Quote (Nihlathak @ Dec 13 2011 01:41am)
There's the inorganic you take before organic chemistry, which is mainly the basics of physical chemistry with some brief details on electron orbitals and overlaps, spin states, and ground state configurations, and then there's the inorganic you take after organic, i.e. hell. I don't think there are many schools that have the time to teach any more than electron pushing mechanisms, which is what we basically did in orgo.
I learned an asston of things in my intermediate inorganic chem class though. Even things you thought that were obvious, such as why water is a linear molecule as opposed to a bent molecule are things that are expounded upon in greater depth:
http://htmlimg1.scribdassets.com/an50d8o5cozopz/images/5-dfc85c66b2/000.jpg
In linear H2O the O 2s and O 2pz orbitals could form sigma bonds with H while the O 2py and O 2px orbitals would be nonbonding. In the bent H2O the 2s sigma and the 2px orbital are allowed to hybridize which lowers the energy of the 2px orbital and results in only one non-bonding orbital (O 2py). In other words, the hybridization that happens between the 2s and 2px orbitals allows for one of the lobes in the pi orbital of the oxygen (in the middle of H2O) to be much bigger and results in a greater overlap with all the two sigma orbitals of the hydrogens around it (when the water molecule is bent). When the molecule is linear, the 2px orbital is in an orientation that makes it unable to bond with the s orbital of the hydrogens, and the energy of the orbitals that do bond are higher because the electron overlap with the sigma bonds between s orbitals aren't as great.
It's conceptualizing some of these concepts and explaining them properly that made the class fairly challenging; what I just showed you was a fairly simple MO, just something i thought was neat, the class grew exponentially harder later on with much more abstract and difficult concepts. But as you can see, it's very different from organic in that it's far from straight memorization, there gets to be a good amount of reasoning that's necessary to understand the concepts.
ya those were the MO that we had to learn as well. i cant remember if it was at the start or the middle of the class though that we learned those. either way, we may have gone only slightly more in-depth than the picture you posted for MOs. Also, we did use pi backbonding for transition metal binding, but we rarely drew out the MO for binding in this situations. I guess though at my school, it seemed easy since we could leave out these MO for most of the problems, however it was one of the funnest by far for laboratories. We were able to make nickel nanowires and look at them with a SEM. Also, we did something with a little LED, gah cant remember exactly what we did ;'/ . Another thing i found interesting was we over one powder compound that when breathed CO2 on it, it could produce oxygen and H2O i believe, but for the life of me i cant remember what it was.
As for differences, i do agree that organic is more memorization than inorganic, but i really do not think there was too much memorization in organic. i guess i dont know how organic was for you, but second semester was mainly just electron pushing diagrams, telling what the product of a reaction was going to be, or they would give you a reactant and a product and you have to put in the other reactants or show step by step how to get there. Those, imo, would be less memorization excluding some of the necessary "side" reactants since we had to know what catalyst they used and type of solution. For the others though, if you knew the more reactive parts and what the side reactants would do, you could reason most of the problems.