General Discussion

I hate hearing from people that it's all "memorization," probably because of the bad habit of being required to being familiar with named reactions. I think that's because they're badly taught.

One has to take an upper level class, generally in physical organic chemistry, to understand that it represents a systematic science that is quite independent of what are often special cases represented by named reactions.

It is the mechanism that matters, not the name. The Cope rearrangement and the Diels Alder condensation are actually the same damn thing, if one looks at it appropriately in my opinion.

I remember, when I was familiar with named reactions, and quite proud of being so, I encountered a book that was classic in my times, March's "Advanced Organic Chemistry," which dispensed with named reactions. At first I found it bothersome, but after a while I got it through my thick head that there was a point to that.

I have no idea whether editions of March are still in use, but hopefully young undergraduates (and old undergraduates, as they may exist) are exposed to something along those lines.

If you go to the "science" section of any general bookstore, one will be surprised to find any chemistry related books, which is a terrible disgrace to my mind. Many of these boil down almost to biographies of the "cool" scientists. I deeply regret that many, most, university bookstores have now been outsourced to Barnes and Nobel. This is a horrible thing, although I will confess that today's students can find quite a few books on line and download them if their University has a good library.

I have a hard time deciding whether I really want paper books or electronic books. I'm sure my home office, which is pretty much wall to wall books, would need to be three or four, maybe even more, times larger if the books on my thumb drive - and the journal articles as well - as well as those on my hard drive, were all paper. It's true that electronic books allow for searching, but when one does a targeted search electronically, one loses some of the ability to stumble across things that appear almost randomly, but nonetheless prove to be important.

(When I'm reading history, my hobby, I insist on paper, because generally I read history at bedtime.)

I trust you are happy with the nursing profession. It is, I think, one of the world's most important professions.