"How Did You Derive the Names...?"

She is Intelligent and Smart…a fast learner. She’s one of the few smartest students I’ve ever taught in my over 14 Years of Tutoring. Guess what her favourite subject is? Did I hear you say, “English?” Nope! “Economics?” Nope! “Biology?” Nope! It’s the…Almighty Mathematics!

However, she hadn’t a solid foundation in Chemistry. And you know… Chemistry deals more with Elements and Compounds. So, in our Chemistry class, each time I mention the IUPAC names of some the inorganic compounds, such as tetraoxosulphate (VI) acid, trioxocarbonate (IV), and so on; she’d ask, “Sir, how did you derive the NAMES of these compounds? Especially the Roman figures in the name?” (Because, so long as she was concerned, I was performing ‘MAGIC’!) And I would answer, “Don’t worry; you’d know it when I teach the TOPIC.”

So, the day finally came when I started the topic…And after laying the foundation of how the Roman figures were derived, I listed ten examples of compounds in order to solve and name each of them. But by the time I finished solving the first three examples, guess what? She said to me, “Sir, DON’T BOTHER solving the rest, I can solve and NAME them!” Wow! Honestly, tears of JOY almost freely roll down my cheeks like Owu Waterfalls in Kwara State…

Hmm…what she thought was a ‘MAGIC’, was so SIMPLIFIED that it became a ‘MAKE-TRIC’ –she could DO IT HERSELF with EASE! This reminds me of the words of Albert Einstein, when he said, “If you can’t explain it SIMPLY, you don’t understand it well enough.”

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