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Why is high school chemistry so autistic

Anonymous Tue 12 May 15:16:28 2020 No.11663840 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>11663854 >>11663866 >>11663955 >>11664104 >>11667079

Just look at a textbook for it, they have to learn off various chemical equations without actually understanding any of the chemistry behind it. One of their questions was just to "write the balanced chemical equation for decomposition of Hydrogen Peroxide"

Lmao top fucking tier education system, well done.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 12 May 2020 15:20:16 No.11663854 Report

Quoted By: >>11663870 >>11663940 >>11663964

>>11663840
Balancing chemical equations is the first step in chemistry towards understanding equilibrium processes. If someone is first encountering chemistry you can't expect them to just magically understand all the notation and why things are done specific ways.

Or is the problem that you think hydrogen peroxide decomposes into hydrogen and oxygen gas instead of water and oxygen?

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 12 May 2020 15:23:26 No.11663866 Report

Quoted By: >>11667079

>>11663840
memorisation is easier than applying principles, people will get a higher grade, most people wont be chemists.
Gotta artificial inflate the grades to make the education system seem worthwhile now dont we.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 12 May 2020 15:23:54 No.11663870 Report

Quoted By: >>11663961

>>11663854
the problem is many """chemists""" go the full four years without getting any sense of what these chemicals are really like
OP's right. Chemistry, a lab science, has become nothing but abstract number crunching.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 12 May 2020 15:40:44 No.11663940 Report

Quoted By: >>11663961

>>11663854
While what you're saying is true, im taking honors chem right now only because i have to and it makes me want to drink the hydrogen peroxide instead because i actually feel my brain leaking out of my head in that class. ESPECIALLY during quarantine rn.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 12 May 2020 15:46:15 No.11663955 Report

Quoted By: >>11663977

>>11663840
>memorize something without understanding it
Congrats, you've discovered how the entire public education system, all the way from kindergarten through postgraduate school, works. If you want to understand math and science, don't go to school. Get some books on libgen and read them.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 12 May 2020 15:47:05 No.11663961 Report

Quoted By: >>11663971 >>11665948

>>11663870
So tell me how you would start out highschoolers who are learning chemistry how products and reactants require integer quantities on both sides that maintain the same number of atoms without something like asking them to write a balanced equation?
I don't know what chemistry program you went into but most of the chemists I know were pretty good at understanding intuitively and explicitly how a lot of chemistry works. If you want to argue about them not understanding QM chemistry I would agree, but almost every single chemistry class requires a lab unless you are taking it in rural Africa.

>>11663940
Then why don't you just study more advanced parts of it if it's so dumb? Balancing that equation is literally like 5 seconds of work. If you want to get into the more complex cases then learn the linear algebra to solve them in general cases.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 12 May 2020 15:47:46 No.11663964 Report

Quoted By: >>11663977

>>11663854
>If someone is first encountering chemistry you can't expect them to just magically understand all the notation and why things are done specific ways.
So how about teach them those things first instead of making them memorize things that are, for someone in their place, completely pointless, you absolute retard?

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 12 May 2020 15:49:17 No.11663971 Report

Quoted By: >>11664008

>>11663961
>linear algebra
Anon, I... what? The whole fucking point of this thread is that crunching numbers without understanding the implications defeats the purpose of learning chemistry, because learning to do things without understanding their significance is meaningless. And now you just take the "memorize, don't understand" to a whole new level. Faggot.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 12 May 2020 15:51:28 No.11663977 Report

Quoted By: >>11664101

>>11663964
>>11663955
Do you people not understand what balancing chemical equations is? The point is to write out the chemicals involved, figure out how to ensure the number of atoms of each type is consistent on both sides despite the differences in each molecular species then figure out the integer values needed to maintain this.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 12 May 2020 15:59:31 No.11664008 Report

Quoted By: >>11666059

>>11663971
There are a lot of levels to chemistry, which ones should you teach a high schooler? The triply excited state of molecular oxygen that makes it ripe for reaction? The orientation for collisions required for hydrogen peroxide to decompose? The atomic orbitals hybridization schemes? The molecular orbitals involved in maintaining the structure? The energy diagrams showing how water and oxygen is more stable then hydrogen peroxide? The kinetics of the reactions and how they manifest based on the mechanism? The radial and orientational distribution functions that govern the QM interactions? The statistical thermodynamics of the reaction under different conditions? etc. etc. etc.

