A very common way for students to try to learn organic chemistry is to commit a vast amount of material to memory and then try to retrieve the correct information when it is needed.
MECHANISMS OF ORGANIC REACTIONS
A
very common way for students to try to learn organic chemistry is to commit a
vast amount of material to memory and then try to retrieve the correct
information when it is needed. The organization of organic transformations
around the chemistry of functional groups is an important tool in this learning
pro-cess. Thus selected functional group transformations provide the initial
body of knowledge that must be mastered. This is why organic chemistry students
typ-ically carry around piles of study cards, each with a reaction written on
it that is to be committed to memory. This time-honored exercise allows
students to learn what happens during
a particular functional group reaction. Even with the simplifications of the
functional group approach, there are still large numbers of reactions to deal
with. The task is to learn them and, at the same time, organize them into
coherent patterns that allow them to be retrieved when needed.
As
a consequence beginning students typically concentrate on the beginning and end
of a chemical reaction, that is, what reactants are converted to what products.
There is also the need to learn what reagents cause these conversions. Such
knowledge is an indispensable first step in the study of organic chemistry. In
addition to learning what happens,
however, it is also very interesting and important to understand how and why these transformations proceed.
The
objective of this enlightenment is to expand our knowledge base so that it is
possible to make reasonable predictions about what might happen in a reaction
for which there is little precedence. Furthermore, it allows us to make
educated guesses as to how a reaction might respond to changes in the structure
of the starting material, or reagents, or reaction conditions. This jump in logic,
from learning what happens during a reaction to predicting what will happen in
a new reaction, requires a very clear understanding of mechanistic principles
and the means by which they can be determined.
As
we have seen, the mechanism of a reaction is the stepwise process by which
reactants are converted to products. Moreover most steps in a reaction
mechanism involve the movement and redistribution of electrons in the reactants
or intermediates until the electronic configuration of the product is obtained.
The electronic changes which are often depicted by curved-arrow notation result
in bond making and/or bond breaking needed to get from the reactant to the
product.
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