Award-Winning Organic Chemistry Tutors serving Portsmouth

We covered a review for the student's exam coming up on Wednesday on chapters 8 through 10. These chapters cover configurations and projections, R vs S, Newman projections, chair conformations, Fischer projections, carbocation reactions, alkenes and E, Z naming. He was very appreciative of the material covered and feels more prepared for his exam.

Today, we reviewed acid-catalyzed hydrolysis of alcohols and their mechanism. We then went into addition reactions involving alkenes (water, sulfate, and halogens). We then discussed Markovnikov's rule and the reasoning behind it by showing the mechanism behind the carbocation intermediate formation, and I explained that the rule holds because of the stability of this intermediate. We ended our discussion with showing the mechanism behind the addition of a halogen to an alkene.

The student has an exam this evening, and our session today was focused primarily on box problems that she can anticipate seeing again on the test. I brought ~8 pages of problems for her to work on, and we were able to get through all of them. Among the topics covered were reactions with carboxylic acids, amides, amines, esters, and anhydrides. We discussed the various reduction and oxidation reagents and how they affected each type of molecule. She did well during our session, and I am confident in her ability to excel on the exam.

The girls are making wonderful progress in their understanding of the material! I had a great session prepared for them today, and it benefitted them immensely. In fact, they are ahead of the class subjects, which gives them a great foot to stand on in lecture.

Today, I worked with the student to help her on her Chemistry lab. She had two assignments to work on. The main project we worked on was the pre-lab assignment for the laboratory on Renin activity - milk curdling and cheese formation. There were several questions that required us to read and analyze the lab manual to get a strong understanding of the chemical hazards, methods, and predicted results for the lab.

We worked on predicting the product questions from practice tests. We saw a common theme of carbonyls getting attacked and the electrons moving up to the oxygen then back down, reforming the double bond to kick off an O or Cl. We worked on nomenclature as well.