Organic Chemistry I as a Second Language - First Semester Topics, 3rd Edition (Bookzcity)

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Is organic chemistry really as tough as everyone says it is? The answer is yes and no.
Yes, because you will spend more time on organic chemistry than you would spend
in a course on underwater basket weaving. And no, because those who say it’s so
tough have studied inefficiently. Ask around, and you will find that most students
think of organic chemistry as a memorization game. This is not true! Former organic
chemistry students perpetuate the false rumor that organic chemistry is the toughest
class on campus, because it makes them feel better about the poor grades that they
received.
If it’s not about memorizing, then what is it? To answer this question, let’s
compare organic chemistry to a movie. Picture in your mind a movie where the plot
changes every second. If you’re in a movie theatre watching a movie like that, you
can’t leave even for a second because you would miss something important to the
plot. So you try your hardest to wait until the movie is over before going to the bathroom.
Sound familiar?
Organic chemistry is very much the same. It is one long story, and the
story actually makes sense if you pay attention. The plot constantly develops, and
everything ties into the plot. If your attention wanders for too long, you could
easily get lost.
OK, so it’s a long movie. But don’t I need to memorize it? Of course, there are
some things you need to memorize. You need to know some important terminology
and some other concepts that require a bit of memorization, but the amount of pure
memorization is not that large. If I were to give you a list of 100 numbers, and I
asked you to memorize them all for an exam, you would probably be very upset by
this. But at the same time, you can probably tell me at least 10 telephone numbers
off the top of your head. Each one of those has 10 digits (including the area codes).
You never sat down to memorize all 10 telephone numbers. Rather, over time you
slowly became accustomed to dialing those numbers until the point that you knew
them. Let’s see how this works in our movie analogy.