Today’s site of the week is www.chemicalforums.com. I have been a part of this site for a while, and have been pretty impressed with it so far. Once you register, you can post chemistry questions for the experts to answer. The experts are extremely knowledgable, and you get a bunch of responses in a very …
Hi Everybody–Resonance is one of those issues that you will have to deal with for both semester I & II organic chemistry. It is much better to have a solid understanding of it now, rather than have to worry about it later. The basic goal of resonance structures is to show that molecules can move …
Hi everybody, I wanted to talk briefly today about resonance and sterics and how it can affect and SN1 or SN2. For background, I hope everyone knows when it comes to SN1 reactions, tertiary substrates are the fastest and primary substrates are the slowest (because of carbocation stability). Conversely, when it comes to SN2, it …
Hi everybody, one of the questions I hear alot is about enolate product. How do you do the retrosynthetic analysis on one? How do you even know it came from an enolate reaction? Here is an example to look at: As you can see here, a possible enolate product is an α,β-unsaturated ketone. When you see one of …
Organic Chemistry Help: Retrosynthesis on an enolate Read More »
Hey Everybody, this is one of the tricks that organic chemistry profs always catch o-chem students on when doing EAS. Put a group in the meta position, when there is an ortho,para director already on the ring. For example: How do you put a methyl group in the meta position in this problem? Here’s …
Organic Chemistry Help: Electrophilic Aromatic Substitution Read More »
Hey Everybody– Here is a minor distinction between two reactions that I have lately seen some students get crossed up on. Cold KMnO4, when reacted with a double bond, give the diol. Hot KMnO4, when reacted with a double bond, cleaves the double bond to give two carboxylic acids. Temperature is the key here, don’t …
Hey Everybody, welcome to semester II. Hopefully everybody survived the first semester and are ready to clobber “Organic Chemistry Part Deux”. One of the questions I get asked alot are about the differences between Semester I and II. In semester I, you are building the foundation of your house so you need to learn things like …
For the record, all I know is that Halo 3 is a video game that everyone loves. Anywho… The short answer to that question is YES, practice tests are great. But the real question that should have been asked is “what practice questions do I want”? First, you want to get old exams from YOUR …
Practice tests and practice questions: Good or is the time better spent playing Halo 3? Read More »
I got a good question from a student recently: “Should I memorize this or not?” To be breif on this introduction, there are two types of students: memorizers and learners. Which is better? Both are a good, but being a combination of the two is the best. That being said, there are certain times where one …
Memorizing vs. Learning–Organic Chemistry Nomenclature. Read More »
