I am sorry that you did not do better on that test. I thought it was going to be on Monday, I guess I got the date wrong. I had hoped to complete a concordance for Carey to my book. I went through  Carey and wrote down all of the relevant topics by chapter. I need to type this up and put the reaction number in that matches. 

 

 

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This is what my book is designed to do. I tried to make it as consistent as I could. I was very careful in how I wrote the curved arrows, schemes, everything. I didn't want any doubt in students minds as to what was happening in reactions. This is what is supposed to be happening in your brain. Your brain is a pattern matching machine. I was trying to appeal to the need to create patterns that your brain would pickup and match with. That is the reason I wanted you to do the problems in my book. As I recall, you said you were struggling when you got to the Part C problems of  the exact same problems you saw in Parts A and B. Obviously, I can't monitor you, but that should be an indicator that you should go back to the Part A or Part B to redo those. Part C is just an extension of those other parts so if C is a problem, then you need to work more on 1) just plain memorizing what is happening or 2) picking up those patterns. 

 

Although I hadn't done research on this, a question that I became aware of is whether some students may be more adept at visual clues than others. Without having verified this fact, that was the reason I introduced the task of writing English sentences that match the curved arrows. My object was to link via sentences for what I, for example, link via drawing. That might be something you could go back and do if you don't see the connection between the curved arrows and the electrons forming the bonds. 

 

This was something I did in my class. I took five mechanism problems and I told the class which ones they were, I gave them the mechanisms, and I put exactly those problems on my exam. That was worth 30 points. This is what I found. The students who are going to get an A or B will get all or nearly all of those problems. The C and D students will vary in the number of mistakes they might have. Occasionally, I had some students that would make no effort to try those problems. They would mainly pattern match as well as they could in the rest. That would usually get a low grade. On the other hand, I had students who spent a lot of time on those problems, but they still couldn't get all of the points. Needless to say, their scores on the rest of the exam wasn't very high either. However, it accomplished some goals. It focussed on mechanisms for solving problems. It gave all students a chance to pass the course. I began to find that I liked this strategy. My overall exam scores in the ACS exam improved, top to bottom. I didn't have students at the 0th percentile. 

 

That was how I learned organic chemistry. I memorized the mechanisms and repeated them on new problems. My book is what I did to get an A in organic chemistry. I may have been better than others in doing this, but I think this is how we think. I tried to pattern my book on how we think. 

 

In the future, I'd like to write a regular organic chemistry textbook. In it, this is the advice I'd give to students. If you can learn the mechanisms easily, then solve as many problems by writing out the mechanisms for as many as you can. If you are struggling with learning the mechanisms, limit yourself to only learning the  mechanisms, skip practicing using them. This makes sense to me, "How can you practice something you don't know?" I really like the analogy of learning organic chemistry to learning a language. You can practice using the words you do know, but how can you practice talking with words you don't know? 

 

This is my advice, ...