This is great! I hope you get lots of good ideas here.

The student misconceptions that I deal with in inorganic all seem to involve fairly simple concepts. I'll list them by "concept" instead of "misconcept." (Please don't pick on my oversimplified wording, anyone. I like to keep them short and memorable for my students.)

1. It always takes energy to remove an electron. Students often come out of gen chem thinking that sodium "wants" to lose an electron. (And just to make it more confusing to them, we teach electron affinities at the same time, and it is true that some atoms "want" an extra electon.)

2. There's nothing magical about the octet rule. Students try to explain everything with the octet rule, without necessarily understanding the underlying science. If I ask "Why is the second ionization energy of sodium so much larger than the first?" they will parrot back "Because it has a stable octet." If I follow up with "And what makes an octet so stable?" it is often met by blank stares. How about something like, "The second ionization pulls an electron out of an orbital with a smaller principle quantum number, so it is closer to the nucleus and more tightly held." Or better yet, something about effective nuclear charge.

3. Just because you can draw more resonance structures, doesn't mean the molecule is more stable. I'm not sure where this misconception comes from, but students seem to think that molecules with more resonance structures are more stable than molecules without.

4. Electrons don't "want" to pair up in an orbital. Some students have a misconception that electrons with opposite spin are attracted to each other. No, they both have negative charge and don't want to be anywhere near each other. This causes problems when you're trying to teach high-spin and low-spin complexes. (Yes, I took quantum and understand that there are subtleties here, but electrons are still never attracted to each other.)

That's enough for starters. I look forward to hearing from others.

If you end up exploring 3D visualizations of point group symmetry, be sure to look at Dean Johnson's Symmetry Resources, http://symmetry.otterbein.edu/. These are phenomenal!

In the past, I have done a lot of acid-base chemistry in my sophomore level inorganic.  My students have a really hard time understanding how metal ions affect the acidity of solutions.  This isn't a misconception, per se, but something that my students find incredibly challenging.

I had this misconception as an undergraduate.  The first time my inorganic professor drew a TM-Ligand bond, I'm sure it was fine, because it was probably like Fe-Cl, and everyone knows that ionic bonds are good and strong.  But within a few weeks, we had TM-CO, and TM-(benzene) and I was so confused.  I still recall how much it hurt my brain to imagine how on otherwise stable molecule like CO or benzene could somehow muster up the energy and courage to form new bonds and become _more_ stable.

I ran into this very thing last week in lab.  A student asked me "So, what is the bonding between Cu and H2O?  is it a dotted line, or a solid line?"

They, like I, want a simple model (dashed for dative, solid for covalent) and it takes some effort on my part (and their part) to develop the sophistication required to understand bonding to transition metals.  I love watching that transformation occur.

Adam 

I love the first one. The root conception that they miss is that "things are more stable when they are lower in energy". Once they really and truly believe this, you're home free. 

The second is so true, though it becomes difficult to explain why the octet rule usually *does* hold. It turns out to be pretty subtle.

 The third comes from  Linus Pauling's The Chemical Bond, and can be thought of as an extension of the particle in a box or the stability afforded in molecular orbital theory as the number of orbitals in a pi system expands. Far from being a misconception, this is actually true with the great big caveat, all else being equal. No, acetate ion is not more stable than CO2 because it has more resonance structures, but phenol is approx. 1 million times more acidic than cyclopropanol because of resonance stabilization of the anion.

I've never encountered the fourth, except in the writings of G.N. Lewis, who did in fact argue that electrons attracted one another in pairs (and, that therefore, Coulomb's law did not obtain at short distances) on the basis of Jacobus Hendrickus van 't Hoff's demonstration that carbon is tetrahedral.

For first year students, I invoke d-orbitals.  Elements in the 3rd row (S, P, etc) and lower in the p-block, can use 1 or 2 d orbitals to form bonds.

For Juniors and seniors, I teach MO theory.  My lecture today iincluded XeF₄ and XeF₂ among other things, and I tell them that if you want, you can invoke the high energy d-orbitals to make your MO diagram look like the Lewis structure, but that doesn't make the Lewis structure "more right."  And that the best description is actually that the bond order in the xenon fluorides is quite low, they are very reactive, and there are high energy electrons in antibonding orbitals.  That is the correct picture, not the Lewis structure.

But, like I said, for the first year course, use those d orbitals with abandon!

Adam

NMR spectroscopy

Physical and chemical bases of reception of magnetic semiconductors

Adiabatic freezing of water by a cold of granules of ice as a problem of the Stefan.

These are some of the topic for dissertation on inorganic chemistry.