I think we can all agree that the descriptive chemistry of the elements (I am thinking mostly of the p block, but some aspects of the d block as well) is:

Hello everybody,

I'd like to draw your attention to our website

http://chimge.epfl.ch

onto which we uploaded the general chemistry course given to first year students in biology and medicine. The course is not totally completed (Analytical chemistry lacks its last chapter) but is multilingual with French English (direct access: http://chimge.epfl.ch/Index_en.html) and German presently available. Any comment is welcome!

Jean-Claude

I really like the idea of teaching inorganic with papers from the literature.  I've never done it because I've never been sure how best to do this.  (I know, I'm a scientist, I should experiment!)  I'd really be interested in hearing about tips (things to do, things to avoid), ways to structure class, important things to look for in a discussion paper, suggestions for leading an effective discussion section, etc... from people who have taught class with lit papers.  I'm curious about  ways to do things and different models that exist.

As one of the presenters at the IONiC symposium in New Orleans said, everyone knows that we only get 1/2 a year to teach inorganic chemistry instead of a year for organic, because, of course, there is only 1/2 as much chemistry to teach (and thats why the books are thinner, I suppose, as well). You have to make choices.  I don't (usually) teach these in my "inorganic" course.  I have taught some of these (marked with a *) in my analytical course, however...

Here is what I think you NEED^* to teach:

1. symmetry, Group theory
2. MO theory
3. coordination chemistry
4. descriptive chemistry (in some fashion or other, even if not a whole unit, work it in)
5. organometallics
6. bioinorganic
7. simple lattices (ionic and metallic)

 what do you include?

^{* note, I don't teach all of these every year...}

Our inorganic lab has a long project where the students do several literature-based syntheses and then propose and carry out a new step (using their product in an organic transformation) that hasn't been done before. I really like this approach, but am not that thrilled with the chemistry we're doing and would like to add a computational component.

Does anyone have good reliable syntheses for preparing both the cis- and trans- complexes of a square planar metal with the same ligands that I could use in the teaching lab?
I had 2 students try to make cis- and trans-platin this year, which you think would be easy, but the data are inconclusive.  I would especially like a prep that involves phosphines with different phosphorus environments so that I could show them cis/trans coupling constants.  But maybe not in the same experiment.