“Daddy, I figured it out!”
I never get tired of hearing that.
The Girl got a couple of chemistry sets for Christmas, and we broke them out and started tinkering with them over the long weekend. They have the basics you would expect: a few test tubes, some rubber pipettes with squeezable bulbs, a measuring spoon, and -- most important of all -- safety goggles.
With the goggles on, she looked like Snoopy in his World War One Flying Ace ensemble. She loved them.
Chemistry sets for kids are a little more sophisticated now than the ones I dimly remember. I recall a great deal of improvisation when I got a set somewhere around age nine, especially once my idiot friend and I figured out that putting chemicals on paper napkins and setting them on fire in the basement -- where the concrete floor wouldn’t burn -- was kinda fun. The experiments the set offered just didn’t seem all that interesting in comparison.
In my defense, I believed that if you already knew the outcome, then it wasn’t really an experiment; it was a demonstration. An experiment means you don’t know the outcome. We didn’t know squat, so we experimented. Admittedly, we were a little loose on details like “reasons” and “procedures” and “basic safety,” but hey, it was the seventies. Back then they put gas tanks right behind bumpers. We were just in tune with the zeitgeist.
My high school lab partner -- a faithful reader of the blog -- can attest that by the time I got to high school, any interest in chemistry was long gone. I treated it as a distasteful obligation to be dispensed with. I’m hoping not to pass that on to The Girl.
Since kids have a habit of doing what you do rather than what you say, I had to throw myself back into a discipline I hadn’t engaged in any serious way since the Reagan administration.
Luckily, The Girl was there to rescue me.
We set everything up carefully. We had newspaper on the kitchen table, paper towels at the ready, and safety goggles affixed. TG even briefly put her goggles on The Dog, just to see how they’d look. The Dog demurred. Science requires sacrifices.
Then we got down to business.
A word to the people who write the instructions for chemistry sets: clarity matters. The one set had a series of experiments in a pretty rigid sequence: experiment 7 required that you use the products of experiment 6, for example, and experiment 8 drew on both 7 and 6. Logically, then, a mistake in experiment 6 borne of an ambiguous phrase would render experiments 7 and 8 dismal failures.
Which, in fact, happened.
We went back to experiment six and tried again. TG conscientiously filled the test tubes with water to the correct height, added the right chemicals in the right amounts, applied the rubber stopper, shook gently, and watched as the liquid turned sort of pinkish. (The instructions suggested that it would be a deep red.) We walked through the instructions step by step, wondering why the next step that was supposed to result in the liquid turning blue resulted in, well, nothing. So we tried it again; still nothing.
At that point, I had to pick up The Boy from his friend’s house. I left, with TW still around in case anything exploded.
When I got back, TB in tow, The Girl beamed proudly and announced “Daddy, I figured it out!” TW denied any involvement.
TG had meticulously retraced each step, and interpreted each next step herself. As it happened, her sense of how it worked was more accurate than her fortysomething, PhD-bearing Dad’s. The test tubes beamed their bright, unambiguous primary colors.
She was proud. I was even prouder.
Rock on, TG. And pay no attention to the paper napkins on the table.
I never get tired of hearing that.
The Girl got a couple of chemistry sets for Christmas, and we broke them out and started tinkering with them over the long weekend. They have the basics you would expect: a few test tubes, some rubber pipettes with squeezable bulbs, a measuring spoon, and -- most important of all -- safety goggles.
With the goggles on, she looked like Snoopy in his World War One Flying Ace ensemble. She loved them.
Chemistry sets for kids are a little more sophisticated now than the ones I dimly remember. I recall a great deal of improvisation when I got a set somewhere around age nine, especially once my idiot friend and I figured out that putting chemicals on paper napkins and setting them on fire in the basement -- where the concrete floor wouldn’t burn -- was kinda fun. The experiments the set offered just didn’t seem all that interesting in comparison.
In my defense, I believed that if you already knew the outcome, then it wasn’t really an experiment; it was a demonstration. An experiment means you don’t know the outcome. We didn’t know squat, so we experimented. Admittedly, we were a little loose on details like “reasons” and “procedures” and “basic safety,” but hey, it was the seventies. Back then they put gas tanks right behind bumpers. We were just in tune with the zeitgeist.
My high school lab partner -- a faithful reader of the blog -- can attest that by the time I got to high school, any interest in chemistry was long gone. I treated it as a distasteful obligation to be dispensed with. I’m hoping not to pass that on to The Girl.
Since kids have a habit of doing what you do rather than what you say, I had to throw myself back into a discipline I hadn’t engaged in any serious way since the Reagan administration.
Luckily, The Girl was there to rescue me.
We set everything up carefully. We had newspaper on the kitchen table, paper towels at the ready, and safety goggles affixed. TG even briefly put her goggles on The Dog, just to see how they’d look. The Dog demurred. Science requires sacrifices.
Then we got down to business.
A word to the people who write the instructions for chemistry sets: clarity matters. The one set had a series of experiments in a pretty rigid sequence: experiment 7 required that you use the products of experiment 6, for example, and experiment 8 drew on both 7 and 6. Logically, then, a mistake in experiment 6 borne of an ambiguous phrase would render experiments 7 and 8 dismal failures.
Which, in fact, happened.
We went back to experiment six and tried again. TG conscientiously filled the test tubes with water to the correct height, added the right chemicals in the right amounts, applied the rubber stopper, shook gently, and watched as the liquid turned sort of pinkish. (The instructions suggested that it would be a deep red.) We walked through the instructions step by step, wondering why the next step that was supposed to result in the liquid turning blue resulted in, well, nothing. So we tried it again; still nothing.
At that point, I had to pick up The Boy from his friend’s house. I left, with TW still around in case anything exploded.
When I got back, TB in tow, The Girl beamed proudly and announced “Daddy, I figured it out!” TW denied any involvement.
TG had meticulously retraced each step, and interpreted each next step herself. As it happened, her sense of how it worked was more accurate than her fortysomething, PhD-bearing Dad’s. The test tubes beamed their bright, unambiguous primary colors.
She was proud. I was even prouder.
Rock on, TG. And pay no attention to the paper napkins on the table.
