Physical chemistry courses decisions

A physical chemistry instructor is faced with a number of decisions the goals and objectives of the course, the level of presentation, the choice of textbook, what topics to include, the sequence of topics, the balance between fundamentals and applications, the amount of homework to assign, the use of classroom time, and so forth. Of the students in the class, only a small fraction might intend to become physical chemists. The physical chemistry instructor must make his or her decisions in this context. 

The predecessor of this volume appeared in 1993, and covers a variety of topics. (7) The present volume also contains various schemes for improving the physical chemistry curriculum, as well as new suggestions for the laboratory portion of the course. There have been other workshops and meetings, including a workshop on curricular developments in the analytical sciences sponsored by the NSF and chaired by Prof. Ted Kuwana of the University of Kansas. (2) You, the teacher of physical chemistry must decide how to apply this large amount of information and the physical chemistry knowledge that you already possess. You should make these decisions consciously, based on the situation that you face and on your goals and objectives for the course. This essay is primarily an attempt by a retired professor of physical chemistry to comment on some of the decisions he has made in a career of four decades. 

You have a lot of decisions to make in teaching physical chemistry. The most important decisions involve achieving the course objectives and fitting the... 

The next step was sending the manuscript in the language it was written together with a Bulgarian translation to the Security Department of BAS. After about a week or so the corresponding author was informed about the final decision and if it was positive he/she was provided with an official permission to send it abroad. Without such a stamped certificate, no post office would accept it. Of course, all this refers to the publication procedure accepted at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of BAS, and 1 am not sure whether the situation was exactly the same in other Institutes of BAS, as well as in Sofia University. 

During the course of the last century, it was realized that many properties of solids are controlled not so much by the chemical composition or the chemical bonds linking the constituent atoms in the crystal but by faults or defects in the structure. Over the course of time the subject has, if anything, increased in importance. Indeed, there is no aspect of the physics and chemistry of solids that is not decisively influenced by the defects that occur in the material under consideration. The whole of the modem silicon-based computer industry is founded upon the introduction of precise amounts of specific impurities into extremely pure crystals. Solid-state lasers function because of the activity of impurity atoms. Battery science, solid oxide fuel cells, hydrogen storage, displays, all rest upon an understanding of defects in the solid matrix. 

This text uses several concepts and tools not present in most undergraduate organic chemistry texts to aid in understanding the most difficult sections of the course. Hard-soft acid-base theory is used to guide decisions and to explain and predict the dual reactivity of many species. Energy diagrams and surfaces are presented so that students have a physical model to help with the more complex decisions. 

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