What do you teach about the f-block?
I like to do the Inorganic Chemistry Top 10 First Day activity by Sheila Smith in which students categorize graphical abstracts from IC by inorganic chemistry subdiscipline. One of those is f-block chemistry. We see f-block chemistry in the abstracts, but I admit that I don't really teach much about how f-block elements compare to the d-block elements that my course centers around. (FWIW, my course is a fundamentals+topics course for senior chem majors who have had p-chem.)
So what are the top 7 things (seems like a good number) that a student should know about the f-block? What LOs do you use to get them there?
(By the way, there was a forum post about this topic in 2008, but VIPEr has changed so much since that time that I thought we could start fresh.)
Yeah,
I don't teach f-block in my quarter-long inorganic class. I very breifly mention them in my MS-level organometallics class.... :(.
Kyle
Nancy Williams and I are talking about writing a 5-Slides About LO for this, similar to Betsy and Sheila's 5-Slides about for bioinorganic chemistry. I like the way their LO addresses the question "What would you want students to know about bioinorganic chemistry if you only had a couple days to cover it?" For f-metals, I would like students to know that the bonding in lanthanide complexes is primarily ionic, whereas there is a little f-orbital involvement in actinide compounds. This means that the geometries are not "directed" like they are for transition metal complexes. We will also want to include something about the common oxidation states (and why they are what they are). Not sure what else. More later. :)