You start at the basics because it's not possible to teach everything at once on even the most basic of interactions. If you want to learn how the balancing of equations for atomic species works in a general case linear algebra is what allows for those computations and is how you bridge the concept into kinetics later on.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 12 May 2020 16:37:47 No.11664101 Report

Quoted By:

>>11663977
>telling people how to do basic algebra
Wow. enlightened. Levels of education i cannot possible comprehend

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 12 May 2020 16:39:01 No.11664104 Report

Quoted By:

>>11663840
Tbf if they can't memorise some easy equations they aren't gonna be chemists anyway

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 13 May 2020 02:26:33 No.11665948 Report

Quoted By:

>>11663961
Because im not really interested in chemistry. I just use that class to do my calc and physics homework. The teacher lets me do whatever bc im a junior in a class full of freshmen and sophomores. I do the week's worth of vlasswork and quizes on monday and have the rest of the week free.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 13 May 2020 03:05:54 No.11666059 Report

Quoted By:

>>11664008
>The triply excited state of molecular oxygen that makes it ripe for reaction?
yes
>The orientation for collisions required for hydrogen peroxide to decompose?
yes
>The atomic orbitals hybridization schemes?
yes
>The molecular orbitals involved in maintaining the structure?
yes
>The energy diagrams showing how water and oxygen is more stable then hydrogen peroxide?
yes
>The kinetics of the reactions and how they manifest based on the mechanism?
yes
>The radial and orientational distribution functions that govern the QM interactions?
eventually, yes
>The statistical thermodynamics of the reaction under different conditions?
eventually, yes

you were so close to a respectable chemistry course, but ofc you forgot the demonstrations and wet lab

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 13 May 2020 07:37:49 No.11666721 Report

Quoted By: >>11667107

I don't even know how the chemical process notation works. Does every chemical process have unique result that you have to memorize or is it somehow ordered like math, where x + y = z always? So for example "all acids react as such with this chemical" and you can figure out the perfect scenario on paper first. Does chemistry work like that (outside of new discoveries) or do you basically have to memorize?
I am really bad with chemistry and pretty bad with physics, but not as bad as chemistry

Anonymous

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Anonymous Wed 13 May 2020 11:29:58 No.11667079 Report

Quoted By:

>>11663840
What >>11663866 said is true. Most people who take chemistry in high school aren't going to be chemists, so bothering them with the stuff that would actually be useful to a chemist really isn't necessary. You want to learn all those things? Great, go study chemistry in a university.

On another note, I think this logic applies to the vast majority of high school courses.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 13 May 2020 11:52:35 No.11667107 Report

Quoted By: >>11667128

>>11666721
The short answer: it all depends. Chemical environment (pH, solvent, other species), physical environment (temperature, pressure) all change what might happen when you 'mix' things together. There's a bunch of very good rules of thumb but there's a lot of exceptions too, it's very much an empirical science. My first lab professor, man who had been in chemistry his entire life, told us that most people couldn't even agree on the macromolecular structure of water in water. In organic chemistry we had an extremely standard synthesis. I looked up a paper involving a reaction pathway. My two assistants both had different answers and they argued about it for a little while but what I took away from that was that chemistry tends not be a science of absolutes, mostly, but various degrees of being right as is illustrated by say Lewis diagrams. Quantum chemists could probably give a relatively straightforward, and pretty correct, answer to molecular structure but a lot of experimentalists rather just do their work and draw their conclusions from that rather than hogging the departemental supercomputer for two weeks to calculate something they probably don't even really care about.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 13 May 2020 11:59:24 No.11667128 Report

Quoted By:

>>11667107
A post-doc in organic chemistry told me the following; We use the rules that were taught to us to try and synthesize compounds that seem interesting, but the odds of you writing down a reaction scheme and actually creating compound X in 10 steps are small. You just break it down into $A \rightarrow B \rightarrow ... \rightarrow X$ and try to check if you're actually going in the right direction whenever you create something. If it doesn't work you try something ELSE that SHOULD work and keep going. I like to think of organic chemistry as an art about as much as it is science, you don't fire willy-nilly but you use (very) educated guesses.

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