Ron was with me at the San Diego APSI, so we did get to do a little “vacation stuff”. We went out to a wonderful Italian Restaurant in Old Town San Diego. The restaurant is called Jack & Giulio’s. I had Valdostana di Vitello (Yum) and Ron had a fancy seafood platter, Cioppino! I highly recommend this restaurant.

I got to work with 20 terrific teachers in San Diego this past week. Teachers who are willing to give up a week of their summer to improve their teaching is always inspiring. I shared my ideas and picked up some great new ideas as well. The APSI (Advanced Placement Summer Institute) is called AP by the Sea. From the patio of this building, you can see the ocean.

After finishing the 2016 AP Reading, I think I would like to add to the bottom of this t-shirt “I’M NOT A HYDROGEN BOND”.

Over and over, I read student responses that indicated a bond with hydrogen constituted a “hydrogen bond”. Students were confusing the COVALENT bond within a molecule to the attraction between molecules caused by the very polar bond formed between H and O (or H & F or H & N). I’m going to focus on this idea this year in Screencasts.

I am now officially retired from teaching. I don’t feel any different. I still have things to get done. I have four APSI’s this summer plus an online course through UCLA Extension. I think I am a little more relaxed about it all because underlying all of the preparations and planning, I know there will be no papers to grade and no grades to assign. I’ll just be helping other teachers begin or improve their AP chemistry classes.

I visited the Grand America Hotel (WE are in the Sheraton). Wow, what a fancy bathroom it had. No paper towels, just cloth ones.

This is a wonderful place to work. There is a lot of light, the lines and patterns are interesting and the people who work here are friendly (as long as you remember to wear your badge.)

Here is a sunset at Antelope Island State Park in the middle of the Salt Lake. The most impressive part was how quiet and peaceful it was. Standing and listening to a few distant birds was very relaxing.

I remember pictures in my 4th grade geography book showing people floating high in the Great Salt Lake. A couple of us drove to Antelope Island State Park in the middle of the Salt Lake and tried it out for ourselves. It was pretty cool. There were little flies on the beach, but they were not bothersome. We saw bison, a great sunset, and even dropped in on a public star party of astronomers. Probably the most impressive part was how quiet and peaceful it was.
Just standing in the open with a few birds singing in the distance was very nice.

This is the group of friendly chemists I have been working with since Day -3. We are in charge of scoring the Alternate exam. We are not allowed to discuss anything about this confidential exam outside of our reading room, so lunchtime conversations are pretty dull. I am in charge of one of the long questions. We will be joined today by 10 Readers. And so it begins.

I am in Salt Lake City for the next 12 days or so. We will be scoring the free response portion of the AP chemistry exams. The work is done at the Salt Palace, a convention center huge enough to house nine different AP subject scoring teams at the same time.