One of my most common refrains in my organic chemistry classes is that students should strive to understand and apply the foundational principles, as opposed to trying to memorize each example reaction that they’ve encountered. I strongly believe that a mechanistic organization discourages the memorization behaviors that students are almost forced to adopt in a … Continue reading How to Help Students See Patterns of Reactivity: My Experience with Karty’s Text
The Teeter-Totter Method: Helping Students Visualize Electrophiles and Nucleophiles
Chapter 11 of the Karty text focuses on electrophilic addition along pi bonds. This can be a tough topic to tackle. The terms themselves can scare students, which is why I've found that it is key to break down the words into smaller chunks, especially for elementary steps. In the text, a variety of electrophilic … Continue reading The Teeter-Totter Method: Helping Students Visualize Electrophiles and Nucleophiles
The Best Tactics for Learning the Elementary Steps of Organic Chemistry
I am a big advocate of the Karty textbook and how it presents mechanisms to the audience. However, mechanisms are not every student’s favorite topic. While some chapters are quite easy to present, others prove to be more challenging for students. I have found that Chapter 7 (“An Overview of the Most Common Elementary Steps”), … Continue reading The Best Tactics for Learning the Elementary Steps of Organic Chemistry
Free Energy Diagrams Help Free Students from Memorization
Most organic professors can agree that we want our students to understand concepts and big pictures rather than memorize a list of facts. When determining the outcome or major product of a reaction, I’ve found that using free energy diagrams is a great way to facilitate concept based understanding over memorization. But despite their long-term … Continue reading Free Energy Diagrams Help Free Students from Memorization
Getting Students to Connect Acid-Base Chemistry to the Rest of Organic Chemistry
Many professors agree that a strong foundation of acid-base chemistry is vital for students to understand the great majority of organic reactions they will face, and I firmly agree. Certainly, the importance of acid-base chemistry is reflected by the fact that organic textbooks typically discuss acids, bases, and proton transfer reactions early. Despite these early … Continue reading Getting Students to Connect Acid-Base Chemistry to the Rest of Organic Chemistry
Six Things Students Should Be Able to Do upon Completing Chapter 7, and One Thing They Shouldn’t
In my previous post, I described how happy I’ve been with my students’ ability to process the relatively complex interplay between kinetics and thermodynamics to understand the outcome of a competing set of chemical reactions. The specific example I gave involved the competition between transesterification and the Claisen condensation reaction, and that got me thinking … Continue reading Six Things Students Should Be Able to Do upon Completing Chapter 7, and One Thing They Shouldn’t
Building a Solid Foundation Gives the Student More Confidence
When I was in ninth grade, my family built a house. I remember my dad, who is an engineer, regularly checking on the progress and quality of the foundation. He knew that the foundation was the most important part of the house. Building a proper foundation took a lot of time, but it was important … Continue reading Building a Solid Foundation Gives the Student More Confidence
Predicting the Products of an SN1/SN2/E1/E2 Competition
When I teach nucleophilic substitution and elimination reactions, I find that students typically have very little trouble drawing each mechanism and predicting the products, so long as they are specifically told which reaction. But many students find one aspect very challenging: predicting the winner of an SN1/SN2/E1/E2 competition. In my first few years of teaching, … Continue reading Predicting the Products of an SN1/SN2/E1/E2 Competition
The Chapter Every Organic Textbook Should Have
This unique chapter is the game changer for how students perceive organic reactions. Whenever I discuss Joel’s textbook with colleagues, this chapter is the first aspect of the book that I mention. Chapter 7, “An Overview of the Most Common Elementary Steps,” briefly surveys ten steps: Proton transfer SN2 Bond formation (coordination) Bond breaking (heterolysis) … Continue reading The Chapter Every Organic Textbook Should Have
Is Organizing by Mechanism Necessarily “Higher Level”?
Because organizing by mechanism really helped me turn around my own organic chemistry course, I was eager to share what I had learned. Many instructors I’ve talked to over the years have been very receptive; some have even adopted this organization themselves. But I’ve encountered a good amount of apprehension as well. Some instructors worry … Continue reading Is Organizing by Mechanism Necessarily “Higher Level”?