Chip Nataro and I have been having a back-and-forth conversation on this topic for about 18 hours now and neither of us likes where we are, so I am opening up the thread to the larger community.  However, I will preface this with, I think the question is poorly written and the answer they want is simple, when in fact, the answer is complex.

Here goes. Spessard and Miessler, 2nd ed, chapter 5, end of question problem 5.5:

The Fe-C distance in ferrocinium+ is 6 pm longer than in Fc, but the Co-C distance in Cobaltocinium+ is 6 pm shorter than that in Colbatocene.

I know there's an old thread on this topic somewhere, but I can't find it. We've been using Shriver and Atkins' Inorganic Chem for a while now. Our other inorganic chemist tried Miessler and Tarr once and it was a bust. It was just too much for our students. I agree that Shriver and Atkins is a decent text, but it skimps so much on symmetry and group theory. I was comtemplaing a change to Housecroft and Sharpe (4th edition). Any thoughts? The order of the material is quite different than Shriver, but I constantly find myself going back to Housecroft (which I used as an undergraduate).

Hi all,

Has anyone developed a guided inquiry or Q&A worksheet for Symmetry@Otterbein? (http://symmetry.otterbein.edu/).

On Thursday September 11

Hello Everyone,

I teach the labs for the introductory inorganic chemistry course at our institution.  For one of the experiments,my students prepare a Co(III) complex, trans-[Co(en)₂(NO₂)₂]NO₃ . I would like them to use FTIR spectroscopy to characterize this compound. 

Does anyone know where to locate the mother of all spectrochemical series? I am looking for something even more complete than the one on wikipedia. From what I have been able to dig up, that is even more complete than the ones in most text books.

Greetings VIPEr Colleagues,

Hi, I am teaching advanced inorganic chemistry for the first time. Would anyone be willing to share his/her syllabus with me?

Over the last few years, my colleague Steffen Berg and I at UiT - The Arctic University of Norway have developed a new approach to teaching descriptive inorganic chemistry based on organic-style arrow pushing. The approach has been shown to work well for main group chemistry. Two articles have been published in the Journal of Chemical Education illustrating the approach for both simple and rather complicated main group reactions:

Dear Colleagues,

I just read a brief article on the CNN website entitled "What's in McDonald's Fries?"  Perhaps, this is topic for introductory chemistry?

http://eatocracy.cnn.com/2014/07/17/what-exactly-is-in-mcdonalds-french…

Sibrina