Thinking+Flexibly

**Thinking Flexibly**
”I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times." -Everett Dirksen

In the situation of the layered curriculum, while the C-layer level questions were fairly straight-forward and posed no questions, some of the higher-level questions created some difficulty for understanding and/or finding an explanation. For example, in A-layer, there was this one question which asked why the chalogen hydride compounds had such varying boiling points. At first, I was very insistent that I must have copied the numbers wrong. The graph simply looked wrong--how could H2O have a high boiling point (100 degrees Celsius), but H2S have a much, much lower boiling point ( -60something degrees Celsius) and the higher molar mass compounds have higher and higher boiling points? I considered hydrogen bonding, initially believing that any compound with a hydrogen atom would have "hydrogen bonding" (I found a source that defined hydrogen bonding to be between a hydrogen atom of a molecule and any other nonmetal with a higher electronegativity, although usually hydrogen bonding occurs between H and O, F, or N). Then, after a fellow classmate (thank goodness) corrected my presumption and forced me to understand that hydrogen bonding generally ONLY between oxygen, fluorine, or nitrogen.

Then, I thought, the lack of hydrogen bonding in the other compounds may explain the signficiantly lower boiling points, yet the increase in molar mass with the increase in boiling point did not seem explainable. As you go down the chalogen group, each element has increasingly less electronegativity. Less electronegativity could not explain the increasing boiling point; rather, it appeared the obvious. So I nearly broke open my head trying to think of something

Just then, my Highly Intelligent Classmate (TM) came to the rescue again, with the hint that increasing molar mass had something to do with increasing boiling point. So, I switched tactics; I went on the infamous web (which could tell me many misleading things about chemistry). Answer found within a few minutes. Case closed.

Moral of the story: Instead of trying to reason things out, take the shortcut and look it up on the web. Just kidding.

If I did not try alternate ways of arriving at the solution (breaking open my head thinking about it, interrogating classmates, and searching the web), I would probably still be clueless about the answer and trying to pound my head into the wall, frustrated, while amused onlookers would attempt to cart me off to the mental hospital (excuse the "un-political-correctedness" of the term). Although generally, it's still best to try to attempt to logic things out, when things get desperate, it's ok to ask other people for help, and if that doesn't work, I can find new ways of solving the problem. While this is (yet another) insignificant example of "thinking flexibly", this reveals that "acting intelligently" does not have to apply to big situations--sometimes, one can act just as "intelligently" in smaller situations.