A better way to write chemistry notes

obvious so this is an example of what we can do with chemistry so this is a mind map that one of the other students has sent me about chemistry it's a little hard to see when you're doing it like this but you can see that they've done some basic chunking already they've done some basic chunking so we can see that there is clearly this reaction example here and then what i'm really focusing on is how we can optimize something like this which is inherently not super memorable and can actually seem quite overwhelming when in reality it's actually very very simple so here's something that we can do we can use our understanding of spatial arrangement and our idea of chunking to create as a representation of this as it's a that's a lot easier so let's examine this a little bit a little bit more closely with a more critical eye really looking at ways that we can chunk it so in this case what we're going to be doing is i know i talk about chunking by importance all the time but it's not always possible to chunk something by importance especially when you're getting down to the fine details chunking by importance is great for creating your logical framework it's great for building a rapid schema of the information it's great for things like pre-study it's impossible to do a good mind map really without having the chunking by importance related stuff anyone that's listening to this right now and isn't clear about the tracking by importance i just encourage you to watch some of the other videos that i have on this talk about it extensively in this case we're going to be using a different type of chunking which is simply just chunking by commonalities um and it could be any type of commonality but we're just gonna find the way the way that works so let's just have a look at this right we can see that here we've got five different types of reactions and can you guys generally agree that um this is quite a common way that you you know you would you would write your reactions you know most people if you look at the notes of of most people they would probably write their notes in this way right uh however there are other ways that we can do this so for example when we look at this okay this is all a react all five of these are just reactions that involve acid they all involve a metal either by itself or with something else attached to it they all produce a salt okay and they all produce either water or hydrogen so some hydrogen containing compound so we can effectively chunk this so that acid is all the same metal is all the same salt is all the same and hydrogen containing something now let's look at the differences the difference is that by itself produces a hydrogen gas when there is an hydroxide that produces the water when there is an oxide it produces the water carbonate produces a water hydrocarbonate produces a water so there is a water if there is a presence of oxygen metal plus anything with oxygen produces a water instead of just a normal hydrogen gas and if we think about that from a conceptual point of view obviously that makes sense what's the other difference the other difference is that in the presence of carbon carbonate or hydrocarbonate there's a carbon dioxide added as well and that's it so these are it's just acid plus middle equals a soap plus hydrogen containing compound if there's oxygen that hydrogen becomes water if there is a carbon that also adds a carbon dioxide and we can think about that from an ionic point of view how that would make sense so we can instead represent this much more simply instead of having that long list we can have the exact same amount of information presented in a way that looks something like this acid plus metal and then something right let's do the something in blue and that something can either be carbon or it can be oxygen right then we could have some examples here underneath we could have hydroxide or we could just have the oxide right or the carbon we could have the hydrocarbon uh or we could have it as a hype uh just just carbonate or hydrocarbonate whatever we want uh but the idea is that we we're chunking it based on the fact that there's a carbon or an oxygen in this in this blank box and then that leads to in all cases the salt plus hydrogen containing something okay and that something is either water if there is an oxygen or if there isn't if there's a if there's a carbon that creates a co2 done all five reactions that's all five reactions expressed right there acid plus metal equals surplus hydrogen if there's an oxygen it creates water if there's a carbon it creates carbon dioxide right all five of those are done uh and we've been able to create a much cleaner shape out of that as well so this shape is in itself inherently going to be memorable right and it's simplified we've thought about it more we've had to process the information more in our brain so therefore it's easier to to understand it's going to have a higher level of retention we're more likely to encode it because of the fact that we've used our cognitive load and our brain power to process the information so it's more likely to be retained it's a simplified understanding so it's easier to organize and fit together examples uh easy to use and swap into this uh and then we can obviously sub you know complement that with a basic conceptual understanding from an ionic point of view in terms of what's happening so when we look at these reaction examples down here right we can see that it's really the same right we've got a ion ion creating the compound here plus the hydrogen gas which is you know so plus hydrogen gas we can see that we've got ion ion creating salt plus it's got an o right so that is obviously going to go with the hydrogen create the water done we've got the soap being formed calcium sulfate done we've got we've got the oxygen so it's going to create the water with the h2 h2o and we know that there's a carbon so that's going to then react to create the co2 easy easy as that and we don't even need to really even be writing all of this example down here in terms of how it works ionically because when we have an understanding about how this works from a more conceptual point of view plus this we can sort of we can sort of skip that whole stage because we have both that conceptual and in terms of like memory optimized understanding of it right is that question for you guys you know is that a way of thinking about and writing notes for chemistry reactions that is new for you that you haven't really um looked at before no i think like i haven't really thought about it that much but like i would normally just kind of simplify it but like not to the extent that you have done but yeah it's it's really useful yeah i would probably say the same as well but i think my main like kind of problem with chemistry i would say comes from organic chemistry with this kind of like you know many times it's not just like one reaction or like one type of reaction you have to remember it's like one reaction after another of another and they're all kind of like interconnected in a way and i don't know how to like super simplify that uh you can actually apply it so i've done the same process for organics multiple times before and you can actually apply the exact same thing for organics it doesn't look the same because obviously the reactions are different but the process is still the same you're trying to find the underlying trends and simplify those trends as much as possible so it's about trying to figure out like you know if if there is um like uh you know it's about trying to figure out if you're in a situation where there's an intermediary product and then that is linking together from from something so let's say you're going from an alkane to a ketone you know that's not a single step reaction understanding basically that hmm any time that there is a hydroxide a more electronegative ion attached to it that's most likely going to be the site of where the reaction happens because you understand that the bonds are not going to be shared as equally in that type of situation that means that you know that in any situation the intermediary is always going to be uh wherever that electro negative kind of weakness is so theoretically you should always be able to uh chain things that way and actually if you look at your action schemes you'll see that actually that's always the case your intermediary step is always just a step that creates a point of electronegative you know weakness where the bond can be introduced or replaced or substituted out and then when you see it that way you'll see that actually all the intermediary steps in the reaction scheme kind of share the same you know the same idea you know reacting from a double bond and breaking the double bond that's a very common pattern that you'll see having an uh hydroxide in there replacing the hydroxide and changing that into a double bond that's a very common pattern that you'll see and then you can start linking them together and simplifying those reactions that way and there's lots of different ways that you could you could cut this yeah okay i guess i never like thought about it this way so i might spend some time kind of simplifying stuff like that yeah it will take some time especially when you're first starting to think about chemistry is often not taught conceptually in this way but um it makes chemistry a lot easier like chemistry is actually really have you have you ever noticed that um you actually really get kind of two types of people like some people have really struggled with chemistry and some people just find it really easy and that's often because people that get chemistry like they actually get it they understand how it works so the reactions are semi kind of obvious to them whereas other people are just straight up memorizing and trying to rotate the reactions and then nothing really makes sense it's not a lot of people will go through chemistry sometimes doing very well at a high school level um not actually understanding why anything happens they never get an intuitive understanding of chemistry and that's obviously uh you know can be quite a weakness and and really time inefficient as well through route learning [Music] you

Channel: Justin Sung

Views: 2,405

Keywords: justin sung, dr justin sung

Id: 61fnsHxubL4

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021