4.+Thinking+Flexibly

Thinking Flexibly:

The first time around, our lab in Chemistry was to dissolve a silver bar in nitric acid, a feat that most textbooks claimed as a fast and rigorous reaction. Therefore, for the first lab of the year, Maggie, Jaekyun and I prepared a lab that tested the rate of reaction of nitric acid, and silver. To my dismay, when our group finally got around to testing our experiment, the silver bar was visually nonreactive to any concentration of nitric acid! Had I been an inflexible Chemistry student, I might have just given up on the lab right there and then.

However, I decided to think flexibly, and to make the already designed lab to work with perhaps a different metal. With a slight switch of subject material, our group experiment transformed from one based on silver to another based on magnesium: we would test how fast magnesium would react with nitric acid, until the set amount of magnesium disintegrated. Since magnesium is more reactive a metal, we therefore assumed it might react, where silver failed. Fortunately, the experiment worked much better with magnesium, and therefore, thinking flexibly saved our lab when the original procedure was wrong. Attached is the silver bar that ended up causing us our problems (Figure 4).

Figure 4

In the beginning of the year, had the same problem occurred, I do not know whether or not we would have been flexible enough to keep the same lab, but switch a controlled variable. Thus, in Quarter One, I believe I have grown in terms of flexibility.