Originally posted by fudgester:
Oh... and how about this one....
My tuition kid's Chemistry teacher forced her class to memorise the
chemical formula of every single
chemical in the syllabus.
That is to say, she has to memorise the chemical formulae of sodium
hydroxide, potassium nitrate, silver sulphate, aluminium carbonate,
etc etc.... literally hundreds of them. 
I slapped my forehead and told her straight in the face: 'When your
teacher was your age, she DID NOT memorise the formula of all these
chemicals.'
Then I simply taught her to remember the formulae of the important
anions (sulphate, carbonate, nitrate) and taught her how to couple
that information with the Periodic Table to get the required
formula.
E.g. for sodium carbonate, just remember that carbonate has a
charge of -2. From the Periodic Table, you can see that sodium has
an oxidation state of +1. And so, coupling these two pieces of
information together, you can get the formula of sodium carbonate:
[b]Na2CO3.
And suddenly, Chemistry became so much easier for my tuition kid -
all because I did what that freakin' teacher should have done in
the first place.[/b]
-whisper- sorry.. actually .. i'm lousy at
science and don't understand... all that.. !
but i know NaCL is salt<-- redeeming quality?
