I have been teaching chemistry for over a decade now. Every semester, one of the most favourite questions coming from my students would be, Doctor… should I memorise the structures??!
That takes me back to how I started learning chemistry, that is when I was in the secondary school. Formula upon formula, and the one that sticks well until today is,
HCl + NaOH → NaCl + H2O
The classic acid-base reaction produces salt and water. This is one part of the formula (excuse the pun). When I continued my studies from A-Levels to undergraduate in pharmacy, I remember the shift from the one-liner formula, as above, to learning how to draw and interpret chemical structures in three dimensional representations. Fischer projection, Newman projection, Zig-zag and Haworth projection (pentagons, hexagons) would probably come to mind for pharmacy and chemistry students.
The Fischer projection for structures of sugars is quite simple and fun to learn because it is like drawing a fish bone. It helps in assigning the stereogenic centre, whether D- or L- configuration to sugars (no logical connection to its optical rotation). By the way, there are over 20 sugar units (building blocks) with many possibilities when they get linked together as polymers.
When I started my Ph.D. in sugar chemistry, my basic chemistry was rusty. In monthly lab meetings, I saw my lab mates effortlessly drawing chemical structures, curly arrows, one after another… So one day I asked my co-supervisor, Dr. S.R. Chhabra, how am I supposed to learn so many structures? How do I memorise them? With a glint in his eyes, he said something to this effect:
Aisyah, you won’t remember anything if you force yourself.
Like eating a meal, force-feeding will give you indigestion.
However, if you draw 1-2 structures today, tomorrow you repeat drawing them and so on, eventually you will know all your structures by heart.
Back to the question above, For chemistry lectures, what you don’t want to do is to memorise drug structures. Memorisation may have worked for you in your 12 years of primary and secondary education, but in higher education and beyond… it rarely works out well. Trying to force-feed your brain would also stress you out, especially when you can’t remember what you just learned. And the whole vicious cycle would repeat.
The key is to learn nuggets of knowledge and apply it as you go. Own the knowledge.
If learning a topic would seem difficult or insurmountable, break it down into small ‘digestible’ pieces to make learning easier for you.
Take baby steps. Take one day at a time towards your dream.
Rome is not built in one day.
So you have time building yours! 😉
