Pink bubbles in a broad glass

originally posted by MLipton:
Yep. That's why they were traumatized in my second semester O-Chem offering in the Spring. Adding to this year's trauma was a first semester treatment taught entirely using PowerPoint slides with unreadable copies handed out to the students: Exhibit A in How To Lose A Classroom of Students.

Mark Lipton
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Ah, whoops. My mistake. Didn't realize it was Orgo II.

Cheers,

Salil
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Arjun Mendiratta:
I don't see the difficulty, but maybe that's because I've always thought of synthetic organic chemistry as just a large, slightly organized, compendium of useless nerd trivia.
Click to expand...

Therein lies the problem, and one that I confront every Spring semester with a large group of traumatized ChemEs attempting to learn sophomore organic. To the extent that the student views organic chemistry (or synthetic organic, if you prefer) as a set of disjointed facts, it becomes: a) a burden to learn; b) impossible to retain, recall and remember long term and c) frustrating for the student. The trick is to impart to the student enough of the underlying logic that they can then attempt to learn from first principles rather than by rote memorization (ultimately, a doomed strategy). It is true that there are many facts that one must be able to recall, but the same can be said of many other subjects, too. The successful student/practitioner of organic chemistry reasons by analogy, using facts already mastered, to solve unfamiliar problems. The unsuccessful one, by contrast, merely attempts to shoehorn a known answer into the unfamiliar problem.

Mark Lipton
Click to expand...
Mechanism, baby, it's all about mechanism.

Or so said the WvED protege.
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Arjun Mendiratta:
I don't see the difficulty, but maybe that's because I've always thought of synthetic organic chemistry as just a large, slightly organized, compendium of useless nerd trivia.
Click to expand...

Therein lies the problem, and one that I confront every Spring semester with a large group of traumatized ChemEs attempting to learn sophomore organic. To the extent that the student views organic chemistry (or synthetic organic, if you prefer) as a set of disjointed facts, it becomes: a) a burden to learn; b) impossible to retain, recall and remember long term and c) frustrating for the student. The trick is to impart to the student enough of the underlying logic that they can then attempt to learn from first principles rather than by rote memorization (ultimately, a doomed strategy). It is true that there are many facts that one must be able to recall, but the same can be said of many other subjects, too. The successful student/practitioner of organic chemistry reasons by analogy, using facts already mastered, to solve unfamiliar problems. The unsuccessful one, by contrast, merely attempts to shoehorn a known answer into the unfamiliar problem.

Mark Lipton
Click to expand...

love this...

unfortunately, the last sentence pretty much applies to human nature in general....and i'm guilty myself.
 
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