I opened my shiny new AP Chemistry textbook to the table of contents, looking for the section on organic chemistry. Expectantly, I flipped to the section on nomenclature, and looked for examples using infix numbers…and saw “2-propanol” and the same sort of crap from sophomore year.

You’d think that while teaching the nomenclature rules, they’d want to teach the right rules. I even checked the IUPAC Blue Book to make sure, and yes, it’s infix. So why, if it should be called “propan-2-ol,” do high school textbooks tell us it’s “2-propanol”? The textbook is a new edition, and the nomenclature was last updated in 1993.

Is infix notation just too much for highschoolers? Is putting numbers in the middle too radical? Last time, we conveniently glossed over the fact that a molecule might have more than one group that needs numbering. “Well, that’s more complicated.” Not really, if we had learned the right rules in the first place.

My problem isn’t that we’re not learning the right naming method, my problem is that the book is teaching the wrong one. I mean, how many of us are actually going to need to know how to name organic molecules in our lives? But why teach the standards in a non-standard way, the one time that most of us will ever learn them?

Until next time, may you always be able to draw out 4,5-Dichloro-2- [4-chloro-2-(hydroxymethyl)-5-oxohexyl] cyclohexane-1-carboxylic acid.