ABC in XYZ

I’ve been thinking about the design of a one-semester integrated introductory chemistry and biology course that isn’t a double course. In a double course, you could get away with less integration and not have to make so many hard choices of what content to keep and what to jettison. As a chemist (who finds biology interested), I can only claim expertise in teaching introductory chemistry so I won’t address the biology portion in this post.

 

What “traditional” topics can I cut from first-semester General Chemistry? The underlying tension is that I’d want to discard topics that don’t integrate so well with the topics in introductory biology, but I wouldn’t want to leave them out if they are a crucial building block for subsequent courses. After all General Chemistry is a pre-requisite for many other courses in the sciences, for good reason in my biased opinion.

 

I’ve previously considered leaving out orbitals. But let’s push this idea further. I could leave out the photoelectric effect, wave-particle duality, quantum numbers (and their rules), orbital shapes and sizes, orbital energies (and photoelectron spectroscopy), electron configurations, hybridization, molecular orbital theory, among other things. That’s a significant chunk: I’d say that’s about 20% of our G-Chem 1 syllabus. If I leave out metallic bonding, structures of solids, and a bunch of “tricky” Lewis structures (molecules that won’t be encountered in biochemistry), most of the gases chapter, parts of stoichiometry, nuclear chemistry, that’s knocking off another 20%. I can likely “flip” another 10% of the material so that I don’t need to use class time, and that gets me to the 50% goal.

 

Things I can’t leave out: some basics of atomic structure (enough so students have some understanding of the periodic table, basics of chemical bonding, and drawing some Lewis structures), some stoichiometry (balancing chemical equations, doing some calculations, acid-base and redox reactions), a molecular view of phases of matter including aqueous solutions, and certainly intermolecular forces and their applications. I could see these topics gelling well with a number of topics in introductory biology. Also, what I’ve left in will not prevent the student from being sufficiently prepared for a standard G-Chem 2 course (thermodynamics, kinetics, equilibria, electrochemistry).

 

But having chopped a number of topics that are important for a student who wants to continue in chemistry, where would these go? I propose a follow-up course cheekily abbreviated “ABC in XYZ” or “Atoms, Bonds, Chemistry in 3-D”! It would cover many of those topics, but in more detail, i.e., I would move some material from a traditional inorganic chemistry course (symmetry, group theory, metals) to be part of ABC in XYZ. Topics such as (advanced) electron configuration and valence bond theory, metallic bonding, molecular orbital theory, solid structures, the acid-base-redox nexus, can get the treatment they deserve. And we’d be able to sink our teeth into the unity and diversity of the periodic table both as an organizing principle but also with its nitty-gritty idiosyncracies. This would set up a student very well for a quantum chemistry course in a Chem major (assuming they have the pre-requisite math) or a more advanced inorganic chemistry course that could be much more interesting than the traditional one.

 

Now I just need to go write up a syllabus. Too lazy to do so on a Friday afternoon…