Run two semesters: fall and spring
Instructor: Jian Wei, Ph.D. Chemistry, Tufts University
Dr. Wei has taught Chemistry courses every year since 2011
Teacher Member of American Association of Chemistry Teachers
Class time: 12:30-1:50 PM, Sundays, Chemistry Basics Course
3:40–5:00 PM, Sundays, AP Chemistry Course
Classroom: #301, Day Middle School, 21 Minot Place, Newtonville, MA
Class size: 6 to 14 students (typical)
Textbooks and Reference materials:
https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-chemistry/free-response-questions-by-year
Download free-response questions from past AP Chemistry exams along with scoring guidelines, sample responses from exam takers, and scoring distributions.
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AP Chemistry
Who should take this course?
Students who has taken the first-year high school Chemistry in the previous school year, who will start taking AP Chemistry in the current school year (September),
- would like to improve one’s performance in AP Chemistry course
- plan to take AP Chemistry Exam in May or early June of spring semester of current academic year
What does this course do? The two primary objectives of this course are:
- Improving students’ understanding of chemistry principles and proficiency in applying these principles to problem solving. Students will improve their understanding of the fundamental concepts of chemistry and their problem solving skills by applying these principles.
- Preparing students for the AP Chemistry Exam. The course will provide information on the AP Chemistry Exam, offer advice and guidance on preparing for the exam/test, and administer practice exams.
Note: While this is a special course to help students prepare for AP Chemistry Exam, the ultimate goal of the course is to improve students’ understanding of the fundamental concepts of chemistry and their problem solving skills by applying these principles, so that one should see performance improvements of students in their high school AP Chemistry class.
This course does not offer hands-on laboratory experiments. Can students effectively learn and improve their performance in AP Chemistry Exam?
There will be in-class video display of demos of relevant chemistry lab experiments over the entire academic year.
Course Teaching Plan: The teaching curriculum is designed for the students who plan to take AP Chemistry Exam in early May and June of current academic year. We will cover each unit below in about three-week period. We will have in class practice excises after each chapter each week.
UNIT 1 Atomic Structure and Properties
UNIT 2 Molecular and Ionic Compound Structure and Properties
UNIT 3 Intermolecular Forces and Properties
UNIT 4 Chemical Reactions
UNIT 5 Kinetics
UNIT 6 Thermodynamics
UNIT 7 Equilibrium
UNIT 8 Acids and Bases
UNIT 9 Applications of Thermodynamics
Nobel Prize winner Tu Youyou helped by ancient Chinese remedy
Tu Youyou has become the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel Prize, for her work in helping to create an anti-malaria medicine. The 84-year-old’s route to the honour has been anything but traditional.
She won the Nobel Prize for medicine, …
Tu Youyou attended a pharmacology school in Beijing. Shortly after, she became a researcher at the Academy of Chinese Traditional Medicine. In China, she is being called the “three noes” winner: no medical degree, no doctorate, and she’s never worked overseas.
She started her malaria research after she was recruited to a top-secret government unit known as “Mission 523”
In 1967, Communist leader Mao Zedong decided there was an urgent national need to find a cure for malaria. At the time, malaria spread by mosquitoes was decimating Chinese soldiers fighting Americans in the jungles of northern Vietnam. A secret research unit was formed to find a cure for the illness.
Two years later, Tu Youyou was instructed to become the new head of Mission 523. She was dispatched to the southern Chinese island of Hainan to study how malaria threatened human health. For six months, she stayed there, leaving her four-year-old daughter at a local nursery. Ms Tu’s husband had been sent away to work at the countryside at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution, a time of extreme political upheaval.
Ancient Chinese texts inspired Tu Youyou’s search for her Nobel-prize winning medicine
Mission 523 pored over ancient books to find historical methods of fighting malaria. When she started her search for an anti-malarial drug, over 240,000 compounds around the world had already been tested, without any success. Finally, the team found a brief reference to one substance, sweet wormwood, which had been used to treat malaria in China around 400 AD.