<p>Quantmech, “inorganic” chem is basically the first year chem course, where you learn all that jazzy stuff about balancing equatiions, covalent bonding, etc, etc:).</p>
<p>In terms of the situation at hand, welcome to college as often practiced (and I am not saying that meanly, I empathize, for a lot of reasons). College is very different then high school, and kids who did great in high school find out college profs can be first class (fill in the blanks with favorite piece of anatomy or whatever). </p>
<p>One of the tricks is finding out what the professor is looking for. I took physics, and I took the first course in majors physics, rather then the one for non majors, and it was an eye opener. When you do AP physics, it tends to be “okay, memorize the formula, get the word problem, fill in the numbers, and gee, you just calculated the speed of a pizza pie thrown off the leaning tower of piza when it hits luigi in the head”…in the course I am talking about, the professor, who sort of looked like Kurt Vonnegut on a bad day, gave a cheerful snort and said “I don’t care if you write the formulas up and down your arms, or get them printed on your t shirt, ain’t gonna help you, you have to think in this class”. Think he was bad? Should have seen the TA doing the lab course…(became a good friend of mine)</p>
<p>So how do you handle this:</p>
<p>-Take a look at the quizzes the guy gives, and see what he is looking for. What I suspect is he is giving problems that aren’t the fill in the blank kinds you often see in textbooks…more importantly, see what kind of questions he asks on the tests, and find those kinds of problems in the book and solve them. A lot of the times, kids just do the problems assigned as homework,and this guy might be some clever duck who gives run of the mill problems for homework, then gives the more tricky stuff on exams. </p>
<p>One of the secrets to doing well with college teachers is figuring out what they want; some of them, for example, want you to spit back their briilliant ideas as facts, others want you to come back at them and tell them they are full of it, and why. I can tell you it probably won’t get any easier, and if you take organic chem, you will really see (I had a guy, no kidding, who went to school in heidelberg and had a dueling scar). </p>
<p>-Don’t rely simply on the text book for the class! These days I am sure there are online sites with chemistry problems and explanations, in my day there also were the Schaum outline series (which I figure is probably as dead as the dial telephone) and the like, or even find an older used copy cheap… I took a course in theory of computation that was a buster, and the textbook, while good, also wasn’t enough, took me two other books to get through that one…</p>
<p>-Talk to other kids in the class, especially anyone doing well, and see what they are doing. If other kids are having trouble, form a study group and while working to beat the prof at his own game, grouse and call him names:).</p>
<p>-Usually the grad students who are TA’s have office hours, go to them for help…also, since they know the prof, they generally have insight into what he is looking for (and since they probably grade the exams, also can tell you what they are looking for).</p>
<p>It also could be S is overwhelmed, it is only 1 month or so into the school year, and he is still adjusting:)</p>
<p>There are bad professors, I had one so bad that I stopped going to class, taught myself and got through it somehow, because I refused to waste my time in class, but that isn’t a great way to do things…</p>