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I've been using standards based grading for many, many years. Each year, there are units that make me question whether or not its the right thing to do and it's generally when we write names and formulas for compounds. In theory, it's not a difficult skill - follow the chart to apply the right rule to the right chemical. In reality, there is so much background knowledge a student needs to have to be successful, it ends up being one of the hardest things we do during the year.

This chart tells a clear story of the difficulty:

The first two points are for types of compounds...pretty much identifying ionic vs covalent substances using the periodic table and then describing macroscopic properties. The next to points are writing formulas for compounds (ionic and binary covalent) and then writing names for compounds. Ionic compounds really just wreck people.

It's frustrating because each of these standards has a huge impact on the overall grade. Students can test as often as they like with evidence of practice and revisions until they can do the skill. I'm pretty lenient on this unit...I let transition metal charges slide in names and they can use a reference chart of polyatomic ions, but there is still a huge struggle for many. I can point to exactly why each person either has or has not demonstrated proficiency, but it's still a tough unit to be resilient through.

I'm thinking through how I can ease the burden in future years. Eventually, we move on into new material so students get a break, but I'm finding it harder and harder to help them persevere through really hard topics when many will not think about chemistry again this year.

For the last two years, I've done an iodine clock reaction with my second year chemistry students as the main teaching lab for our chemical kinetics unit. We use 0.2M sodium iodate and 0.2M sodium bisulfite as our reagents instead of the classical sodium thiosulfate and iodine. I've found this to be reliable and uses materials I already had in the lab. The amounts of reagent are low enough that I can make enough stock for eight lab groups to have a little extra in case they need to re-run a trial.

I introduce the reaction mechanism and main points the day before so students can read prior to starting. The entire wet procedure can be done during one 60 minute class period with analysis happening in the next class or for homework. The lab protocol gives students a detailed table of reagent amounts for each trial. They essentially perform a serial dilution from the 0.2M stock samples keeping the bisulfite concentration constant for the first trial runs and then keeping the iodate ions constant for the second. Students have to retrieve and manage samples, avoiding cross contamination, in order to complete the 10 trials correctly.

Most groups this year (all except for one) got the expected results of a first order rate for iodate and a second order rate for bisulfite. Here's the full procedure if you want to take a look at the student handout along with sample data and preparation notes on the last page.

I'm late with my reading from last month because I was in the middle of updating my entire blog setup and didn't want to have extra posts to import. Here's a look at my reading from January:

Death from the Skies! - Phil Plait

I like Phil's conversational approach to science writing. He tells stories and paints really clear pictures of what is happening in the deepest parts of the universe. This was a little bit of extra fun because each chapter starts with a small vignette setting the scene for the horrible thing heading toward the earth.

Trail of the Lost - Andrea Lankford

I really enjoy travel/wilderness survival stories, so I grabbed this while browsing at the library. The book follows a multi-year search for three hikers who all disappeared from the Pacific Coast Trail around 2016 and 2017. The author is a nurse and former National Parks ranger and has years of experience in wilderness search and rescue. At first, I thought the book was mainly a vent at official search and rescue protocols, and in some ways it is. She's frustrated with the bureaucracy and secrecy around missing persons in the national and state parks. At the same time, the book details stories of volunteer searchers also needing rescue because they're inexperienced and run into trouble.

In the end, the book walks through three families searching for lost sons. The official outlets are stretched and unofficial groups are often shut out, leaving a weird middle-ground where you cannot make progress. Community and the care of strangers brought together by common cause helps everyone involved keep looking when there is little hope left.

As of today, all traffic from https://blog.ohheybrian.com is now directing to https://ohheybrian.com/blog. I've migrated all of my old posts (I think I got them all) into the new platform and I finally decided that it was just time to redirect and patch up issues as they arise.

I've spent a couple of months, working intermittently, on this change. I'm happy with what I was able to put together and I'll do some detailing about what changes I made and what I had to build to make the switch. The short story is that I'm back with an online-first platform, running on Flask against a SQLite database. I learned a ton and I'm excited to keep building it out.

I came across a post this morning on why AI isn't killing learning. Educators are good at the blame game and I think the overall premise of the post is correct - we need to constantly revise what we do along with our methods, but that's standard practice, not just in response to new tech.

I think he missed the point on skill building, though. I cannot just look at a series of prompts a student gives an LLM to determine what they know or don't know. There is still a place for fundamental knowledge and building skills to develop fluency.

I'm painting almost every day and I'm still taking things a few strokes too far. My latest was good and then I tried to darken more, which muddied it all up. Lightness!

