A Proud Moment

As some of you know, I'm tutoring a high school student in Chemistry this year. She's not the most scientifically minded individual, and this kind of stuff does not come to her easily. She definitely struggles, and she does have to work hard.

We're doing Stoichometry, which is taking a whole bunch of skills that she's learned up until now and combining them and mixing them up. Balancing equations, significant figures, atomic mass, molar mass, moles, molar volumes, unit conversions, etc., etc.

Anyway, we met yesterday and it just wasn't going well. We worked until she was picked up and I told her that I'd meet with her while Meghan had her piano lesson the next day (today). Apparently, she went after school for more help from her teacher, and by the time I met with her this afternoon, she actually had the whole thing down!

I made up a few practice problems, which she flew through. Then I made it a little harder by adding a couple of extra factors to consider and she just laughed and did it right off!

I was amazed. I'm really proud of her. She was so happy. She called up one of her friends to come over and study with her because her friend is struggling and she knew she could teach it to her. They have a little test tomorrow with ten problems. I'm sure she'll be able to do it!

This just makes me happy. If you can master stoichiometry, you can pretty much do anything in chemistry. She might just pull off an A this semester! Next semester we do gas laws and such, so I anticipate some difficulties there, but I really feel we've gotten over the biggest hurdle.

Whew!