Why Pre-Meds Need to take Organic Chemistry: My Syllabus Day Speech
by azmanam on Aug 26 2011 (12805 Views)This is a loose transcript of the “Syllabus Day” speech I gave my Organic Chemistry I class on the first day of fall semester this week. Organic Chemistry I is the first of a two semester sequence at my small, Midwest, liberal arts university. Our five organic faculty cater mainly to students preparing for professional schools (I call them my pre-mees: pre-med, pre-dental, pre-pharmacy, pre-PA, etc.)
(School specific references have been removed)
Welcome! Welcome to Organic Chemistry. It’s 8:00am on the first day of class. So before we start, everyone stand up, turn to the person behind you, give them a high five and say “welcome back! How was your summer?”
Ok. This is my second year teaching here, and you’re in the 8:00am section. Now, I’m not naïve, so this means one of two things. Either my reputation has preceded me, and you really wanted to be in this class even though it was at 8:00am. Or [the cool professor]’s section was full and only the 8:00am fit in your schedule. That’s ok, I’m ok with that. I’m really excited that you’re all here with me. We’re going to have a lot of fun together, and maybe learn some cool things along the way.
Let’s start with some word association. There are a lot of preconceptions and emotions surrounding the terms organic and chemistry. So, just shout them out, when you hear ‘organic,’ what do you think of? (healthy, carbon, no pesticides, nitrogen, more expensive…). How about ‘chemistry?’ (molecules, elements, catalyst, periodic table of the elements…). And when we put them together, ‘organic chemistry’? (HARD, few elements, related to life, carbon…).
Good. These are all good associations. These are common things that come to mind when we think about ‘organic,’ ‘chemistry,’ or ‘organic chemistry.’ Here’s what I want you to think about as we go through organic chemistry:
Just about every day and in every problem, we’re going to have some new information. We’re going to have to take that information and find the patterns. This is a course highly concerned with pattern recognition. This is not going to be a “trivia recall” course. We’re going to analyze these patterns, and take action based on those patterns. This will provide us with more new information, and the cycle repeats.
This is going to be a challenging course. That much is true. There’s going to be a significant amount of book learning we’re going to have to do. We’ll learn new names, new verbs, new symbols, and new arrows. I don’t want you to memorize them. In fact, we’re not allowed to use the word memorize any more in this course. If you memorize, you have to search through your memory, find where you stored the memory, and find the piece of information you memorized. That takes too much work. We’re going to being using some of this information so much and so often that we just need to know it.
There’s going to be a significant amount of decision making where we’ll have to think through sometimes-conflicting data. Sometimes the reagents don’t look like they go together, or the starting material will be drawn a little bit differently than you’ve seen before. That’s where our pattern recognition is going to be crucial. Learning how to navigate those conflicts, keep our cool, and make the right decisions will be a huge part of our work this semester.
There’s going to be a lot of working with our hands. We’ll learn these skills through lab. We’ll actually get to see these reactions in practice through the lab course.
Hmm… If only there was a career field that required us to exhibit these skills of book learning, conflicted decision making, and working with your hands. … Oh, wait. This describes exactly what doctors have to do on a daily basis. There’s a heck of a lot of book learning in med school. Doctors daily see information that conflicts; yet, they still have to make hard decisions. And they have to work with their hands. Let’s take a show of hands. How many of you are pre-med? Keep your hands up. Pre-dental? Pre-pharmacy? Pre-PA? Who else did I miss? Any other pre-mees in here? Ok, that’s what I expected, thanks. And how many of you are actual chemistry majors? Five. That sounds about right. Five out of 40.
Here’s the thing: ten years from now, no one will care if you can draw the mechanism for the Markovnikov addition of HBr to an alkene (except maybe the one of the five of you who might actually go on to become an actual organic chemist). Not all of you are going to become bench organic chemists for a living. That’s ok. I understand that. I’m not trying to teach you trivia here, I’m trying to teach you a new way of thinking about thinking. A new way of thinking about learning. We call this metacognition: thinking about how we think. Learning about how we learn.
