Choosing Lecture Humour Carefully

In my introductory lecture to all of my labs every semester, I try to put one-liners and other bits of humor in to keep the students engaged. One of the quips I used to do with some regularity when talking about selecting lab partners was something along the lines of, “Any partnerships lasting longer than the semester just go to show the lasting and central power of chemistry in our lives.”

Over the years, I’ve gotten several emails from students (usually female) to inform me that they remembered my joking about that and were now marrying their lab partner from my course.

Things like these are the hidden gems of teaching.

SDG

Breaking Stereotypes

{Note:  This is the manuscript of my essay for “The Truth That Makes Them Free" Anthology, described in this post. Thus it is longer than most posts.}

 “Always share your faith. If necessary, use words.”

      St. Francis of Assisi

"Ooh", said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he...quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion!"

"That you will deary and no mistake", said Mrs. Beaver. "If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly."

"Then he isn't safe?", said Lucy.

"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver. "Don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? Course he isn't safe.....but he's good. He's the King I tell you."

C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

I grew up in a normal American family—my parents and a younger sister. We were Americans, so that meant we were Christians. Then, when I was around the second grade, my dad was urged by his father, “Kevin, you get those kids into church!” So, we started attending a Methodist church. My sister and I didn’t find the services terribly interesting, but I seemed to absorb the Bible stories in Sunday School. Several years passed, and Dad’s Sunday School teacher began to challenge him to take the Bible’s claims about truth seriously. Thus began a bittersweet time for my sister and I—we went from listening to music in the car to all of these radio preachers, hardly an enticement for young kids to be interested in spiritual things. 

Like a Perfectly Thrown Football

It’s New Year’s Day 2011, and I should be saying something pithy about that, but I already have, sort of, yesterday, and today want to continue my thoughts on time.

Time has fascinated us, well, since we were first aware of the concept. So many stories in our literature dream of moving at will, back and forth through time. The oldest I can recall are how some of the Arthurian legends describe Merlin moving backward through time, becoming younger, and his memory moved backwards, which is how he knew others’ future, because it was his past. Even the idea of prophecy has exhilarated us because of the glimpses of another time it offers.

Most of physics and even chemistry is heavily dependent on time in their fundamental theorems and formulas. Yet, while most of science views time as something in constant motion, Einstein peskily showed it doesn’t. This of course is not a surprise to most humans, who have long been aware of time’s apparent inconstancy. Einstein even quipped about it, “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.”

It is further interesting that the West as a whole views time as linear (Creation to Apocalypse), whereas the East tends to think of it as cyclical (the Yin and Yang, death and rebirth). As I pondered these ideas in high school or college, I remembered the story of the blind men and the elephant. Five blind men were brought to a zoo and allowed to explore an elephant. The first, feeling the ears, perceived the animal as a large fan. The second, feeling the leg, believed it to be a tree trunk. And so on. Afterward, they fell to arguing about the nature of the elephant because each only had a limited experience with an elephant and not with the whole critter. Was time similar?

It occurred to me that perhaps time in a sense moves in a spiral—some cyclical aspects, but not truly repeating, and that we do move linearly through time, but not in a straight line—like we are traveling along a coil of spring or a football in a perfect spiral.

Do I have proof? No. But isn’t it just like God to give some of the information to some folks, and a different set to other folks, with the idea that we should bring our knowledge together and mutually encourage and edify each other, thus bringing greater glory to Himself? And, isn’t it just like us to start bashing each other over the head because we believe we have complete understanding and therefore, anyone who thinks differently is automatically wrong?

There is his story, her story, and, somewhere in between, the truth.

PS—Is this a subtle form of universalism? Stay tuned true believers…

SDG

What’s in YOUR Water? (Episode II)

Yesterday’s post about water fluoridation reminded me of another recent water-related event. One Wednesday several weeks ago, two coeds were in my office to find out about a study abroad program I coordinate. The phone rang, and it was a woman asking, “My Vitamin Water ™ is cloudy. What has been put in it?”

What follows is the linear form of the story, not the order in which it came out. My first response was that it might be mold/mildew. I then learned she had bought the water on Tuesday and drank about a quarter of it, put the lid on and tossed it in her backpack. (She sounded like she was in her 20’s, and was not a student.) The next morning (earlier the day she called me), she took it out to drink and noticed 1) it was cloudy, 2) bubbled, fizzed, and smoked when she opened it, 3) it smelled funny.

SO, she did what I’m sure all of you would do at that point—she took a sip… … … AND SWALLOWED IT!!! She said it burned her throat going down. Now she was calling the local university’s chemistry department to see what she drank. This happened in the morning and it was now around 3 in the afternoon. (How she found my number out of the ~100 in our department, I have no idea.)

I very gently recommended she call poison control, and the police. It sounded like maybe someone may have put an acid in her drink, but from her description alone, I couldn’t be sure. She asked if there was someone locally who could test it. I replied there were some labs that could do that, but it would 1) be expensive 2) could possibly be considered tampering with evidence, and that the police should really be the ones testing it. Her response was that she didn’t want to call the police…because they’d already been there that morning for something else!! I asked if she had shown it to them then, and she said yes. The officer looked at it, smelled it and said it smelled like someone poured vodka into it. “But we don’t have any vodka here!” was her response.

I again gently urged her to call poison control and the police and that was all I could do for her and ended the conversation. The poor gals sitting in my office hearing my side of the conversation were wide-eyed. “Poison control?” “Police?” “Acid or mold in a drink?”

It has occurred to me that this may well have been a crank call, and if so, it was pretty good. Maybe they recorded it and put it on the web somewhere. If you find it, let me know—I want to hear it! Maybe it was real. I don’t know. But I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the story, including here.

SDG