There are two types of students willing to take an 8 a.m. organic chemistry class over the summer: the overachiever looking to lighten his or her fall semester load, and the unfortunate student who bombed a prelim or two during the school year and is reluctantly retaking the course. As much as I’d like to proclaim myself an overachiever, the truth is that two incorrect questions too many on a spring exam prompted me to drop the course and come back this summer to suffer through the premed requirement a second time.
Waking up at 6:45 a.m. every summer day is tough for a mattress professional like myself. But I have found one silver lining that not only makes the class bearable, but enjoyable: the humor of the summer instructor, Tom Ruttledge. Ruttledge is the definition of a morning person; always chipper, he greets the class with a smile on his face and a beaker of water (which he jokes is actually vodka) in his hand. Every day, he spends a good portion of the two-hour lecture sharing hilarious anecdotes from his childhood (he was one of nine children) and from his years in college and grad school. But some of his funniest remarks are the tips he offers to help the class better understand chemistry.
Take, for example, his explanation of the interaction between a carbocation—which a textbook would describe as a positively charged carbon atom looking to stabilize itself with added electrons—and the electron-rich chlorine molecule it hopes to get those electrons from. “Carbocations are the prostitutes of organic chemistry!” Ruttledge shouts. “They want electrons badly, and they don’t care where they get them from.” He motions to a drawing on the board. “And this chlorine molecule right here, covered in unshared electrons—well, he just got paid.”
In addition to his jokes, Ruttledge shares stories about his trips, sometimes incorporating words from other languages into class. He refers to an unintended reaction as a matata, which is Swahili for “problem”; he’ll call a particularly bad reaction mbaya sana, roughly meaning “very bad.” He uses these words so frequently that, were I an Arts student, I’d think the course should fulfill my language requirement.
Although the material in summer orgo is exhaustive—condensing a year’s worth of chemistry into little more than six weeks—in Ruttledge’s class I learn much more than acids and bases or Diels-Alder reactions. I get life lessons, vicarious world travels, and a whole lot of laughs.
Nicholas St. Fleur ’13