Little-Wonder.Net

19 September, 2003

Outcome of Chemistry Practical

22:34:31 | School Life |

Despite prying myself from the internet for three whole days, nothing much has been accomplished. For some strange reason, I am still slacking in the afternoons and in the evenings and would only touch my notes when I feel like it. Such poor work attitude when the promotional exams are only three weeks away. To make matters worse, mt attempt at studying this afternoon failed when I dozed off halfway whole reading through my physics notes.

After combing through countless Sports retail outlets at the various shopping malls here in Singapore, I finally managed to purchase a proper sports water tumbler. Gone are the days when I would be carrying a recycled mineral water bottle during each and every school day. For some reason, the sales of Sports bottles had risen dramatically after the results of a study showed that recycled mineral water bottles contain a relatively higher percentage of bacteria as compared to using a proper bottle. For hygiene purposes, I have no other choice but to fork out $8++ rather than to let my health deteriorate.

The Promotional Chemistry Practical paper was held today. As usual, I was in a deep frenzy whilst waiting at the reporting venue before the practical while Swee Wah was completely calm beside me. I panicked even further upon looking at the practical paper when I realised that I had to complete 2 experiments, plot a graph and answer 5-6 chemical calculation questions within one miserable hour. Therefore, I had no choice but to multi-task. Anyone who was watching me during the whole practical would realise that I would be doing two different things each time. At one particular moment, I was pipetting 25cm³ of FA3 into the conical flask with my left hand and dropping methyl orange indicator into another flask with my right hand…

However, multi tasking would not always be effective as I made a grave mistake during the second experiment. The question specifically required us to pipette 25cm³ of solution FA3 into a conical flask and add an additional 30cm³ of solution FA1 into the same flask. In my haste, I added the 25cm³ of FA3 and accidentally added an additional 30cm³ of the same solution FA3 as I had forgotten to switch my bottles over. I only found out about that mistake when I realised that there was still no colour change even though I had enptied the contents of the whole burette into the flask during the titration. The result? I was delayed by 5 minutes. Thank goodness all my answers to the practical matched that of my friends’ upon comparision after the paper… *phew*

There was a certain teacher who really pissed me off before the practical examination itself. She would yell at anyone who was late in reporting for the practical and my entire class was yelled at for a whole minute in the lab because we took quite some time to settle down. Hello? The seats weren’t even labelled properly, so how on earth would you expect us to find our allocated seats quickly? She even accused us of holding up the entire examination when it was the fault of the seat planners themselves. Her voice was loud and shrill as she yelled continuously at the whole group with me half expecting the glass windows and chemistry apparatus to break any moment. Some lung power! In fact, she really reminds me of a “ba po” or typical Singaporean “ah soh”

Sigh… Physics lecture at 8:00am tomorrow… No more late Saturday mornings for me until the promotional examinations end.

I have placed this weblog off-hiatus, as I have decided that I cannot live without my daily dosage of weblogging.