Chemical Education Today edited by
Book & Media Reviews
Jeffrey Kovac University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996-1600
The Nuts and Bolts of Organic Chemistry: A Student’s Guide to Success by Joel Karty Benjamin Cummings: San Francisco, CA, 2006. 217 pp. ISBN 0805331174 (paper). $34.40 reviewed by Tami I. Spector
Generally, I have an aversion to the supplementary materials created for organic chemistry. This is for a number reasons: the extra cost to students; the fact that most such “new” materials seem to be repackaged old materials—just with more bells and whistles; and perhaps most importantly, like most chemistry teachers who have been teaching for a long time I am wary of new-fangled ways for communicating the concepts I have been effectively teaching for a long time. Joel Karty’s The Nuts and Bolts of Organic Chemistry, however, has made me rethink my anti-extra stuff stance. As Karty writes, this is a text that is meant to prepare students “with the right mindset for learning organic chemistry” (p ix) before they begin their full-year course. At a relatively brief 217 pages (compared to full-year organic texts that often run upwards of 1200 pages), The Nuts and Bolts is by necessity highly focused—sorting out much of what is found in full-year texts. Karty accomplishes this by eliminating whole topics rather than including everything in an abbreviated manner, a mistake that many texts for one-semester organic survey courses make, which ultimately leads to an unsatisfactory superficial presentation of the material. Instead Karty opts for depth over breadth, eliminating details (do students really need to know five oxidizing agents?) and emphasizing conceptualization over memorization. By carefully choosing what not to include, he is able to cover much of what is typically found in the first couple of review chapters in full-year texts, as well as almost all of the other important topics that make up the conceptual basis for understanding organic chemistry—including nucleophiles and electrophiles and much of stereochemistry. Although I had some slight quibbles with what he kept and tossed (e. g., he should have discussed issues of connectivity in Lewis structures and left oxidation states for the full-year course), most of the topics that he chose to include meshed well with my own teaching mindset. Remarkably, I found myself wanting to read The Nuts and Bolts (something I am not prone to do with a 1200page introductory organic book) to see if he might have a better way of conceptualizing a topic for my students; I have no doubt that I will borrow some of his explanations the next time I teach first-semester organic. This book is clearly written by someone who has taught organic chemistry many times and therefore anticipates what students tend to have problems with, addressing, in his words, the “pitfalls” they fall prey to directly and comprehensively. Sections of Karty’s text that exemplify the depth of his organic teaching experience, among many others, is his explawww.JCE.DivCHED.org
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nation of how to draw tetrahedral centers with wedges and dashes (pp 41–46) and another on the use of mechanism arrows (pp 122–129). In both of these cases he specifically addresses mistakes of representation that I have often seen students make but have never seen addressed directly in a textbook. Nor, before reading his explanations, had I found a way to effectively communicate to students how to correct these typical “drawing” mistakes. For the non-experienced chemistry teacher these examples of Karty’s explanatory prowess might seem trivial (since they appear to deal with troublesome representational details rather than larger concepts), but for those of us who have taught organic numerous times, it is clear that a student’s failure to grasp these points indicates a deeper lack of understanding that will haunt the student throughout the course. Karty’s teaching instinct and his savvy sense for the problematic aspects of other organic texts allow him to make some subtle but substantial adjustments to the way material is traditionally presented. For example, standard organic texts usually box-off sample solved problems, but Karty cannily incorporates them into the text. By doing so he makes it more difficult for students to skip the problems altogether. His presentation of solved problems is also much more detailed than in other texts, leading the students step-by-step through the thinking process involved in solving a particular type of problem. Such explanations can often take him a number of pages, which might seem heavy-handed compared to the abbreviated way solved problems are presented in other texts, but in fact, as Karty implies by his approach, understanding the intricacies of how to approach and solve problems is the heart and soul of succeeding in college-level chemistry. In the culminating SN1/SN2/E1/E2 chapter (chapter 8) Karty sequences the material in such a distinctive way that I became acutely aware of how indoctrinated I am by the texts I learned from and those that I currently use to teach. Perhaps, as a result of this, I found this chapter less pedagogically effective than the rest, making me rather concerned about the details he chose to leave out so that he could communicate conceptual trends without too much confusion. By doing so he glossed over important sub-topics (such as the relative strengths of strong nucleophiles) and sacrificed some of the conceptual beauty hidden in the details (of solvent effects, for example), ironically giving the students rules to guide them (i.e., things to memorize), which he rightfully and forcefully advocates against throughout the book. Despite the minor failings in this chapter—which could be easily remedied by a longer treatment—the conceptual and structural acuity of The Nuts and Bolts of Organic Chemistry makes it a model for writers of the full-year organic textbooks. Or better yet, I hope that Karty will use this book as a springboard for writing his own full-year text so that we all can take advantage of his unique approach to revitalize our teaching. Tami I. Spector is in the Department of Chemistry, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94117;
[email protected].
Vol. 83 No. 11 November 2006
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Journal of Chemical Education
1603
