I got a nice comment from one of the students in my organic chem class yesterday. She had visited Boston College and looked over several of the problem sets & answers for their intro organic chem class. She made a point of looking at problems from different parts of the course—beginning, middle and end—and was psyched that she had been able to understand and follow just about everything on all of them.
I’ve had several occasions throughout the year to fret about my inability to teach organic chem in a way that’s neither too simplistic nor too difficult for high school kids (albeit most of whom are in the top 5% of their class), and I didn’t feel like I had gotten the level about right until after February vacation. So it was especially nice to be measured against one of the college courses that I’m trying to be comparable to and actually compare favorably.
