Specialty Chemistry Forums > Chemical Education and Careers
Classroom vs. Lab
xiankai:
i often find lab lessons very fun, except for the fact i dont really know what im doing.
i just follow instructions, and am expected to give certain answers. it can be very satisfying to see how chemistry works out in real life applications, because thats what chemistry is about. but the problem is most of the time we are jsut asked to indentify only certain properties of the reagents, and in the end we are still in the dark about what the reagent is. the point of lab was to reinforce the analytical chemistry skills.
i always end up feeling that i left out something... due to half of the time spent explaining what to expect and the other half of the time actually doing the experiment.
on a side note, i once obtained a milky white mixture after adding sodium thiosulfate o_O can anyone enlighten me what it was, everyone else got a different colour.
Rayan:
i enjoy the lab a lot more than lectures. but i also dont know what i'm doing, i just follow instructions.. and now that the lab sessions are over, when i think about what i learned, it is mainly about how carrying experiments and some really general properties of material.. it's like i know we use charcoal to remove colored impurities, but i learned nothing like reaction mechanismes or stuff like that.. although lectures are very important, i still enjoy lab more!
Benzene265:
You need them both. If you're doing reactions, you don't always have the time to take notes on the mechanism. In lab, you make observations and make sure whatever you're making doesn't blow up on you. Then you have to stand in line and wait for various spectrophotometirc equipment to analyze your white powder or clear liquid. I'm sure there's time to discuss theory there, but the labs at my school are in the afternoons and no one's interested in hearing another lecture. So, hopefully the section on making carboxylic acids was covered already in lecture, or will be soon.
I like it best when the same professor is doing lecture and lab. Then, they tend to synch perfectly.
TakeItEasy:
Both of them are necessary...classroom and lab are like body and it's organs without either they will not function well.
Qazzian:
Both.
The lectures and labs should compliment each other. In addition to learning how you do certain lab tasks, you need to understand the theory behind it, and how it can be made general.
Sure, it's great to know how to add Bromo-benzene to Formaldehyde, but what about later when you need to synthesis something different. There's no way to cover EVERYTHING in the lab, so you need to know the theory. Teaching the theory in a lab is quite stupid, because it's a waste of space and resources to draw mechanisms and to teach about reaction types when you could be doing it on paper in a lecture hall much easier, with more people.
At the same time, knowing the theory isn't enough, as the reactions themselves help r-enforce things. I know I wish I had a lab section with my biochem course I'm taking, as alot of it was "here's how you'd do something in the lab, but we're going to jut talk about it, but you would do this". Actually purifying proteins would be much better, since it'll help with our understanding.
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