-outdated equiqment
-not enough equiqment
-teaching staff unaware of the existence of newer equiqment or regulations
-40 students with individual questions but only 1 teacher
-Fear of injury / responsibility restricts to very basic experiments
-Belief in atomic orbital model
Jan Schulte You guys learned orbitals in school? All we got was hand-waving Bohr model stuff (except for one powerpoint presentation on orbitals and aromaticity).
I mean, you could always go to a deeper level of explanation, but if a teacher actually reaches atomic orbital explanation level properly, that would be an upgrade in most places.
Well we got a relatively hasty introduction with Bohr model, then went on to orbitals. There is no way I could reproduce any of the knowledge today, because it was not related to anything. Best I can do is say that valency electrons are responsible for chemical connections- which is probably not even entirely true. Jürgen Weippert
Well, if your teacher said that the valence orbitals play the major role in the bond formation, that would actually be pretty close to most current models as the core electrons are just shifted a little in energy. Of course the frontier orbital method used in 1980s organic chemistry is outdated, or as Fleming's newer textbook phrases it, "had no [physical] right to function as well as it did", and of course there is the radical statement "there is no physics in orbitals", but when you ask people who insist upon that what they use instead, the room usually turns pretty quiet.
I wouldn't see this as a major problem in secondary education, though, especially since this question here was about laboratories.
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