I painted a lot in 2025. I have a couple posts from this year (post 1, post 2, post 3) with some others I never shared. Here are some of my favorites from this year overall.

I had a couple here and there that I was particularly proud of, like this house from back in April.

I really enjoy landscapes, stemming, I think, from just loving being outside. I did a lot of small paintings at the start of the year that have since turned into full-page pieces. I also started to get more bold with my colors and values.

I'm making progress with blending, mixing colors, and taking advantage of watercolor's softness, but I still have a way to go on managing moisture in the paper and brush and painting light, mid, and dark values to build depth into the pieces. I did this the best on a painting done in early December of the lake cabin we used to visit growing up.

All said, I think my favorite painting of 2025 is this field that I have painted several times, trying to get just right. I don't think I was ever disappointed with a piece, but I kept getting drawn back into the scene, trying to capture it in different ways.

It's been a good year of growing in skill and confidence. I got a lot of supplies for Christmas gifts this year and I'm looking forward to filling those books up.

So many books over winter break! A couple were short, but they still count.

The Wilder Life - Wendy McClure

I'm reading the Little House series to my middle daughter before bed, so I grabbed this on a whim. It went on a little long, but McClure realized that a) the life on the prairie wasn't always as quaint as was portrayed, and b) hunting for that life now paves over the complexities hidden in the children's story.

What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions - Randall Munroe

I used to read the What If page regularly, but had never picked up the actual book. I burned through this in a couple of days, giggling at how ridiculous some of the scenarios are. I especially loved the light-speed baseball this time around. It's an easy, approachable read for anyone.

The Art Thief - Michael Finkel

I'm really on a kick this year with thefts and anthropology. The Art Thief is one of those mouth-drops-open kind of stories where you just can't believe what the thieves pull off. Stéphane Breitwieser thinks he's invincible and he has little reason to doubt that assumption. He frequently makes off with artworks in broad daylight, even when cameras are around. The book read quickly and I found myself turning page after page waiting for his luck to run out.

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

I'm not a fan of Victorian literature, but we watched The Muppet Christmas Carol this year with our kids and I decided to sit down and just read the original. I was surprised at how close the movie came to the original and just how much darker the book was. I lost the thread a couple of times in some of the descriptions of scenery and people, but overall, I enjoyed the short read.

A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite - Adam Higginbotham

In 1980, a man with a grudge built a highly-sophisticated bomb to blow up a casino he owed money to unless he was paid a $3 million ransom. Higginbotham is one of my new favorite authors because he is able to weave together each story into one compelling narrative.

This was a podcast episode, but the full text is the length of a short book and is still available on The Atavist.

https://magazine.atavist.com/2014/a-thousand-pounds-of-dynamite

I've had this little space up for a few weeks and I still haven't decided if I should migrate all of my existing posts over or not. I'm liking being able to fire off quick posts here and there, but I'm worried about losing the old stuff in a move. It would take some wrangling to make sure I don't break every link accidentally. I also don't love having two spaces to think about. What belongs where? Does it matter?

I'm having a hard time turning my brain off this week. Nothing school specific, but I feel like I can't just relax. I feel like I should be doing something but it's like I can't recognize that resting - reading, listening to music, etc - is doing the resting.

I fell into the productivity nexus several years ago. I think it was a symptom of not having a teaching position and needing to be able to justify the work I was doing. I tracked all the things, figured out oblique systems to plan out and quantify my hours of time spent on whatever I was doing.

Now that I'm back to teaching, I realize how much energy I spent on tracking and how little effect I think I actually had. I'm in a new district, teaching, and my to-do list lives on a legal pad. I look at that old district and I feel like I wasted several years of opportunity to actually make meaningful differences with people, not just my time ledger.

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I've never looked at Rust, but I'm aware of why it is so well liked. My Python projects are all for my own enjoyment, but I feel like these patterns are things I can learn to use just to make my own code cleaner. I've got the tab open on my phone and I'll come back to it when I do some more work on the backend here to finish up some stuff that needs polishing.

I came across a post this morning on why AI isn't killing learning. Educators are good at the blame game and I think the overall premise of the post is correct - we need to constantly revise what we do along with our methods, but that's standard practice, not just in response to new tech.

I think he missed the point on skill building, though. I cannot just look at a series of prompts a student gives an LLM to determine what they know or don't know. There is still a place for fundamental knowledge and building skills to develop fluency.

Three books finished in November! A marvel of reading during the school year. I even managed to read and retain some nonfiction this month.

Terrestrial History: A Novel - Joe Mungo Reed

I enjoyed this a lot. It spans four generations and takes plenty of time developing each narrative. I don't think I read it quickly enough, so I had to keep refreshing myself of who was narrating at a given point and what had happened to them so far.

