... is why I dumped my biology major in my Freshman year of college and switched my focus to bioethics, then physiological psychology. Neither of which required me to take organic chemistry. Which was fine with me.
I also got away without taking it in my 5 years of graduate school.
But tonight... I just finished several hours of immersing myself in ionic and covalent bonds, polymers, oxidation / reduction reactions, the ATP cycle, phospholipids, nucleic acids... relearning all that fun stuff as I helped the Teen cram for his Big Biology Test tomorrow.
The fact that he left that amount of material for the night before the test would be infuriating, had I not had the distant memory of doing that kind of thing myself at one point in my youth.
But now we (hopefully) both know all about this stuff, from the structure of an atom to the structure of a strand of DNA. Ask us anything!
Hopefully it was overkill - but you never know. Mainly, I want him to learn 1) the steps involved in integrating lecture notes with the text into a single study outline and 2) the fact that studying - really studying something - takes time. There are no shortcuts. You do it until you know it, not until you feel like you have a vague idea about it, but have a stronger desire to dump it and go to bed.
Meanwhile, I'm wiped out. I already knew a lot of this stuff, and it was still way too much material to try to absorb in one night.
Taking a novel upstairs and heading for a hot bath and my bed.
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