Milwaukee Time Lords Blog

Once again Milwaukee Time Lords member, Jay Badenhoop presents us with more real samples of student answers to science questions. I include everything in Jay’s email to me, including the amusing disclaimer.

Here is another set of actual quotes from chemistry student exams, homework, and lab reports.

These are presented anonymously so no students were embarrassed (though maybe they should be).

[Again, my thoughts to myself are in brackets.]

 

On a 3-D molecular model-building exercise:

There is a symmetry plane between the center carbon atom.  [Do you know what "between" means?]

 

Q: When you change to the other chair conformation [of dichlorocyclohexane], are the chlorine atoms now axial or equatorial?
A: They’re trans.  [That wasn't one of the choices!]
Q: Now move one chlorine atom from carbon 2 to carbon 3.  Are the chlorines cis or trans?
A: They’re axial.  [D'oh!]
[On his tax forms, where it says "married, divorced, or single?", he answers "yes".
On my tax forms I select the option "Married filing double jointed, nudge nudge say no more!".]

 

Do not get benzoic acid in your eyes or it will cause digestive track irritation.  [Did you swallow your eyes?]

 

Inhaling benzoic acid may cause respiratory tract infection.  [No, it is a powder, not a bacterium.]

 

Insert the sample tube into the hating element.  [Make love not hate.]

 

        Part C: Indentation of an Unknown Solid.  [It is already indented - see?]

 

There was a lot of error due to missing the begging and end of the melting range.

[If the melting range begs, they put it out of its misery.  Don't miss it!]

 

The appartus was too slow and drug out the whole experiment.  [Maybe it was high.]

 

We will find the solubility of a coefficient in water.  [A coefficient is a number.  You mean you can dissolve numbers in water?  I think you mean "find the solubility coefficient".]

 

The mixture is shaked.   [No.]
The mixture is shook.    [No, try again.]
The mixture is shooked.  [No.]
The mixture is shooken.  [Still no.]
The mixture is shucken.  [Nope, you're getting colder.]
The mixture is shucked.  [No, you shuck corn, not mixtures.]
The mixture is shaken.   [Finally one person got it right!]
[Das Mischung ist geschücken, yavoll, mein Herr!]

 

Make sure you open the top between shakies or it might explode.  [Jinkies!]

 

You have to open the bottom because the pressure in the mixture has to relieve itself.

 

The benzoic acid was not quit pure enough.  [You shouldn't quit.]

 

My melting point was too high.  It must of been my equipptment.  [Or your spelling.]

 

The layers were easy and easy to see.  [Yeah, feelin' easy...]

 

Q: Why should you not use a bunsen burner to evaporate ether from the benzoic acid solution?
A: The flame could ignite the ethanol.  [Last time I checked, ether and ethanol were two different substances.]
A: Because it would burn the benzoic acid down.  [The big bad wolf burned it down.]
[Real answer: The ether is highly flammable!]

 

If you overheat the solution, something bad will happen.

[Can you be any more vague?  You'll upset the karma of the universe, man.]

 

Q: What could cause the recovery of benzoic acid to be less than 100%?
A: A mistake.  [You mean like taking this class?]
A: Some could have been lost when it was put on a watchglass and kept in my drawer.
[Alakazam, benzoic acid vanished!  It's magic!  Maybe the drawer has a trap drawer.]

 

The density of the object is its density.  [I yam what I yam.  Master of the obvious.]

 

The density is less dense than the density it is floating in.  [Huh?]

 

Water always has a density of 1 even if you have a lake.  [But not if you have a pond?]

 

Density is all ways constant.  [No, some times it deep ends on temperature.]

 

A psychometer is used to measure density.
[No, a *pycnometer* is used to measure density; a *psychometer* is used to measure insanity.]

 

It doesnt mater how much watter you put in the graduated cylinder.  [The t wandered.]

 

A 50 mL sample of ether is wadded to the funnel.  [Like a wad of cotton? added?]

 

I measured the volumn of the column.

 

Q: Why does a steel bar sink, but a steel ship floats?
A: Because the ship is on the ocean.  If you take a cruise, you feel happy and more buoyant so the ship floats.

 

The release of clouroflourocarbons caused depletion of the ozone lawyer.  [Ozone lawyers only take cases in the upper atmosphere.  We already have too many lawyers; it wouldn't hurt to deplete a few.  Clouroflourocarbons are baked with flour and "clour"?  It's spelled

"chlorofluorocarbons".]

 

Global warming causes floods and droughts that kill everything in it’s awake.

[Then go back to sleep.  It was all a bad dream.]

 

The media creates excitements and false postulations from the population.

[I thought you get false postulations from a bad pregnancy test.]

 

The media sometimes uses only a portion of the data witch gives erroneous results.

[And it uses witchcraft to make up the rest.]

 

If we reverse global warming, then we’d have global cooling and the media would thrive on stories about that.  [Sad but probably true.  Students sure don't trust the media.]

