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Health & Fitness

"Science in the Summer"

When we first moved to Newtown Square, I resorted to a practice I had used before, when I had moved, before, to a new location to live or work. I looked around for a volunteer role that I could do to learn something about the community and to get to know some of the people who lived there. This time, I applied for a volunteer shift at the library.

There was the guy, with a long commute, when had "read" through an entire series of mystery novels on the CD player of his car. Or the kid who is standing back behind his mother while she checked out a biography of George Washington Carver.

“A school assignment?” I ask him. He smiles, shyly, and nods yes. His mother goes into some detail about the assignment, quite a lot of detail.

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A young girl wants to return The Giver by  Lois Lowry. I say,“Wow, I think I saw a play written by this same author. It was about a year ago. The play was really good. What did you think of the book?”

She says she liked it, but really, she was most interested in using her new library card to return the book. It was her first card in own name. Even though you do not have use the card to check in a book (the barcode reader identifies the borrower) I take her card and scan it in. Up it comes on the screen. She peaks around the edge on the computer monitor to see. She seems very pleased with herself.

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That’s the good part. The down side of volunteering at the library is that you sometimes get recruited to help with other programs. Often, that means you are doing things you never expected to do, but this one time it worked out. I volunteered to be a teacher’s assistant at a week-long program called “Science in the Summer.”

The program is good. It has two age groups – fourth and fifth graders in one, six and seventh graders in the second. It has recognizable sponsors - this year GSK paid for and the Franklin Institute administered the program – and very competent teachers. It lasts a week, with an hour of class each day.

This year the program tried to show what it would be like if the kids were scientists in a bio-medical laboratory. The first exercise of the week introduced microscopes. With twenty kids in the class, they divided up into teams of two, each team sharing a microscope. Because of the age of the kids, the teams were either two boys or two girls (“Hey, dude, this is fifth grade. You don’t experiment with the opposite sex; at least you don’t in the classroom.”) Each microscope was accompanied by a plastic sandwich bag full of things to look at.

The microscopes offered three lenses – 4 times, 40 times and 100 times magnification – and the kids’ eyes widened as they looked through the various lenses. It is amazing just how much dirt there is on a penny from your pocket, but you can see that, and all the words on the penny, too, through a simple magnifying glass. A feather, on the other hand, looks like a feather under a magnifying glass, still kind of like a feather under 4 times magnification, like some weird, insect from space under 40 times magnification and at 100 times magnification, well, I don’t know what, exactly.

We did an experiment with cups of water. We were told to imagine that we were at a Party, where it was easy to pick up someone’s drink other than your own, because all the cups looked the same. The cups were “shared” by each kid pouring a little of his water into his neighbor’s cup and so on around the room. Then the teacher dropped a tiny amount of coloring agent into each of the cups, turning each cup a different shade of green. The darker the green the closer you were to the source of the color. Imagine someone came to the party with a cold.

The best part of the day was the plastic "petri dishes" at the end of class. Before the kids could leave, each team was handed two small plastic containers, one labeled “clean” and a second labeled “dirty”. The idea was that one member of the team would wipe his fingertip across the gooey stripe of the “clean” dish and the second team member would wipe his finger across the stripe of the “dirty” dish.

Before you did the clean dish, you had to “wash” your hands with a hand cleaning gel. The kid who swipes the “dirty” dish does not wash his hands. In fact, he is encouraged to swipe his finger across the bottom of his sneaker, or perhaps on the inside of his sock, or (the preferred option, apparently) in his armpit.

The obvious point of this is that the dirty dish, after it sits at room temperature for the rest of the week, will bloom with all sorts of bacteria splotches, in all sorts of interesting colors. The not so obvious point is that, unless you “wash” your hands really, really well, the “clean” dish will also “bloom” with splotches.

The boy’s teams had some discussion before they settled on who got to be the “dirty” kid. They settled these disputes, quite reasonably, I thought. They flipped a coin. They played “paper, rock and scissors” three times. Whatever, it took. 

Girls of that age are either more articulate, or, maybe, they just talk more. Their discussions lasted longer. One team did not seem to be able to resolve it, until the teacher, running short of time, stepped in and announced, “Jessica, you’re dirty. Angelina, you’re clean”. The girls obeyed, by all appearances.

But when the teacher turned her back to go to the front of the room, Angelina and Jessica swapped their petri dishes by passing them behind their backs. This goes to show that even though there is a decided premium to being the “dirty kid”, a true scientist puts a bigger premium on experimenting her way rather than just the way she’s been told.

 

-        Rob Dewey





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