I’ve never cared for science experiments at school. We knew exactly what was going to happen, but we were expected to pretend we didn’t, then write up the results as if we were learning it for the first time, in the name of developing a “scientific mind.” And we were even expected to come up with a “source of error,” and suggest why the results shouldn’t even be believed anyway!
In Grade 8 they showed us a British film about school lab safety. (It started with a slapstick western involving dynamite, complete with a Native American saying “White man speak with forked tongue”! No relation to the rest of the film, but it grabbed your attention.) Then it showed a big doofus played by one the Carry On movie actors, making every mistake in the book. (“My microscope bulb’s burnt out—I’ll use the sun!”) One section was titled “Hoxygen Horrors.”
In Grade 7 I had a science teacher who shall remain nameless. My father was a university professor and had given her husband a failing grade, with the result that he couldn’t graduate. So she bore a grudge against me. We did these experiments in teams of two, but one day we were doing a complicated experiment with Bunsen burners, so the teams doubled up into teams of four. Now she paired me and my partner with two nasty guys she knew good and well I didn’t get along with. (I pleaded with her to reassign us, but she wouldn’t listen.) The result was that I ended up hitting one of them, and got sent to the principal’s office.
When I told my mother about it, her second reaction was to be mad at the teacher and the school. (Her first was to get mad at me.) My parents wrote a letter to the New Brunswick Department of Education about it! They even pulled me out of the school for a week, then lost their nerve.
Later on during gym class we were playing volleyball and it was my turn to serve. The guy I’d hit shouted “Hit the ball as hard as you hit me!” Later on, I heard that he was still struggling to finish high school, but I’m not sure it was the same guy.
