Louis
Posts: 6436
Joined: Jan. 2006
|
| Quote (Texas Teach @ Aug. 25 2011,00:14) | | Quote (Louis @ Aug. 24 2011,14:23) | | Quote (Lou FCD @ Aug. 24 2011,17:17) | [SNIP]
OChem looks way more fun than General Chem, and OChem was the class about which I have been most concerned. So that's good news. |
Good to hear all is well. Organic chemistry IS more fun that general chemistry.
No I'm not biased as all hell. Why do you ask? ;-)
If you ever want organic chem related chats/advice you know where I am. Just remember 99%* of organic chemistry students hate it, don't get it and despair at the sheer volume of crap they are asked to apparently memorise when they first encounter it. It gets better. Usually a few years in, after beating your head against a wall repeatedly and several messy suicide attempts, a magical light pops on in your head and you get it.**
Of course if you do what the vast majority of organic chemistry students don't do, you'll get it in about 3 weeks and can then relax in a bar. The secret is to grasp about 5 or 6 basic principles and forget about memorising huge swathes of shite. The problem is working out which 5 or 6 principles! ;-)
Of course, for a reasonable fee, I can be relied upon to {ahem} illuminate you. In fact seeing as you are a friend, I'll do it for nothing, plus modest expenses of course.***
Louis
* I may be underselling the precise percentage a little.
** I may be making it sound easier than it is.
*** I find my best and most accurate thinking is done on my own private, luxury, tropical island resort surrounded by a bevvy of willing, morally adventurous and nubile young ladies.****
**** When I say "find" what I actually mean is "suppose" and/or "fervently wish". |
As one of those inorganic types who did not care for most of organic I can say that the problem in many cases is that organic professors don't take Louis' advice. They were taught organic as a series of memorizations with no underlying theory, and they will teach it the same way, pedagogy be damned.
That said, the little organic spectroscopy course I took was great. It saved me considerable angst during the lab final as I ran the spectra first (most everyone else did it last) and then ran just the qualitative tests I needed to use to confirm my interpretation of those. |
I started out inorganic/organometallic and then converted to the True Faith ™.
I regret it some days. ;-)
I'll be briefly serious. The memorising of huge amounts of stuff is very, very useful and allows you to talk to other organic chemists easily. A classic case in point is "named reactions", they really are a good shorthand and not merely "waggling of the chemistry dick". It never hurts to know umpteen functional groups, major molecules of interest etc, but all this stuff can be learned along the way. Grasp the basics (e.g. acidity/basicity from an organic perspective i.e. lots of pKa's, electrocyclic reactions, oxidation states of carbon, so carbenes, radical, anions, cations etc, polarity, "hard" and "soft", photochemical processes, sterics, stereochemistry etc) and then progress to knowing a hundred examples of each. Organic molecules behave certain ways for certain basic reasons, ok it's not simple or easy, but it can be made easier for the intelligent student to grasp.
I prefer to understand the basics first, then work up to assimilating tonnes of data later. The problem most professors have is not just that they were "raised the other way", but that they often no longer see those few principles as being more important for the student than memorisation is. Grasping the "basics" is seen as being actually quite technical and difficult so they tend to present a huge number of examples, expect people to learn them, and then highlight (or synthesise....haha I mades a funneh) the principles from the morass of examples. It can be done, I did it as did thousands before me, but it's off putting, partly due it being needlessly challenging as opposed to needfully challenging.
Chemistry was a bit weird educationally, at every stage of education we'd effectively get told "ok, all that stuff you knew before, yeah, that was wrong, here's what's REALLY going on". It struck me more in all the chemistry I learned, at every level I learned it, than in either of the other major scientific disciplines, biology and physics. They seemed to build on the basics more, an evolutionary approach, chemistry seemed to be a series of revolutions.
Meh, maybe I'm wrong.
Louis
--------------
Bye.
|
