Chemistry 11 tutoring

If your child is taking Chemistry 11 right now

Chemistry 11 tends to start well. The early material — safety, matter, the periodic table — is familiar enough that students feel confident. Then the mole unit arrives, usually a few weeks in, and marks drop sharply. Parents often describe it as a switch flipping, and it is one of the most predictable patterns we see.

What has happened is that the course changed type. It went from descriptive science to quantitative science, and it did so without warning. A student who was doing well by reading and remembering now needs to be fluent with ratios, proportional reasoning, and unit conversions. That is a fixable problem, but not by studying the same way harder.

What the course covers

The chemistry here is the foundation everything later rests on. Students learn how matter is classified and how the periodic table organises the elements by their behaviour, how atoms bond ionically and covalently, and how to name and write formulas for compounds. They learn to write and balance chemical equations and to classify reaction types.

The quantitative core is the mole: a counting unit that lets chemists connect a mass they can weigh to a number of particles they cannot see. From it come molar mass, percent composition, empirical and molecular formulas, and stoichiometry — using the ratios in a balanced equation to predict how much product a reaction gives, including limiting reactant and percent yield. Most courses also cover solutions and concentration, gases and their behaviour, and an introduction to organic chemistry.

Where students commonly get stuck

The mole is the obvious answer, but it helps to be precise about why. Students can usually recite that a mole is a number. What they cannot do is move confidently between grams, moles, particles, and litres in whichever direction a question demands. Taught as three memorised formulas, it collapses the moment a question needs two conversions chained together.

Stoichiometry is the second sticking point, and it is really the first one with an extra step. Once a student is comfortable with moles, stoichiometry is one ratio. Once they are not, it is impossible. Limiting reactant questions expose this immediately, because they require the student to work out two possible answers and reason about which one is physically real.

Naming and formula writing is a third, quieter problem. It looks like memorisation, and students postpone it — but every later unit assumes it, so a student who cannot write the formula for a compound cannot balance the equation, let alone do the calculation. Polyatomic ions and transition metals with multiple charges are the usual culprits. Finally, students often struggle to interpret what a question is actually giving them, especially in solution and gas problems where the same quantity can be presented several ways.

How sessions are structured for this course

We teach the mole as one idea with one map rather than a set of formulas. Students learn to sketch the route from what they were given to what they were asked for before calculating anything, which makes multi-step problems no harder than single-step ones. That habit alone resolves a large fraction of the difficulty in this course.

Naming and formula writing get built in as short warm-ups every session rather than a unit to be crammed, because they need repetition rather than explanation. We also work on dimensional analysis explicitly — tracking units through a calculation so that a wrong setup announces itself before the answer is written.

Around tests we shift to mixed problem sets and past-style questions, and we work on labs and reports when that is where marks are being lost. Sessions run in person across Metro Vancouver or online over Zoom with an interactive whiteboard.

Related pages

This course is part of our chemistry tutoring. Other chemistry courses we support:

• Chemistry 12 tutoring