes, SL students, we are some 75% through the core syllabus...)

The timing indicated here makes the false assumption that you know what you are doing. Depending on your readiness you may need to allot 50% extra time.

Check back for the home-made items. They just takes more cooking time.