Do not listen to the advice of others and completely throw out what has worked for you in other classes.
More on that later.
For both ochem I and II: this is just one former TA's opinion. For the basics -- alkanes/alkenes/alkynes, Kekulé structures, angles, GSE configurations, IUPAC nomenclature, all that -- there will be some memorization just as par for the course. It's akin to having to memorize an alphabet; I like the Russian language, but if I ever hope to be competent in its usage, I'll first have to memorize the 33 letters of the Cryillic alphabet.
When I went through the courses, it was my experience that the ratio of memorization to understanding more readily dropped as I progressed; at first, there were things that were easier to "just know" -- but as you get into nomenclature, intro to synthesis, all that, the material lends itself way more readily to understanding as opposed to oh-okay-hydrogen-with-palladium-catalyst-does-such-and-such (although knowing that is certainly useful in its own right).
Beyond much of the "basics", and for the purposes of undergraduate organic chemistry courses, you're often basically just putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It's pattern-matching, folks. The person above me who was talking about electron-pushing has the right idea; once you grasp a few basic ideas (e.g., oxygen is an electrophilic ***** and loves to snatch electrons), mechanisms start to make more sense. And at some point, it does get to where you start to pattern match functional parts of reactants and what a given reaction condition will do to them. That's why practice problems are useful.
For me, I avoided the textbook at all costs, but that may just be because I felt that I had great ochem professors. I went to class without fail, took solid notes without fail, and frequently reviewed my notes without fail. When practice problems / practice exams were made available, I made damn sure I used them -- mostly for the things that made me uncomfortable, and less so for the things about which I felt I had a decent understanding.
All of that said -- don't take ANYTHING posted in this thread as gospel. If anything I said is anti-you, then don't listen to me any more than you do anyone else. The best approach quite possibly might just be some amalgam of shaping your approach to the material ever-so-slightly, but fundamentally using what has always worked for you in other classes.
Now I'm totally not gonna forget this for when I start orgo next year. If only professors phrased things like that, too.
