Dr. Hardinger at UCLA teaches the intro organic chemistry courses for essentially anyone graduating in science. His lectures regularly exceeded enrollment of 1000 people per quarter when I was there in 2009.<p>Dr. Hardinger also wrote his own text books. He’d charge $35ish for them through the university publisher instead of making us buy much more expensive professionally published text books. I personally thought they were well written and his problem sets and worked explanations were clear and concise. All in all a great professor.
Home page of this glossary: <a href="http://www.chem.ucla.edu/~harding/IGOC/IGOC.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.chem.ucla.edu/~harding/IGOC/IGOC.html</a>
Resources like this back up my idea that we teach organic chemistry wrong. It always escaped me why rote memorization is how the subject is taught, when it's actually much better suited to the 'learn by doing' approach. If you have references like this, actually doing the work of organic chemistry is much more educational!<p>For example: rather than trying to force people to memorize solvent-reaction combinations, have them actually try the wrong combinations and show them physically what happens. Seeing the reaction fail, then getting into why that is would likely stick more than just seeing a red X mark beside the wrong selection on paper. Always found doing the lab course first made the subject just make sense.<p>The "you won't always have a reference" argument is nonsense. Am I going to be teleported back in time and have to recreate modern medicine?
I would love if there were an illustration of how to understand organic chemistry as not a collection of endless "rules" that yet have annoying exceptions, and tables and tables of pKas that mean you just have to remember that something does what it does, "because".