about

As a seventh grade school student, I stood in awe, in the chemistry laboratory, amused at the bright colored substances formed in my test tube. The perfect blue Copper sulphate crystals in my Petri dish sparked the curiosity in me to learn more about the subject of Chemistry. I remember being excited about the delicate glassware: the fragile test-tubes, the round bottom flasks and the conical flasks, which fell down a couple of times during class bringing about stares. Not to forget the smells: the sweet smell of ester with the scent of perfume, the stinky smell of rotten eggs from Hydrogen di sulphide and the pungent smell of acids when the lids were lifted off the reagent bottles.

Well, the class on the Reactivity series of metals and watching the piece of potassium reacting with water explosively and the flame test and the pop test of Hydrogen was enough to make me choose Chemistry as the main subject in my High School and in my Bachelor degree in St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore. The laboratory was now upgraded and had so many chemicals and apparatus. So we were introduced to fractional Distillation and Tripod stands, Bunsen burners and Thermometers. So we had to handle fire with confidence and a little lesser supervision. Naturally, I still have the scar from having touched a hot tripod stand by accident.

Nope, but that didn’t deter me from being curious. I finally found myself enrolling for a postgraduation in Analytical Chemistry in the very same College. This time I was preparing Catalysts and using them in an Organic Synthesis reaction. And I still remember the nausea i got from smelling pyridine during a lab experiment. The test for ions and the tests for organic functional groups made me and my classmates into detectives and the feeling of satisfaction you get when you have found out the positive and negative ions in the salt mixture is unexplainable.

Years later I found myself as a Chemistry Teacher in an International School. And I found that same curiosity in my students as I lead them into the Chemistry Lab. So I started a journey with teaching Chemistry to IGCSE and IB students.

My Mission and Goal of this website is to spark the curiosity of my students, to kindle in them the desire to learn more, overcoming barriers of large volumes of information, by breaking them down to smaller packets of interesting articles.