Stop the Slaughter! Please! I'm begging here!

Perhaps I should not have given an exam the Friday before Halloween.  The students were in a particularly blood thirsty mood.  The wanton destruction put me in mind of Timur (Tamerlane) standing on a pile of the heads of his 100,000 captives during the conquest of Delhi.  It made no difference (to the students, not Timur) what Lewis acid was on the oxygen, the carbon-oxygen bond was almost always broken.

I warned the class several times about decapitation of alcohols and alkoxides, to no avail.  Appeals to consider electronegativity differences did not sway this group of students.  When asked, they remembered the picture of the decapitated alcohol, which they thought was funny.  To bad that they did not remember the concept behind it.

I often try to bring in analogies that will make them laugh to help them remember concepts, particularly those that they commonly trip up on.  The lesson, I suppose, is that being entertaining is not the same thing as educating.

So, back to the drawing board.

T.S. Hall