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My education only went as far as AP Chemistry in high school but we did no such memorization of periodic table. The table is organized in a way that's extremely
by kaesar14 4y ago
My education only went as far as AP Chemistry in high school but we did no such memorization of periodic table. The table is organized in a way that's extremely informative with regards to ionic charge and element classification. It pretty much is exactly what you say re: learning what the periodic table means. Any high level chemistry class that's focused on such trivial memorization is doing a huge disservice to its students.
The memorization bits come with remembering nomenclature and equilibriums, which you just kinda have to memorize or you're not really learning any chemistry at all. They're the building blocks of all higher level chemistry that come after, organic or inorganic.
- mjhay 4y agoThat sounds fine. Obviously some memorization is avoidable, but it seems like many classes just do memorization for its own sake - either to give the professors an unwarranted sense of superiority or just laziness.
- kaesar14 4y agoYeah, I think is more of an organic chemistry thing which I only got to at the end of my class so hopefully some other commenter can provide more color there. I will say the experience I had there made Orgo seem more like a language than a science - there's no way to talk about Orgo without memorizing the language as you would with French or Spanish. But again, I don't have the right context to push that analogy further