One of my students referred to a task we were doing in class today as “touchy feel-y flower child” methods. Not something that one expects to hear in chemistry class, when classifying compounds as either ionic, polar covalent, or non-polar covalent.
This was because I was discouraging the method in the book, which no one except high school textbook authors uses. High school books always want you to subtract the electronegativities, and compare the difference to some arbitrary standard that changes from book to book, to classify a compound as ionic or covalent, polar or non-polar. So annoying. What I always did, and say real scientists doing, was using a general sense of periodic trends to compare polarities, electronegativities, and electron rich and electron poor areas. The textbook method is too formal and impractical, it is not useful. I guess my use of the word “intuition” or “feel” for the periodic table was frustrating for her; she describes herself as having a very “math” brain. I think it is fair to say that most scientists think mathematically =). But sometimes being overly quantitative is arbitrary, time consuming, and provides no useful information.
They were not convinced. A very interesting and unexpected dilemma.
