Bromine Water

Not much happening at school, with the exception that the cricket nets will be back in action tomorrow. Finally, we can play cricket, without some teachers throwing a fit about playing the quadrangle. It's so inconsistent. Most teachers don't give a damn about us playing there, even though technically it's against the rules. They probably know that the crickets are undergoing reconstruction and that we're playing temporarily here. Of course, a few teachers step in to stop the match. *sigh*

Finally on to the meat of the title. It's in Chemistry and we're learning how to tell alkanes from alkenes by mixing it with bromine water. Now my Chem teacher gives out a sheet that says you drop the hydrocarbon in to the orange-brown bromine water, and if it is an alkene, the bromine water will decolourise to clear very rapidly. Almost instantly, in fact. So we're doing the experiment and when we pour out the bromine water, it's fricken clear. That ruins the whole point of the experiment. When my group notifies the teacher, she says the colour is very light and it decolourises quickly. WTF? It's clear, totally clear. How can it even decolourise? Furthurmore, bromine water is supposed to be orange-brown not clear. There's a major difference. Instead the teacher keeps telling us that the clear stuff is bromine water and we're like "No it's not!". In the end, we bugged her to get a new sample of bromine water and repeat the experiment, next lesson or whatever. *phew*

To be honest, I'm buying a whole bunch of Chem books. It's to help increase my chances of making it through this year.