It's a time travel story but not in a heady sci-fi way. I had to think about the ending for a while because it wasn't until the final few pages that everything really clicked for me.

Grizzly Confidential - Kevin Grange

Kevin Grange is an outdoors person, but terribly afraid of bears. This book is his journey to learn more about the American brown bear in order to overcome his fears. His writing takes him all over the northwest United States to see, learn about, and be with wild grizzly bears. He talks with scientists, teachers, field researchers, and other field experts and shares his experiences in an easy to read, enjoyable way.

What he finds is that if we, humans, are predictable and controlled, experiences with bears can also be safe, predictable, and controlled. Much of the human-bear problem interactions are due to human behaviors. By living in a way that is bear friendly, there is no reason for bears and people to come into conflict.

The Feather Detective - Chris Sweeney

Roxie Laybourne lived at her lab table after growing up through the great depression and entering academia as a woman without a PhD. It didn't matter - she became the world's leading expert in bird identification based on feathers alone. Her expertise was under appreciated for much of her career and, only near the end, did she get the recognition she deserved.

All of her achievements aside, I can't help but think that her life was consistently lonely. She often pushed people to a breaking point because they couldn't meet her work expectations. Those that could rise to her expectations often had the same relational and familial problems in the end. While she wasn't alone in her work, I did feel sad that she couldn't maintain a healthier relational balance in her life.

Heading into December, I threw some books on my list that I happend to find while looking for different books in an effort to broading my reading a little bit. See you in a month!

I had an itch to scratch, so I rebuilt my homepage and built in a new microblogging platform that I'm lovingly referring to as my "otherblog."

The site itself got a facelift - much simplifed and more streamlined. I wanted somewhere to write from a web editor, so I made it how I wanted it. We'll see if it sticks around.

This isn't going anywhere. I may merge the two someday, but that would take some serious URL wrangling to make the schemes work. For now, it's just another spot if you want to keep up with me. RSS is available for your reader.

This has been a while in the making. I built a new CMS within my site using Flask to...well, mainly...let me write online again.

This site is already using Flask for some tasks, but it was done mainly for a graduate school requirement. Since finishing my master's degree, I ripped out a lot of the stuff I had to add and left it pretty much alone. Just about a year ago, I added comments to my static site by setting up a small database here. It works well and I was happy to have that added function.

I've been using Pelican since 2023 for my main blog and I like the static site, but I missed being able to just pop open a form and fire off some thoughts. So, here I am.

I'm keeping it separate for now. Welcome to otherblog.

I'm not sure how long that will be, but it is what it is. It's got RSS set up, so you can subscribe to posts if you want updates.

Much of this new site's layout was heavily inspired by Leon Paternoster. Sorry Leon. Thanks Leon. I hope we get to meet someday.

I finally decided it was time to move away from Nova Launcher. I purchased Nova Prime probably 10 years ago for like $6, so I think I got my money's worth. I wasn't thrilled when it was sold and even less when Kevin left back in September. I just needed to take the time to try stuff out.

I landed on Lawnchair. It isn't as customizable as Nova, so there has been some muscle memory re-training this week, but I'm happy overall. I'm glad they're actively developing and I think it's the next closest fit for me.

So long, Nova. You were good while you were good.

I started toying around with a little side microblog because I miss being able to open a browser and make a post. I've used Pelican to generate this static site for a couple years now and I think I'm ready to move back to a web publisher.

I wanted to try and revive Anchor CMS, but I don't have the PHP skills to refactor something so large. I'm comfortable in Python, so I'm extending my homepage, which already uses Flask, to have a blog path. There's a lot to do, but it's something I can pick away here and there in the evenings. It's fun to rethink this space every now and then. I think this will be a good move overall.

Only one book finished in October, but it was a doozie, so I'm okay with that.

Death's End (Remembrance of Earth's Past) - Cixin Liu

A parallel continuation of The Dark Forest. It picks up with a new main character that you follow through the rest of the book. All of the original themes of Three Body Problem tie into this new narrative while bringing some old characters back to pass on obligations and introducing new ones who bring their own complications.

This was a great ending to the story started in Three Body Problem. Some of the physics got weird for me in the end and there were some ideas teased that didn't get played out like I had hoped. But, all things aside, I'm glad I presed on considering how wary I was after finishing the first novel earlier this year.

My wife's parents are moving next year. She and her dad built a gazebo when she was younger and today, it moved to our house.

We'll landscape this in and turn it into a nice little weekend coffee spot.