Askance

Someone randomly came up to me and asked me chemistry problems when I was drawing some structures on a random chalkboard today*. Now that's not too unusual - this is undergrad after all - but what's unusual is what the person asked. Certainly I was astonished.

The question was:
One can draw an equilibrium between propanol/acetate on one side, and the corresponding alkoxide/acetic acid on the other side. Which way does the equilibrium go, and why?

*conspicuous pause*

Took me awhile to recover from that one. I basically started with defining the Bronsted-Lowry definition of an acid/base and went from there.

Of course, everyone starts learning this stuff somewhere, but I dare say that second-year organic is not the time or place to start the learning process. More precisely, this should've been taught in general chemistry at the latest. I don't care that the species are organic, this is acid-base chemistry. At the risk of sounding like some codger - what the hell are they teaching kids these days?

*New toy is remarkably stupid (and reticent) about some things and I have to manually compensate for that. Doodling on the chalkboard (apparently) helped with my manual constructions, because now the result is close(r) to what I want. Still not quite right, though, sigh.