Fundamentals of Chemistry I (CHEM 111):
For my Scientific Reasoning course, I took the Fundamentals of Chemistry instructed by Dr. Jonathan White. I was originally extremely excited to take this course as I was a chemistry major, but throughout this semester I realized my passion just wasn’t for it anymore. The content of the class was taught through mainly lectures and our knowledge was testing through the Quest system.
I despised the Quest system through the majority of the semester. I struggled to understand how five questions on a quiz like paper would determine my grade. I fell really behind on quests as I just kept failing them, no matter how many times I attended tutoring or office hours. I thought that I had grasped the content of the subjects, but then after I took the quest I felt as I knew nothing. After weeks and weeks of failure, I was prepared to withdraw from the class, but I trudged on. Thankfully with the effort I put in, I finally started to receive grades that reflected that.
We were also required to write lab reports that corresponded with the labs we had during the week. I actually enjoyed doing lab work and looked forward to it, even if it was at 8 o’clock. Writing lab reports were genuinely fun for me, which surprised me greatly. Being able to apply the content we learned during the lectures made me understand a bit more, the concepts we were being taught.
Even though I struggled through the class content, I really enjoyed my classmates and professor. Dr. White made us breakfast at least once a week, making biscuits and homemade jam or gingerbread and snicker doodle cookies or donuts, he even brought us Bojangles one day. He was an extremely nice person, with an incredible sense of humor, even stopping lectures so he could show us a meme he found online the night before. He even had a pet mantis that he found and brought to class, we even got to name her. Chem 111 was one of the best classes, I have taken at Longwood University.