Hi,

My name is David Richardson, and I have taught organic chemistry for several years. Over the years, I discovered that many students find the traditional introductory course in organic chemistry to be quite challenging. These students have forgotten some of the basic concepts they studied in general chemistry, and they have difficulty understanding the principles and concepts used in many of the state-of-the-art textbooks. In addition, they have difficulty understanding professors' lectures.

Some concepts essential for understanding organic chemistry are:

· Lewis acids and Lewis bases

· Lewis electron dot formulas

· Valence shell electron pair repulsion (VSEPR) theory

· Hybridization

· Linear combination of atomic orbitals

· Pathways or mechanisms to explain chemical transformations

· Interpretations of spectrophtometric and spectrometric data

I will attempt to explain these concepts and others in this blog. For instance, each reaction will be explained by attempting to understand the series of elementary steps that lead to products.

The purpose of this blog is not to add to the complexity of your understanding of organic chemistry, but to make it relatively simple and understandable.