There’s this idea that organic chemistry is one of the major hurdles on the way to med school. “Why do we even need to take this course if, in ten years, no one’s going to care if I remember it or not?” This is why I feel organic chemistry is such an important course on the journey to med school. Medical schools need to know you can think like a doctor, and organic chemistry is where you start to learn how to do that. We’re not focused on learning facts in this course; we’re focused on learning how to learn. We’re focused on learning how to fit new information into what we already know, extracting the basic principles using our pattern recognition skills, and doing something novel and useful with that information. If you buy into that philosophy, then you’ll understand how I approach teaching this course.
For some of you, this may be the first time you’ll be challenged to do this. This may be the first class where you’re not going to be asked for trivia recall, but instead are asked for analysis and action. It will be a challenge at times. But remember the goal: it’s not about the reactions, it’s about the process. I really want you to learn this process and be able to take it with you when you leave this class. Now, of course, the way I’m going to assess if you understand the process is by testing the reactions, so there will be that part.
Sometimes we’re going to come across questions where maybe we haven’t seen these reagents in exactly this combination before. You're going to say to yourself, "Uggg! I swear, I have NEVER seen these reagents before. I have NO IDEA what Dr. [azmanam] is trying to do here!" And it may feel frustrating. But we’re going to be required to take those reagents, combine them with what information we already know, and do something new and unique with it. This is exactly the job description of the medical profession. You maybe haven’t seen this constellation of symptoms in exactly this order before. But you’re going to have to take those symptoms, synthesize them with the information you already know, and come up with something new and unique, like a diagnosis or a treatment plan.
To help us get to that understanding of the process, this course will be concerned with the synthesis and knowledge of reactivity patterns and the application of those patterns in novel combinations. We’ll focus on reaction mechanisms and investigate WHY reactions occur as they do. This will be heavily stressed such that you can apply these mechanisms in novel ways without anxiety. If I had to come up with a motto for how I teach organic chemistry, it would be this: knowing why reactions occur is much more important than knowing that they occur.
So how do you succeed in organic chemistry? I feel there are three ways to get an A in this course: practice, practice, practice. There are no shortcuts to learning organic chemistry. Without adequate time spent attending to the theories and nuances of the material, mastery cannot be achieved.
I do have some tips for successful completion of the course, though. 1) Attend class every day, even though it’s at 8:00am. 2) Do practice problems every day. And please attempt them without consulting the solution manual. In fact, have your roommate hide the solution manual somewhere in your dorm room, go study in the library, and tell your roommate not to tell you the answer no matter how hard you beg and what bribes you offer. If you constantly glance at the solution manual to ‘check your work,’ you’ll think to yourself, ‘yeah… I think I understand how they got there,’ and you will be doing yourself a disservice. It’s not the best way to study. Resist the urge. 3) Attend office hours! You’ve (well, someone’s) paid for an all-access pass to everything I know about organic chemistry. Utilize it! 4) You should constantly check understanding by asking “why” to every step you take. (Be sure you can answer “why,” too). 5) Do not fall behind. It is very difficult to catch up if you do not keep up with the material. Here are some tips last year’s class wished they would have given themselves when they started organic chemistry.
It’s going to be challenging at times, but we’re going to have a lot of fun and have a really rewarding semester. Let’s go over the syllabus and see what’s going to happen between now and December…
Good speech. However, you forgot to put in BLOCK CAPITALS where you TELL THEM THE THINGS THAT ARE EXTREMELY IMPORTANT THAT YOUR STUDENTS FROM LAST YEAR DIDN'T PAY ATTENTION TO.
It's OK, though, it's only your second year. The block capitals seem to come with age.
More seriously, this describes the value of the subject well - as a mental training ground for applying the knowledge and analysis of a great number of experimental facts toward solving problems - a vital skill for any scientific professional. I read one description of ochem as "the connective tissue between chemistry and biochemistry/cell biology", which of course it is.
Really well said.
