My name is Anton and I’m going to be one of your TAs in Chem165 (I’m teaching discussion sections M and N). In my regular life, I’m pursuing PhD in theoretical and computational chemistry with a general interest in using ab initio (meaning things you can create by reasoning from first principles) tools to study the properties of atoms/molecules and mechanisms of chemical reactions/life.
The good news for you is I’m actually excited to help you understand chemistry, so this is not something I’m just required by external forces to do. In short, please feel free to reach out to me by email with any concerns or questions anytime. I try to respond reasonably fast (in the last semester, my median response time was 43 min, and 90% of emails were answered within 20 hours).
I made an emphasis on the word understanding, so let me explain what does it mean to understand something. Before you object “I surely know meaning of words in English”, I’d argue that a big part of the notoriety of chemistry (which is often perceived to be difficult or challenging or requiring a lot of memorization) comes from the lack of epistemic knowledge.
Now, before we delve into the “how”, let me state that I firmly believe that the only reason why I know chemistry better than you is because I spent more time studying it. In other words, I think the skill is only a function of time, so the only reason why I can solve certain problems and you may not is because the argument into my function is, say, f(t=1000) and for you is, say, f(t=10) (if you’re interested, we can discuss, at some point, what I believe the shape of the “f” is). Put simply, if you want to achieve understanding of chemistry, you can do that.
So, if you’re interested in understanding chemistry, keep reading to find out “how”. First of all, it’s important to realize that there’s a difference between information and knowledge. Information is a collection of words/sentences which carry certain meaning. When you go to any lecture (or read any textbook) what you get is information (and not knowledge, as one may mistakenly think). What is knowledge then? Knowledge is systematized and functionalized information. To convert information into knowledge, you have to answer the following questions:
- How does this new information relate to what I already know?
- Do I know anything with which this new information contradicts?
- To which questions does this information serve as an answer?
- What new questions arise now that I know this information?
- In which situations may I benefit from this information?
One way to think about the whole collection of everything you know is by using the terminology of mathematical graphs. We can treat every piece of information as some node (a place in some space) and nodes are connected by one or multiple edges which encode the character of the relation of two nodes. For example, node A (information A) is an answer to the question posed by node B (information B).
Let’s consider the situation in which you get some amount of new information (say in a lecture). Sometimes you may feel like the material just “clicks” with you and you remember it easily. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just don’t even understand what’s going on. I think that “click” is a formation of a relation of new information to what you already know. If you’re presented with an answer to the question you already thought about and the answer uses logical principles with which you’re familiar, you can only say “ah, how could I not have seen that coming?” And even if you forget some details about the information in the future, you can reconstruct it by applying some logical principles (which govern the connections between nodes). In contrast, it’s very hard to understand something which you don’t even understand how it relates to what you already know. What am I supposed to do with this information?
The conversion of information to knowledge is the process of learning and it takes both time and effort. You also have to be somewhat conscious of the whole process — no one can give you knowledge, not even the best teacher in the world. At most they can give you information, which you have to place into your own knowledge graph by yourself.
My objective, for this semester, is to help you functionalize and systematize the information that you receive in lectures. Because I don’t know what exactly you already know (the current state of your knowledge graph), it’s hard for me to tell you things which will help you connect the new information to your graphs. As such, it is important for you to be active and constantly asking questions. Some good questions you can ask:
- I don’t see the purpose of this information. Why do we need it?
- Is there some guiding logical principle behind this information?
- Is there any connection between these facts? I don’t see how they relate to each other
At this point, I shall stop and let you enjoy your last weekend before the semester starts. Again, I’m excited to teach Chem165 this semester, and there are plenty of interesting questions in chemistry that are still unanswered and I hope some of you will end up working on finding answers to those!
P.S. You can use the length of this announcement as an excuse to not fear writing similarly long questions by email.