Submitted by Chip Nataro / Lafayette College on Mon, 11/16/2015 - 15:05

Today in class we talked through the first tutorial to appear in Organometallics. The story behind this can been seen in the previous BITeS post. Our discussion in class was quite interesting. Unfortunately, the timing of the publication of this tutorial did not allow me to be quite as prepared as I will be in the future, but it was still a useful discussion. We have an exam coming up this week so I played it off a bit more as reading this paper will be a good test prep for the students. Fortunately, they agreed. They thought it was a very solid review of oxidative addition and did seem to appreciate it. I did not share the previous blog post with them and I doubt they took the time to read any of Paul's editorials, so I was intrigued when the first comment they made was that the paper read very much like a lecture. This quickly took us into a discussion about this being very different from any paper they had previously read for class. The students commented on the fact that it was really easy to read which they greatly appreciated, but they were curious as to why a research journal would do something like this. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to seem important, so I mentioned my conversation with Paul and how they properly surmised the lecture aspect of the tutorial. They then raised the point that they felt like they were the target audience for this tutorial. Had they attempted to read it prior to this year they would have been lost. I wasn't too surprised by that sort of comment, but where they went next did surprise me a bit. They wondered if this would appeal to the general reading audience of the journal. They felt it might be useful to graduate students early in their studies, but probably not to established researchers in the field. They felt that this was almost like a chapter of a textbook. Other points raised were an appreciation for the historical/anecdotal parts and the use of references that were more like footnotes as opposed to the standard references. As far as the chemistry went, they seemed to appreciate the layout and talking about the different numbers of electrons. They thought it flowed really well and the figures did an excellent job of allowing them to visualize the chemistry while reading the narrative. We did breeze over the final section because we haven’t gotten to coupling reactions or Monsanto in class yet. It will be interesting to see how reading this paper impacts those classes later this semester. I think I got some good ideas for developing an LO based on this tutorial, look for it in the future.