Descriptive chemistry, teaching

This new edition has been written for students. It can be used as a textbook for college students as well as grades 7-12 and can be modified for grades 5 and 6. It has material for full courses in general chemistry and introductory art. Ideally an art teacher and a chemistry teacher will team teach these subjects using Art in Chemistry Chemistry in Art as their textbook. For grades 5 and 6, quantitative calculations can be eliminated and descriptive chemistry can be taught. The art material as presented will fit into this approach. 

Teaching Descriptive Chemistry Using a Television Game Show Format... 

Teaching descriptive chemistry has always been a challenge. The subject does not lend itself well to the leclure/discussion format commonly employed in classrooms today and the subject matter is, regrettably, not considered to be appropriate for modem courses at the undergraduale level. Nevertheless, descriptive chemistry lies at the heart of much (if not all ) of what we, as chemists, do. Descriptive chemistry includes an understanding of the nomenclature (including popular, historical, and trivial names) and properties of the elements and their common compounds, the major sources and uses of common substances, and typical reactions - in particular those reactions that are important to the production and use of common substances in everyday life and in the laboratory. 

The question is Why has descriptive chemistry fallen into disfavor Perhaps it is because descriptive chemistry is difficult to teach in the traditional manner. 

This paper describes an approach to teaching descriptive chemistry in a nontradi-tional manner to third- and fourth-year college undergraduates as part of our required inorganic chemistry course. 

Jeopardy in the Inorganic Classroom - Teaching Descriptive Chemistry... 

For all the reasons discussed above, descriptive chemistry remains an important part of the chemical curriculum, and we are doing our students a great disservice if we fail to instill in them an appreciation for the properties of the elements at the most fundamental level, for it is only through that that they will truly appreciate and understand what they will leam in their advanced courses and what they will encounter in their later careers once they leave school. The question, then, is How best to teach the subject matter of descriptive chemistry The answer I have found is not to attempt to teach it in the traditional manner but to have the students leam the material on their own in preparation of a series of weekly exercises. 

The Jeopardy approach provides a novel method of teaching descriptive chemistry. It avoids what some view as the drudgery of lecturing on this routine material. Instead it provides a lively classroom environment in which learning can take many fonns. My inorganic chemistry course has become legendary among our students for this aspect of it. 

Abstract Students are usually able to give adequate descriptions of macroscopic phenomena they observe and to develop suitable mental strategies to cope with the demands of symbolic chemistry language. Visualization skills or the skills necessary to describe microscopic phenomena need to be developed as an integral part of chemistry teaching and learning. 

In 1937, the chemistry department occupied two single-story brick buildings one contained the main general teaching laboratory plus stores, balance room, fume room, combustion room, the professor s laboratory/ room, and one other small research laboratory the other contained the physical chemistry teaching laboratory, two research rooms, a darkroom, and a fair-sized departmental library room. The chemistry department also had two wooden army huts—one (grandly called the research hut) was only barely suitable as an apparatus store the other, called the inter, hut, was used for elementary laboratory teaching of Intermediate B.Sc. standard, and its decrepitude almost defies description. The benches leaned this way and that on the crazy, hummocked wooden floor, and gas, water, and electric services were crude and unpredictable—a source... 

The descriptive chemistry chapters have been moved to the back of the book as many programs do not teach this material. We still consider it important, certainly as reference material for students that keep the textbook. Nuclear chemistry and the two organic chapters were moved up to immediately follow Chapter 21 on electrochemistry. Based on our discussions with faculty at many programs, these are more typically taught after electrochemistry. 

Other simplified quantum treatments, such as the Lewis electron pair and orbital overlap models, have proved useful in teaching and they give qualitative predictions of the structures of molecular compounds, but they become unwieldy when applied to solids. They have not proved to be particularly helpful in the description of the complex structures found in inorganic chemistry and have therefore not been widely used in this field. 

Professor Rouessac gathered the material presented in this book during his teaching career at the University of Mans and he has made an effort to integrate theory and practice in a remarkable way. The chapters contain detailed descriptions of instruments and techniques with a few applied examples that are useful to appreciate the scope of the techniques as well as their strengths and limitations in the applied world. The philosophy behind the manuscript is to show that although analytical chemistry and chemical analysis are sometimes considered as different topics, they are inherently intertwined. 

There are many variations of combinatorial chemistry, and all have distinct advantages and disadvantages. A comprehensive description of the different techniques is beyond the scope of this chapter. In the following sections, a few examples will highlight the main features common to most combinatorial approaches to library synthesis. This section contains a considerable amount of synthetic chemistry. The goal of this section is not to teach organic synthesis but instead to demonstrate the basics of chemical library synthesis. Do not get lost in the synthesis Focus instead on the characteristics and qualities specific to each combinatorial technique. 

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