Enjoyed the post from start to finish.
Really I think that this can be applied to any chemistry course. But, organic is the one course where recall and pattern recognition are THE most important.
Completely agree with the whole thing. I was a pre-med once, and Organic I was what MADE ME A CHEMIST. I thoroughly enjoyed the "learning how to learn" and still use most of the skills from that course every day. Labs, for some people, are the first time they've ever had to "learn by doing," which can be daunting if you come from a cram-school or a college prep course.
Hey, doctors may not draw the Markovnikov addition, but I'll bet you they still have to recognize structures in a Merck Index, or long names in a PDR (Physician's Desk Reference).
Great post...keep it up!
hmmm
i strongly agree with that speech..well said..
Thanks, all. Although, it was interesting to read the reasons why some actual med school students disagreed with my assessment.
Yikes. i can't believe that guy thinks physics is going to be more 'relevant' or 'interconnected' than chemistry. How is he ever going to understand molecular mechanisms of diseases?
And his wishes for an 'introduction to medicine' course... pretty sure that's just more biology there.
Student: (Wailing.) Organic chemistry is all memorization!
Me: Yeah - how are you going to remember the bones of the hand? Derive them from first principles? By the way, what's your phone number? Do you compute it fresh every time?
Probably preaching to the choir here but nothing teaches critical thinking skills like organic chem, and nothing teaches you which doctors to run away from like teaching organic chem.
@RBW - Probably a moot point to these pre-meds, but they should all read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" One of the stories involves RPF taking a biology class, and looking up an anatomical chart for cats.
Once in front of the class, he begins to draw and list off muscles and bones, and the students complain that "they've already learned all that." To which Feynman replies: "Oh, no wonder I've been able to catch up with you so fast"
I have actually written about this topic myself. I have seen too many articles lately saying that you don't need to take organic chemistry to be a doctor, but i completely disagree. Medicine is a science, and to be a good doctor you have to be a good scientist. I see too many doctors that forget that. i really liked your five keys to doing well in the class too. Very concise. thanks a lot
This is the single, best description of an organic chemistry semester and I truly believe your students are extremely lucky to have you guiding them. In the years I TAed, I used a number of those concepts. Every chance I could, I would stress to my students not to memorize the reactions, but to understand _mechanistically_ what is going on in every reaction. I remember in the days leading up to exams, very often students would complain to me about how many reactions they had to memorize. I explained to them that if they really thought about it mechanistically, it's really only 2-3 reactions. The reactions may change, but the underlying concepts of nucleophiles, electrophiles, and polarity were all the same. They all thought I was crazy because I looked at o chem as easy!
Organic is about the process that you can apply to many unrelated topics, but I think that idea gets lost on many pre-meds who think it's a waste of time. I think this write-up should be handed out to every incoming organic student.
Excellent post and good luck on the semester!
@Organic Chemistry
It's not that o-chem is a science, its about critical thinking, abstract thinking, and problem solving in general; summed up very will in the point that IntricateExpressions brings up with "..it's really only 2-3 reactions". What organic chem has brought out in me more than any other class, course, or topic is the realization that you need to see what's underneath the surface of a problem to realize the problem you're actually solving, and to realize that you need to think about your own thinking.
I don't want a doctor who can propose a synthesis of the drug they are prescribing me, I want one who can think flexibly. Medicine and o-chem are both deep fields where practically everything is related to everything else in some way. Introducing doctors to this type of situation before they're called Doctor prepares them for the sort of thinking which will benefit them and their patients later on.
I have to disagree with the consensus here. You can learn analytical skills in any field, there is nothing special about Ochem. It used be that you needed to learn geometry and have a working knowledge of the Bible to be a properly educated man. Many business schools require that you take calculus, which even engineers don't use much (computers are wonderful). Things have changed, doctors need to focus on their specialties, which are increasingly complex. I learned what the true meaning of numbers are when I took Set Theory in college, and it was far bigger intellectual revelation than Ochem. Should Chemists be require to take Set theory?