An aspect of how to learn organic chemistry or how do we
learn is the textbook that we use. For organic chemistry
there are two main groups, functional group based and
mechanism based. The functional group based one are the
more frequently encountered and have the oldest tradition
of teaching. I favor the mechanism based textbooks for two
reasons. In my classes, I had switched from a mechanism
based textbook to a functional group based textbook and I
discovered that the average of the median student had
fallen by five percentile points on the ACS organic
chemistry exam. The other reason is that I believed a
mechanism based book was a better teaching model to work
from. To explain why this may be true, we will need to
think about some chemical reactions and how our brains
work.
I believe the key to how our brains work is that they are
very good at discovering and using patterns (real and
imaginary).