Dec
21
Last year I took Organic Chemistry I, had a miserable teacher, learned and understood very little, and somehow ended with a C minus. With no background of understanding at all, I took Organic II, tried to understand but it didn’t work. I read the text, class notes, bought Organic Chemistry Demystified and tried sparknotes, made flashcards, spent time in the professor’s office reviewing things; but failed to understand the material when it was on the test and ended with a D. Now, since the courses are required for my major, As much as I despise it, I have to re-take Organic Chemistry from the beginning but I need some help. What else can I do….I just cannot get the reactions in my brain and understand other concepts.
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2 Responses to “What can I do to make myself understand Organic Chemistry?”
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hi
i’m an organic chemistry tutor, taking a few years off to raise my kids. i know exaclty how you feel. i had a super difficult time with organic 1 and 2, and barely passed each one with only a C. then somehow in grad school, i started to understand organic mechanisms, and that helped SO much! so now i tutor college students. 
organic *really* is understandable… i think the teachers sometimes make it hard on purpose to “weed out” students. here are my tips to help.
1 - immerse yourself in the material. study every day and try to become as comfortable with the reactions as possible.
2 - when you learn a mechanism, don’t think about “ok, what comes next in this puzzle?” think instead, “ok, what does the electron want to do now?”…. as you practice and study, you’ll learn elecrons’ pattern of behavior, and soon be able to predict what they’ll do, even in a rxn you’ve never seen before.
3 - learn definitions. if you run across any word in your textbook, and you’re not *absolutely* sure what it means, look it up. and don’t look it up in a general chem text or the dictionary, but in your organic text. some words mean different things in organic than they did in general chem… oxidaction/reduction and acid/base are examples! same thing if your prof uses a word in lecture…. look it up or ask him/her. speaking of which…
4 - meet with your prof. find out his/her office hours. study enough that when you stop by the office, you have specific questions, so they know you’re trying hard. often, when a prof sees you’re genuinely serious, they’ll want to help you.
5 - if you can, get a tutor. i’m in the tampa bay area… odds are, you’re not close by. but if so, email me :). if you click on my face, it’ll take you to my profile, and you can send me a message. also, if you want, you can send me your email. i have a bunch of word and excel files i used to use for my students. i can send you those as attachments, and maybe you’ll be able to use them.
good luck!
Everyone of my friends who was trying for Pre-Med got the same or worse as you did, so it’s pretty common unless you’re a natural in that subject.
There is a method to the madness and once YOU find the method out you’ll start to see it better and ALL I can suggest is to continue doing what you are doing and MAYBE see if you can find a bio-chemist to help you out.
It’s about atomic binding and they only bind in certain ways and they follow a certain pattern.
A lot of it is memorization.
Look for animated websites that might show you the morphing and binding operations and when you see a visual picture it might open your mind a little.
I don’t personally know much about organic chemistry as that is the one sbuject I never really took, because it’s too difficult and I wasn’t going science or med
BUT I have been struggling with Relativity just for the fun of it and over 20 years have learned bits and pieces about it from a variety of sources
I wanted to know intamacies about SINE COSIDE TANGNET and all “experts” kept telling me was the pat definition as a ratio.
It wasn’t until I saw an ANIMATED PHYSICS experiment on a boat in the ocean that I started to see how tangets and sine and cosine behave.
I quickly realized that a surfer in the ocean is an expert in pratcial use of angles and tangets and sine and they do it by sight, they eyeball the pocket and if they hit it, NEWTON gives them a ride.
Organic Chemistry is in the same boat and YOU need to find some things out there that SHOW you have it works so you can see it in your mind.
IT’s like relativity. IT’s a view of the organic universe, except it’s not purely theortical it actually is predicatable.
It’s a philosophy and you have to see that in your mind and once you can, you can probably figure out any carbon chain just from running it over in your head.
But you first have to make your brain see how it all flows, so keep turning over rocks.
Talk to people, a wide variety of people with advanced degrees. SOMEONE will show you a magic trick that will help you see the universe as they see it.
Here’s a complete video course by a professor that might give you some help..
You started me on the quest and I learned a bit just from three of his videos about the basics and he does things visually so I can start to see how it happens
His fundamental explaination is how Hydrogen is MONO constructed, CARBON is tetra (or three prong) constructed and that HYDROGEN and CARBON form strong bonds plus CARBON AND CARBON form strong bonds.
It’s then about mastering how they bond in 3-D to make complex molecules.
Another site I visted echoed my view that you have to UNDSERSTAND the few concepts of reactions and once you do that you can understand how they work.