Organic chemistry--help please

[Eyegirl2007]

Organic chemistry!

Here's the difficulty that I'm having. I can handle the stability, polarity, acidity, conformation, and stability parts of O chem. I have no problem looking at steric effects, inductive effects etc... My problem is the synthesis questions. How in THE WORLD am I suppoed to memorize every possible reaction that can possibly occur? I've been trying for days it doesn't seem to be sinking in.

I'm not really talking about the simple ones either (e.g. adding something to a benzene ring) I'm talking about the ones that take several steps. I couldn't do them in classlast year either.

Also, do I really need to know name reactions other than the major major ones? (like Wittig or Fischer) And what about enolates?

Eyegirl is whiny (sorry).


Thanks to anyone who has advice...

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[rpames]

The thing about organic is that it is complete brute memorization. What I did was grab a pile of blank paper and sit down with my book and notes and make a list of all the names of the reactions. Then I would go through my notes and book and find that type of reaction and copy it several times. Then I would go to the next and do it again. I would continue this loop until I could draw all the reactions out perfectly with only looking at the name. What a pain. Here is a web site I found last year that is a very nice reference. I found it helpful at the end of the year when I took the ACS exam. Sorry that I don't have any easy answer.

http://www.towson.edu/~sweeting/orgrxs/reactsum.htm