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Anne Schmidt

Chemistry Instructor

Anne Schmidt is a Chemistry Instructor in Wisconsin. Anne has been teaching high school chemistry for over 20 years and is passionate about providing accessible and educational chemistry content. She has over 9,000 subscribers to her educational chemistry YouTube channel. She has presented at the American Association of Chemistry Teachers (AATC) and was an Adjunct General Chemistry Instructor at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. Anne was published in the Journal of Chemical Education as a Co-Author, has an article in ChemEdX, and has presented twice and was published with the AACT. Anne has a BS in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, and an MA in Secondary Education and Teaching from Viterbo University.

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Q&A Comments (4)

Do you have any advice on being a good chemistry teacher?
Keep your students engaged, and really get to know each one of them to connect. Remember that we get to keep our students for a year, so make sure to do this early. Once they do and they trust you, they'll listen and make the year a lot easier. Also, when teaching, make sure to use good models because chemistry happens at a particle and molecular level. So, having a good model, letting your students discover and work through things, and getting their hands on a model to understand what's happening on a particle level.
How do I balance a chemical equation?
Make sure that all the atoms you have on the left equal all the atoms you have on the right. One trick I teach my students is something about keeping them together; they're called PI atomic ions. So don't break apart a sulfate typically, because sulfate will be on the other side of the reaction, which is a vessel for two minus charges, and balance that as an ion, so not only bouncing atoms, but the other trick at a higher level is to balance ions. And above all that, if you're a higher-level college student or AP chemistry, when you're done, what's called checking that charge is conserved in another ionic equation, and that's a higher-level task. So basically, I'd say trial and error first; make sure all your atoms are there, keep your polyatomic ions together, save your loan elements to the end, and just keep on trying.
What kind of test can I perform to identify an element?
A fun way to do this is by performing a flame test. Although some elements may not have a reaction when ignited. But usually, it's metal elements that have lost electrons that tend to burn a specific color in a flame, or at least a fairly unique color. And so fireworks are based on this property; the age of stars is based on this property; and an instrument called an atomic absorption emission spectrum called an AE is based on this property. Each element has a unique color based on those electron transitions. 
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