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learning periodic table of elements


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What's the reason for memorizing it? Although a lot of chemists might know where a lot of the elements go, I don't hear about them actually sitting down and memorizing. It just comes with time.

Yep.

My husband is a chemist, and he never intentionally sat down to memorize the periodic table. It comes with time since you see it all. the. time. when you study Chemistry.

 

My daughter has a glass top table and she put this HUGE periodic table (like a wall poster) beneath the glass, and she sometimes switches to work there. Not that having a huge periodic table covered by textbooks is particularly helpful, but subconsciously, I guess you learn it quicker the more you see it. You can try with wall posters, wallpapers on computer, etc.

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I have several high school and college chemistry textbooks on hand and ALL of them suggest that the reader (student) learn the most common elements (it's usually list of about 30-40). I would think flashcards would be the way to go.

 

BTW, when I was in middle school (8th grade) our Science teacher made us memorize a table of 31. He said we would thank him when we got to Chemistry. I never had the opportunity to thank him but I was thankful that I had learned them because they made my comprehension of learning a solution that much easier.

 

My husband, a chemist turned patent-attorney, said he, too, was made to learn the more common elements when he was in high school. Of course, that was back in the dark ages of the 1960s. Hubby will be in charge of teaching our daughter Chem this year and he said he is going to have her memorize the table of 39, 2 of them per day, which will work out to little under 3 weeks. He said it is a major timesaver considering the short amount of time put into it.

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Interestingly, just had a discussion about this with a high school senior...her high school teacher made them memorize the entire periodic table..I was sitting there wondering why a teacher would make the kids do that when the many and varied equations in Chemistry should be tried and tried again...I would not waste my time memorizing any elements, but I would strongly focus on electron configuration, Boyle's Law, and others using common elements and even not so common elements so they know how to work their way around a periodic table...

 

Tara

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