I have essentially replaced the old website with new content. Again, there are two linked sites, the organic chemistry forums and the site to support "The Language of Organic Chemistry".

I have been able to create reasonable content to explain how one should learn organic chemistry. Most students start off just trying to memorize a sea of facts. Eventually, one of two things happen from that path, either students begin to connect the facts together into the mechanisms or students experience the "I am so lost" phenomena.

When I was a student, I didn't consider how one should or should not go about teaching chemistry. "Is there a right and a wrong way?" My professors gave us the mechanisms for reactions they considered important for us to know. I knew they were going to ask us to solve new problems using those mechanisms. It seemed obvious that I would need to know at least one example that I could apply to a new problem. I didn't think further about it. I didn't question whether there was or was not another way.

When I had a chance to teach organic chemistry, naturally I followed the same path. I sought a mechanistically strong textbook. What proved to be a surprise to me was how poorly students did. Why didn't these students do as well as I had? I didn't think I had any special capabilities (I don't).

I was getting hammered on my student evaluations. Even though my students were doing better that my predecessor, I was unable rationalize granting good grades for such low levels of achievement. What I wanted was a higher level of achievement.

One of my colleagues thought most students did poorly because they didn't know how to study. I thought that was a good observation and one I was fully prepared to help. I began writing worksheets that laid out the details of what I wanted students to know. Those worksheets were the mechanisms that were to become the workbook "The Language of Organic Chemistry".

Parenthetically, after writing TLOC, I began to compare my teaching agenda with other books. My objective was to mechanistically rationalize as many reactions as possible. A natural consequence of doing so is students can recognize mechanistic patterns and as they know more mechanisms, it will take less effort to add a new mechanism. However, scanning different textbooks, I do not discern the same intentions. In fact, many of the books are written in a way in which I might call them mechanism optional. For those professors using books in which mechanisms are only lightly used, I fear "The Language of Organic Chemistry" would not be a good match.

However, I found from my own teaching program, that no book satisfied my desire to have students learn mechanisms. A mechanism is an organized method of solving problems. I sought to make it a priority to place the process ahead of the problems. In fact, that leads to a plausible stratagem for students. An "A" student can easily learn a mechanism and with the time left over, practice it on a enough problems to master its usage. A "C" student will expend so much effort to learn a mechanism that little time would be left to solve a problem using that mechanism. When each student must solve a problem on an exam, the "A" student will do better because of the practice in applying mechanisms to new problems. The "C" student may have the tools, but will be prone to more errors from the lack of application. For those student forgoing learning mechanisms, their only salvation is a multiple choice question. They can pick an answer out several possible answers. This further reveals the weakness of different books. It is possible to write questions is a way that one doesn't even need to read the book to figure out a plausible answer without knowing or applying a mechanism. (Who is buried in Grant's tomb, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Cooledge or Ulysses S. Grant?)

Tags: teaching, organic chemistry, reaction mechanisms