Welcome to my blog! I’ve been teaching and tutoring A Level Chemistry and Physics for the last decade. For the ten years before that, I also tutored Chemistry to 1st and 2nd year undergraduates at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary, University of London.
In my years of experience I’ve found that the topic area students seem to struggle with most tends to be all the calculations in A Level Chemistry. The calculations themselves aren’t mathematically hard. You certainly won’t need any trigonometry or the quadratic formula like on an A Level Physics question and there are only a few specific skills needed that are beyond GCSE Maths. Instead, the real challenge often comes from deciding what to do with the information and numbers given in the question. There are certain approaches you’ll need to use for nearly every question. Other approaches come up much less frequently but are simply extensions of the more routine types of question you’ll have seen many times.
I was initially planning to write a website covering every possible type of calculation the exam boards could ask but I came to the conclusion that it simply wasn’t possible. The best way to prepare for an unusual calculation is to make sure you have an absolutely rock solid foundation in the topic and to have seen and answered the widest possible range of question types. So, to help, I’m going to focus my blog on highlighting a few interesting calculations I’ve thought about each week. I’ll start with what I think are the big ideas in chemical calculations – the most fundamental and widely useful approaches you’ll need to tackle any question confidently. Please follow!