![]() ![]() I have never advocated abandoning the aufbau mnemonic but just that one should use it carefully. I would like to respond to Matt's final question about "how to bridge the gap", meaning teaching simple tools without doing too much injustice to the science. Thanks for your comments Julia, Joanne and Matt. I'm interested in whether Eric (or anyone else) has a suggestion of how to bridge this gap, i.e., that we want the students to be able to use simple tools with predictive power like the Aufbau diagram without necessarily falling into the trap of assuming that it tells us more than it actually does. I have found it useful to teach the "Aufbau diagram" shown above, simply because I don't want students to leave with the false impression that we have no way to predict electron configuration for neutral elements. I do teach the "Aufbau" mnemonic, while trying (perhaps unsuccessfully) to emphasize that atoms are not put together 1 electron at a time and so this is not absolutely correlated with orbital energy (though they are related). You can ionize an element by removing any element by removing any one of its electrons (a 2 s electron from Sc, for instance), but this doesn't change the most stable configuration for the ion obtained afterward. Along the lines of what Joanne mentioned (and I think this is implied in Eric's post but not explicit), what I try to emphasize to my students (introductory as well as advanced) is that the ground-state electron configuration amounts to the answer to: "What is the most stable way to organize n electrons around a nucleus with a z + charge?" Science Skills, Practices, and Resources. ![]()
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