Personally, I feel like the two subjects that demand the most intense thinking are TOK and Chemistry. This is because in Chemistry I cannot easily see and picture many of the problems and questions that I need to answer. So far, the topics seem very abstract and the thinking is all very new as in IGCSE everything could be displayed practically. We very rarely thought theoretically or conceptually and personally that is quite a new way to look at science and my beliefs in TOK. In IGCSE Chemistry, I could almost always draw a model/diagram or there was something that I had learned which I could connect with the question. I feel like connecting things and being able to explain something in a different way helps me learn topics and maybe in a couple of months time, there will be pieces of information or diagrams that I can connect to what I am learning which will help me understand the topic. The same goes for TOK because you cannot draw or visualize your thinking process/beliefs either. In addition, when it comes to Chemistry, there are things that are very tricky to wrap my head around and fully understand. It is easy to understand the basics of both subjects but being able to throw away or develop the basics like what you believe in TOK or the Bohr Model in Chemistry and learn the advanced like why and how you believe something or the arrangement of electrons has proven to be quite difficult as the level of thinking is dramatically increased.
Question: Will there be many practical/physical topics in chemistry or is it heavily conceptual?
I would agree that both chemistry and TOK involve some very theoretical concepts. Would you say that there are other subjects with equally abstract content (e.g. physics or math)?
Yup, chemistry and TOK do require a lot of thinking and they can go really deep if we decided to go that far. The gif in the end is definitely me every TOK and Chemistry. And from this post, I have reached a conclusion that people all have their different strengths and weaknesses.
Both TOK and Chemistry require a lot of abstract thinking and I agree that it is difficult, if you aren’t inclined to abstract thinking, to forget the basic information you previously thought was true. I do think that Chemistry and TOK, like maths, involve more than just conceptual thinking and that we will learn more about the practical aspects of chemistry.