Sunday Scribblings - "The Experiment"

I have to say I didn’t like secondary school at all. My friends from next door, who were a year or two older than me, had primed me for all the “exciting” things I’d get to do once I moved from 8th grade to the 9th. They were studious, hard-working twins, and I’ve no doubt they thoroughly enjoyed their lessons and lab work. I listened to them extol the virtues of science in the laboratory, but I had my reservations. (Quite apart from their tendency to pull my leg sometimes, I was never quite sure that I would love lab work as much as they seemed to. I wasn’t a studious student.) For starters, I couldn’t even accept that they were twins (although they were) because they were as unalike as a pea and a cucumber. They completely threw my preconceived ideas of twins being alike, and I wasn’t convinced they had come from the same pod, so to speak.

Anyway, my reservations about science and lab work proved justified. I took to chemistry, physics and biology like a fish to sand – in other words, completely out of my element. Of the three, I found the chemistry lab sessions reasonably interesting, if only because of the smells and fugs - and the odd explosion or fire - that were generated by the random mixing of chemicals. They ought not to have been random, but one teacher could hardly keep an eye on 60-odd exuberant students simultaneously. There were usually a couple of lab assistants who were meant to help the teacher control what went on, but more often than not, they turned a blind eye to our shenanigans. It was a wise idea to cultivate these assistants – and quite a few students did – because if you were in their good books, they would provide some surreptitious help during the lab tests.

Physics was a closed book to me, whether in the classroom or in the laboratory. I hated it with a vengeance. The two things I remember best are the vernier calliper and the screw gauge. I have no words that could describe the extent of my loathing for these implements, especially as I have never, before or since or at any time in my life thus far, felt even remotely inclined towards measuring the thickness of a wire. And since those were the introductory lab experiments in physics, they pretty much closed my mind off to anything else in that department. (It didn’t help that the physics teacher was an even bigger turn off.)

But the lab which tested me the most was biology. Mind you, my biology record book was a marvel of neatness – I loved drawing and took painstaking care while detailing the cell structures and cross-sections of various things that we had to draw (why? I didn’t know and didn’t care) and I displayed my neatest handwriting in it as well. It was a heck of a lot of work for a measly 5 marks or so, but to me it was worth it. I always got the full 5 marks for my record book. Lab work counted for 20 points, I think, and the remaining 65 came from the theory part. (I’m not quite sure if that’s an accurate distribution of points, but it will do.)

The record book points didn’t matter as much as the lab test and the theory test. You had to pass both the lab test and the theory. Getting a 0 in labwork and 60 in theory still didn’t mean a pass on the whole, and the minimum pass mark in labwork was 8 points or so. You’d think it would be easy to score 8 out of a possible 20… but nobody had reckoned with a girl who did so remarkably badly in bio lab.

Anyway, the very first experiment that we had to do in bio lab was to scrape a bit of skin off the inside of our cheek, stain it and observe it under a microscope. We were each given a toothpick with which to do the scraping. Simple enough on the face of it. I scraped at my cheek, then peered hopefully at my toothpick – but there was nothing on it that I could see. I think it was blunt (if you can imagine such a thing). So while my classmates busily worked away with their glass slide, drop of dye and microscope, I stood there scraping and scraping at my cheek.

After some frantic effort, I managed to get something on the blessed toothpick and was about to transfer it to my glass slide, when a batchmate sidled up to me and asked if she could borrow some of MY skin cells! Apparently she was too squeamish to scrape the inside of her own cheek! (Yes I know – ewwwwww!) I had to refuse - for one thing, I had quite enough trouble getting my own sample without scratching my cheek bloody for someone else who was too scared to get her own! For another, wouldn’t it be cheating? She was supposed to look at her OWN cheek cells!

The second lab experiment was to dissect a worm. Luckily we only had to observe while our teacher carried out the operation, as it were. At first I was so far in the back of the group (being a tall girl) that I couldn’t really see what was going on. I didn’t particularly want to, so I was content enough to be looking at the back of the other students’ heads. I also got to ignore what the teacher explained as she did her job. But then she asked us to get back to our tables so that she could exhibit the dissected worm and give each student the chance to take a look at what she had been describing.

Eventually she came around to our table and told us to come closer. I needed only one look – one horrified, queasy look at the luckless worm, which was moving weakly, teased open and pinned to the board – to realise that the thing was still alive. One big retch and I had barely enough time to make a quick exit to the toilet. I don’t like worms and never have, but I couldn’t stand to see one skinned alive. It was worse than any horror movie. As far as I was concerned, my interest in biology ended right there.