If you look at the resources - students’ have textbooks, they have electronic media, they have Sapling. They can do the problems in their own time in a guided way with something like Sapling. All we as lecturers have to do is give them the framework to solve the problems. If you set up the framework for them and let them go away and use that framework and learn how to solve problems they’ll teach themselves. So it’s a matter of giving them that framework and it’s the buffers that are the framework of it all.
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, Ka, Kb) 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.
There could be five “different” reactions, but actually they are the same core mechanism. If they can identify an electrophile and a nucleophile and how they get together in a particular context, then they understand all five of the reactions and another 55 too, if they choose to. The ultimate goal is that they have a skill-set, a set of tools, that allows them to meet any reaction, even reactions they have not seen before, and apply the concepts, use the tools, and get a handle on what is actually happening.
They're learning a new language as well as new concepts. There's a lot of vocabulary - terms like electrophile and nucleophile and many others. So it’s about learning the language, learning the curly arrow code that we use, and then starting to apply that in half a dozen different contexts.
Explain partial charges, with problems, then link this to bond polarity. Explain the differences in arrows 'language'. Draw organic structures as line structures and no stereochemistry (until you discuss that). Make stoichiometry explicit and link the structures to names to build on the concepts.
Re-teach electronegativity quickly because you don't necessarily trust the person who's taught before you. Make sure that it's reiterated, and then follow through to bond polarity and partial charges. Include all of that information first before going on to do reaction mechanisms. So the first thing to do is draw in partial charges to identify the electrophile and the nucleophile before going on to the next step. It's about doing examples all the way from first principles to build up those concepts.
Use model kits for third year pericyclic reactions: It's visual and it's used every lesson because everything uses the same rule. That's the message to get to them - that you’re not teaching four new things. It's all the same rules. They just move slightly differently. So they see the same models and they can see where the cyclic reactions close. That's very hard to demonstrate in two dimensions. The bigger models are much better as well.
Introduce quantum mechanics in a very qualitative way, so they don’t get worried about it in a big way or worry about the mathematical treatments. Introduce just the big thing that it can tell us, but not be too concerned about the details. The ideas that flow from the qualitative concept are very important, but the mathematical treatment is not so important to them at that stage.
