From: "Ellison,
Mark" <mellison**At_Symbol_Here**sachsco.com>Date: February 16, 2010 4:28:47 PM
EST
Subject: RE: [DCHAS-L] Minor
Chemical Incidents in Undergraduate Labs
But for
time and/or distance and/or nature of the chemical exposed to, could
this have been a major/catastrophic/fatal event? This is the question I ask
myself prior to performing a root cause analysis.
We should
not have to suffer ANY pain in order to learn. So take the root cause
analysis and turn that into a lessons learned for the rest of the
undergrads and communicate to them that all events, no matter how slight
or insignificant, deserve at least the question "Why?".
Mark
Ellison
"Plan Safety - Work
Safely"
P Please consider the
environment before printing this email
===
Date: February 16, 2010 5:08:39 PM
EST
Subject: Re: [DCHAS-L] Minor
Chemical Incidents in Undergraduate Labs
Absolutely.
We learn from our mistakes and those of others. Knowing how something
could have prevented (or could have been worse) makes for a very
teachable moment.
Your idea can work as long as it is not too lengthy and not
punitive. "Every"
might be a bit much, as you will get a lot of repeats, but if you have
one representative incident and add a note each time it is repeated you
will know if your efforts are working.
I think
the approach works best if if is NOT limited to the context of
safety. Safety is an
integral part of every laboratory activity, so why separate it? The sort of incidents you
describe are part of the common mistakes/problems students have in
performing a particular laboratory assignment and should be posted as
such. In my
laboratory courses, I had great success posting laboratory assignments
on the course web site, with a constantly updated list of
changes/updates/alerts as we discovered them for each assignment. These changes could
include safety recommendations, equipment/procedure changes or general
tips. I had good
feedback on this approach and this was in the days when students were
just turning on to using the web.
One can, of course, make a
separate list for general common laboratory techniques without
explicitly labeling it a list of safety tips and accomplish the same
goal. Thinking back
to the relatively ancient days when I took freshman chemistry, this sort
of approach could potentially have avoided some mistakes I witnessed
others make - pouring flammable liquid into a distillation flask above a
lit bunsen burner, wiring condenser hoses incorrectly, glass tubing
insertion into a hand instead of a stopper etc...
The
results of such approaches are palpable whether they are in a
traditional class or laboratory. For example, when I taught
freshman chemistry (non-laboratory), I saw students make the same
mistakes again and again.
Eventually, I published a list of the top 5 most common student
errors for each chapter of the book. For example, in pH
calculations, those were (sadly) things such as x^2 =E2=89=A0 2x, the
brackets around a chemical species such as H+ mean "concentration of"
etc. etc. For many
students getting these understanding these simple little things that
were overlooked is all it took to get them on the road to success. Safety can work the same
way.
Rob Toreki
===
Date: February 16, 2010 4:44:47 PM
EST 