Atomic structure, killer topic. though i'm sure there would be alot more chapters which would be as tough or tougher than this. Atomic Structure timed assignment 3A was the worst "surprise quiz" i had. imagine the highest as full marks. so what does 1/10 means? well, at least i do understand now what went wrong. i was doing the ionisation graph the other day on microsoft excel. frankly, i've got this headache while doing it cuz the instructions were not really useful to me as the version of excel is different. nonetheless, i managed to complete it and guess what? there's this sense of satisfaction. like "wow, i cant imagine i can actually do this!" kind of achievement. anyway, back to atomic structure. Right now, i feel that atomic structure is not as tough as i've said. in fact, its quite simple after i get the hang of it. credits to Nisa, Mr Tan, Zixin and Ms Jee for constantly helping me in this topic. Right now, i'll just have to read up more on it i guess.
Last lesson was about chemical bonding. though i'm thoroughly confused why the way of drawing the covalent and ionic bonds is ENTIRELY different from what we've learnt in secondary school. honestly, i don't get most of the main ideas taught in class cuz i was distracted for a minute and in the end, i cant get the whole lecture. anyway, i learnt that to handle a-level chemistry, our o-level foundation have to be strong and not only that, we have to adjust to new changes made to the foundation we've learnt and applied. eg, its not always ionic bonding even if the two elements involved is a metal and non-metal like aluminium chloride. so far, chemical bonding is not yet a problem for me so we'll have to see if it is after the whole lecture.
i have to say chemistry practicals are not as easy as what we were taught during our secondary school life. Right now, all reactants are named as FA1, FA2, FA3 etcetc. its kind of complicating cuz it becomes easier to mess up all the solutions. i guess the easiest part of the practical would be the titration cuz we have tons of practice before. To me, the hardest part of all is not carrying out the experiment nor calculating the mole or concentration or mass, but is to answer the purpose, the significant errors etc. apparently, i'm doing all the experiments without even knowing whats the aim of it. i did not realise this until Ms Jee mention it during the last practical where one of the qn asked "what is the purpose..." and the answer obviously lies in the title of the experiment. well, at least after 4 experiments, i'm kind of getting used to the way practicals are done in a-level.
well, i think thats all for now. will update soon.
