Only a Few Key Principles

There are only about three key principles that they need to know from this topic at first year level. All of it comes back to understanding equilibrium and buffers. Because if they understand buffers (which involves understanding weak acids and weak bases, conjugate acids, conjugate bases, equilibrium, K_a, K_b) then they can immediately understand titrations and all the concepts that they need because they’re encompassed in the concept of a buffer. If they’re dealing with either biological or chemical systems they’ll deal with buffers. If they understand the basic principles of how those work they’ll understand weak acids, weak bases, conjugate acids, conjugate bases. They’ll understand equilibrium and implicit in that they’ll understand the difference between a strong acid and a strong base and a weak acid and a weak base. If they can understand that they can understand anything else and you should be able to give them a problem that’s peripheral to it but based on their understanding of equilibrium and buffers they should be able to solve the problem.

Read the first quote here