Hello,
I am an organic chemistry student, and I have some concerns over the way Organic chemistry is taught relative to other science classes. I come from a physical science background mostly, and ochem is presented in a very different manner from anything I've ever seen before, no math and very strange. I find my textbook (gorzynski-smith) lends itself to a memorization type of learning, because it doesn't give a lot of motivation for why anything is the way it is, but rather a laundry list of facts, such as ''sn1 favors this, sn2 that..etc). Also the class contains so much stuff that it becomes cumbersome to do anything but memorize, because for a lot of mechanisms all these weird assumptions are made and every mechanism has its own caveat.
I am of the opinion that there must be a better way to present this material, I've been told by my professor to take everything on a case by case basis. I don't know how you can take everything on a case by case basis, there must be some sort of generalizations, the universe seems to be orderly and generalizable in all other regards. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong, but I think o-chem sucks and needs a revamp.