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An Overview Teaching General Chemistry (An Alternative Method)

Touching upon Inorganic, Organic and Physical Chemistry.

The great pedagogical principle is to lead the student from the familiar to the unfamiliar. In grammar school science the students have learned about such fundamental concepts as atoms, and about living beings including DNA and genes. Thus, let's see how we can start with that foundation and do a classic reductionist approach, no unlike figuring out the principles of a clock by taking it about and seeing how each of the parts works.

"Here is a tree. Is it one or more than one atom? What are the parts of a tree trunk biochemically? Ah, cellulose. What must cellulose look like - round and granular or long and fibrous? What happens when you chew on a popsickle stick for a long time? Ah, long, and fibrous! On the blackboard, let's draw one of them, represented by a line. Now this line might also represent a muscle fiber, or a DNA molecule. Is it one or more than one atom?" Thus the concepts of polyatomic structures are imprinted.

Next we can turn to two other grammar school science concepts - magnetism and electricity. Although there is a great deal of fuzziness in understanding, the students already know about the two magnetic poles, N and S, and that we have electricity in "positive" and "negative" forms, such as we seemingly have in our household sockets. Combining these two concepts we can put some plusses and minuses onto the line on the blackboard, and introduce another word that they may have heard - "ion" - from TV ads about a type of air purifiers. But now you can refine their concept by mentioning that the charged line on the blackboard now represents a "polyatomic" "ion" - actually, a polyionic molecule.

Continuing our reduction, we take a much closer look at what those plusses and minuses might be. Thus we can start talking about sulfates, phosphates, carboxyls, carbonyls and amines.

We can next ask what would each of these charged groups be like if detached from "the line". And that allows the door to open on inorganic chemistry.

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In similar fashion a close look can be made of "the line" itself, and that opens the door on organic chemistry, be it based biochemically (DNA, proteins, polysaccharides), or non-biochemically in polymers. In either case, we move to the level of monomers, the chemistry behind of how those monomers can link up or be broken apart, and so on and on into the depths of organic chemistry including stereochemistry.

By this time the students are ready to start talking about reaction energies and other physical chemistry concepts.

The net result of this "reductionist" approach is that everything has been linked and grown from what the students knew when they came into the class. When the students look at the world around them, they can picture it from a chemist's eye. It is no longer an esoteric subject, but one that is relevant to their five senses.

| A Beginning Beginner's Nomenclature in Organic Chemistry |

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