 

We humans have put a dent in the plant life on earth.

[Don't worry, we have auto insurance for that.]

 

Global warming will raze the water level of the earth.

[Don't worry, we can use a razor to shave it down again.]

 

If we don’t do something about global warming, it will have a snowball effect.

[Don't worry, the snowballs will make it cooler.]

 

Jay Badenhoop

 

No trees were killed in the sending of this message.
However, a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

MTL member Jay Badenhoop, who was the first editor of our club newsletter, has contributed his first material for our blog.  It is answers to test questions given by students and one response to a cheater at the end.

I’m so sorry (as the Doctor sometimes starts with when about to do something awful to an opponent), but the following piece may cause you either pain or sadness for the state of our education of our children.

You can do your part to help by going back to the International Year of Astronomy post and lending your support to that effort.  (I think the Doctor would want you to do something.  He had something to say about “dumbing down” in the third season episode 42)

[Convention - italicized words are the teacher's comments; term or question in bold]

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MORE STUDENT ASTRONOMISMS
Set #4

Stonehenge - Three pillar of stones with a stone circle people stood on to studied the stars.

geocentric - in the middle of the Earth.

epicycle - plants make small loops in their obits around the sun.
[The plants are dead?  Did you water them?]

ellipse - a cone plane passed through the side of the cone, not bottom.
[The Conehead family flies in cone planes.]

perihelion - the very end of a speed of a point orbiting the sun by its body.
[Huh?  It's the farthest point of a body in its elliptical orbit.]

period of revolution - length of time it takes for a plant to have one full revelation.
[A giant psychic gardenia?]

light pollution - an axis of light in the sky.  [no, that's *excess*!]

light pollution - a lot of light.

wavelength - different distances appear as different colors.
[That's the principle of 3-D glasses.]

wavelength - the distance from crest to crest or through to through a wave.
[Er, that's *trough* ("troff") like what a cow eats from.  Here, try reading this "ough"t loud: "Though it ought to be bought, the tough calf with the cough thought it was through eating dough thoroughly enough at the trough."  There are at least five different pronunciations of "ough" in that sentence.  That's English for you!]

infrared light - light that is redder than red.  [*really* red!]

Doppler effect - something caused by Dopplers
[Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting Dopplers...]

focal length - the length from the lens of a telescope to infinity.  [...and beyond!]

focal length - objects at infinity fall at a distance.
[huh?  Objects at infinity are closer than they seem.]

chromatic aberration - when light coming from a telescope makes you see rainbows.
[No, that's  a *mental* aberration.  It's when light of different wavelengths is focused to different points, so the colors appear blurred.]

focus - where light waves come to a focus.

Why are some wavelengths blocked from reaching the Earth’s surface?
Radiation is blocked from reaching the Earth’s surface.
[The last two from the "bleedin' obvious" school of astronomy.]

Info-red light is blocked by the O-Zone layer.
[The O-Zone is where the Wizard lives.]

Gumma rays are blocked by the Oziononic layer.

Which types of light in the electromagnetic spectrum are mostly blocked from reaching
the Earth’s surface by the atmosphere?
Opaque light is blocked from reaching the suns atmosphere.
[Did she think "opaque" is a color?  And confused the Sun with the Earth?]

Compare a refracting telescope to a reflecting telescope.
A: Reflecting telescopes have mirrors that magnatize light.  [I think she meant "magnify".]
A: Reflecting telephone use mirrors as the optics to focus and reflect light.
[And he uses the telescope to call his mother.]
A: The refracting telescope turns red light blue.  [It does?  Don't use it to look at traffic lights.]
A: The human eye is a refracting telescope.  A rearview mirror of a car is a reflecting telescope.  [Er, no. *Like* a telescope, maybe.]

Advantages of using the the Hubble telescope are as follows: saving money by limiting its ability to point at random positions in the sky; telescopes on Earth are limited but eh atmospheric “seeings;” the starlight is consentreated into smaller images with not amosheres above the telescope.  [Huh?]

How does light from a light bulb compare to that of natural light from the sun?
A: You shouldn’t look into the sun.  [But you *should* look directly into a light bulb?]
A: The wavelengths of the sun have more length then the light bulb.  [And they have less wave.]
A: Light from a light bulb is approx. 3000 K as opposed to the natural light of the sun which is approx. 5580 K.  [A light bulb is 3000 degrees, over half as hot as the sun?  Steel melts at around 1200 K.  The student's light bulb would melt the Earth's crust!]
A: A light bulb will become hot if left on for a long time, hotter than my fingers can stand so I cannot even imagine trying to change the sun right after it goes out.  [I sure hope this student was joking!]

Here is my answer to an unsuccessful cheater: “[Female student], the file you submitted for Activity #1.1 is a copy of Homework #1 (wrong assignment) submitted by [male student, her boyfriend] with his name on it!  You should do your own work.  I cannot accept this submission, so I must assign a score of zero.”  [Can you believe it?]

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