Posted by alexandra_k on March 22, 2014, at 22:01:31
In reply to Re: increasing sensitivity, posted by alexandra_k on March 22, 2014, at 21:43:25
so... chemistry is starting to get awful complicated. at least, that is the way it is seeming to me...
after going really slow through the first week or so of content... the pace picked up rather fast and... one needs the website / textbook for the full version of the content of the later stuff, really. things are starting to recur... like how earlier we learn that the alkali metals form 1+ cations and the alkaline earth metals form 2+ cations etc... then later we learn that they gain / lose electrons to get to previous / next noble gas configuration... which is sort of (almost, nearly) the same thing twice... so stuff is starting to feel like familiar ground and then a little bit more... which is much nicer than it feeling like everything was completely and utterly new. it does help have a little hook to hang new stuff off of. i hear you on that ot...
i guess the thing is that some little bits you get introduced... open up vast tracts of... things to do. like getting the building blocks for naming binary compounds or molecules and then all of a sudden we're off into another language nearly all of the time. It is going to take some getting used to the idea that while we will have some conceptual knowledge to demonstrate... Mostly it is about... Doing problems. Drawing structures or whatever. That does require conceptual understanding... It is just that it is very different from the sorts of (largely multi-guess) psychology assessments I'm used to. Or philosophy essays, of course.
It is good that this course is turning out to be at just the right level for me. Not pitched too high, I mean. I had tried to teach myself by just going really very slowly through more advanced text-books but I see now why that strategy was doomed... It was supposed to be a memory refresher for the... More extensive knowledge I'm doing now. I didn't appreciate just how much information was packed into things... E.g., I just thought that carbon has four spaces to bond and nitrogen has three etc... Not realizing about valence electron sharing and how that is important for geometry and polar bonding (which I didn't have any idea what the hell that was supposed to be before either, or how on earth you would be able to predict that).
Anyway... Done with the 'foundations' block now. Lots to revise on that for the test... But on to organic chemistry for two weeks from tomorrow... I'll try and sit closer to the front away from sneezy...
I think the oddest thing... Is that it looks like we are actually going to be getting through the whole textbook. My past experience on things has always been... No more than 1/2 a textbook for a one semester course. But this textbook... Well... I am looking forward to being able to well and truly throwing it away at the end of this course. I mean -- I am enjoying it. In many respects it is a very good textbook (is at the appropriate level and explains things clearly)... But... It will be nice to be at the level where a... More advanced textbook is appropriate. Lol.
Actually... They have a website... And in many respects it seems to be heaps more important than the textbook. A bit of a blurb... Then problems - and immediate feedback on the problems. They seem to have a knack of getting the level of the problems just right... So you get the last few wrong and learn something new (they really push the concept so you get how to determine hard / tricky cases)... But sometimes it is nice to have a bit more of a detailed explanation... Even though at the end of the day... Answering the questions seems more important, really... Apparently physics is like this too, hur...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1058481
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20140312/msgs/1063072.html