Patterns in Chemistry

I must confess that I was never fascinated by Chemistry; at least not when I was a 15 years old. I was more intrigued by numbers and I was fascinated by how the lung and the heart works.  However, it was during my years in junior college that made me fond of the subject as I saw that beneath the massive number of equations and facts, lies interesting patterns for me to identify and be acquainted with.  This was a challenge that I enjoyed:  It grew to become a fervent interest and ultimately a career. 

As a 15 years old student, I remembered that the colours and the smells were something that made this subject memorable.  But as much as there are many things that I could rely on my senses to help me appreciate the subject, there were even more that were beyond the capacity of my senses to reach out to.  This made it hard for me to relate with the abstract facts.   However, I discovered that learning Chemistry often require one to be able to spot that pattern; for most of the time, we are not faced with questions on the factual information but rather questions that required us to apply the knowledge.  Hence, recognising patterns is important.

I could remember the difficulties that my peers faced in studying Organic Chemistry.  It was a similar fear that some of my students experienced.  I empathise their difficulty as this topic has numerous equations, conditions and reagents to put into memory.  Simply, this topic was a string of roman letters which form words that seemingly look English but is not English; yet it has its own meaning.  Essentially, Organic Chemistry could be seen as a language on its own.  

However, the success in learning this “language” is simply being able to identify the patterns that are involved and relate them to other patterns or principles that one has prior knowledge of.  There are only polar and non-polar covalent bonds.  The polar bonds are broken during “nucleophilic substitution” and “nucleophilic addition” reactions.  While, the non-polar ones are broken in either “free radical substitution”, or “electrophilic substitution” or “electrophilic addition” reactions.  With the aid of the “dot and cross” diagram and the definitions of “nucleophile”, “electrophile” and “free radical”, I was able to identify that the first has a lone pair of electrons available for donation, the second has an empty and energetically accessible orbital to accept a pair of electrons, and the last has an unpaired electron.  Lastly, if a stronger covalent bond is broken, we would expect more severe conditions needed for the reactions to occur.

1. When I am given an unknown equation, instead of trying to dig out when and where I memorized this equation, I chose to ask
2.  What is the polarity of the bond that is most likely to be broken?
3. Could the other species be either a nucleophile, or an electrophile or a free radical (It can’t be all three and if it were, you will be stuck.)?
4.  Is the covalent bond broken relatively strong or weak to those that I know?

Hence, the subject becomes less frustrating and more student-friendly.

However the beauty of this subject lies in the twists that it provides.  I guess this was ultimately the reason that drew me toward its.  I was fascinated by (instead of frustrated by) the weakness of the patterns which allows me to predict all the cases but yet seemingly insufficient to include absolutely everything within it.  That motivated me to improve the definition of my pattern to make it more concise (maybe even precise) and hopefully more accurate until the next factual information that weakens this pattern, and the cycle repeats.