School Projects

Whiskey-tango-foxtrot, I swear it's like my brain is determined to make up for the few days I didn't post by bringing up zillions of dead memories so I'm forced to post three times as much until I catch up or something. Honest, I'm not doing any of this on purpose--it's just kinda happening.

Anyway. School projects.
 
Before school became Srs Bsnss (TM), I spent my early school years learning practical applications for the material taught through a lot of rather clever hands-on projects. I haven't thought about them in years, which is why it surprises me that I can remember them this well.

At some point during my school career in the UK, for whatever reason part of the curriculum was learning about how English schools functioned in the past. (For those of you who don't know, British schools were fucking sadistic. Up until at least the 60s and probably even longer, corporal punishment was not only allowed but actively utilized in private AND public schools. Everybody else in my class came to school with stories to share about their parent's experiences with school and they involved 'canings', whereas my parents were actually kind of horrified that I'd been taught about all this. I was surprised to learn my parents were never 'caned' in school. I felt left out. Seriously.) Anyway, in the 'olden days' we learned that kids didn't write on paper but on little tiny slates--they didn't have desks, just benches. Or they used old-fashioned ink pens. Part of the 'hands on' project in this lesson was that we lived an entire day as if we were attending a nineteenth-century school. Sans canings, because by the 80s it was really illegal. We sat in our chairs without desks in rows, our teachers were very strict and we weren't allowed to talk, and we either wrote in ink or with a little slate. (I had a slate. I wanted ink. I was disappointed.) We also had to eat on the classroom floor since schools didn't have cafeterias back then. I don't remember a good deal else of what happened but one of the teachers apparently got so into the part of a nineteenth-century schoolteacher that one of the girls started crying. In her favour, the teacher did stop and hugged her and said it was only pretend. I think we might have been as old as six at the time.

One of my other favourite experiments was when I was in the fourth grade in the US. We were learning about electricity. I don't know who on the school board was having seizures or huffing glue at the time, but it was evidently agreed upon that the best way to teach nine-year-olds about electricity was to let them play with electricity. We made rudimentary light switches by connecting brass tacks to copper wire and hooking them up to batteries (yeah, REAL BATTERIES), completing the circuit with a paper clip that could be flipped up or down to turn a small light bulb off and on. I mean we actually seriously were playing with electricity and batteries and, as we all discovered through experience, an electrical current running through a copper wire makes it BURNING HOT. It was good fun at the time but as an adult I can't help but wonder why anybody thought that playing with batteries and electricity was a good idea for small children.

My absolute favourite school experiment was done the following year. I don't even remember what the point of the exercise was, what we were learning about at the time that made the activity relevant--I think we might have been studying 'structure', a science unit on basic concepts of architecture like beams and columns and balance and shit. But I honestly don't remember. All I remember was the egg experiment. This experiment was actually kinda famous in the school and all the kids knew that you got to do it your last year before middle school. The instructions were to build some kind of 'shelter' or contraption that would prevent an egg from breaking when dropped from the second floor of the school. The windows opened all the way back then (since apparently nobody was concerned we might jump out of them like they fear today), and one by one we all dropped our egg-cushioners and then went outside to see if they'd survived. I don't remember what mine even was or whether or not my egg survived. (Your grade didn't hinge on this anyway.) I do remember that parachutes were forbidden, since word had gotten out that a parachute was a guaranteed success. Kind of a shame, since my parents used to work for Grumann Aerospace and at the time I knew more about aeronautics than most hobbyists. I hated it, though--which is why I don't really remember any of it today.

This last one isn't a school project, more like something my school did and got the kids involved in. Student-produced morning news programs aired on CCTV to every classroom are pretty commonplace now, but in the early and mid-90s it wasn't something most people were even aware of, much less participating in. It happened that the school I went to was one of the first to start doing a student news program. There was one faculty member, Mrs Eggleson, who supervised us and taught us to use the equipment and made sure we didn't cost the school thousands of dollars in repairs, but other than that it was entirely done by students--none of whom were older than eleven. We manned the cameras, we did the editing, we recorded the weather and interviews, operated the lights and sound, not to mention all the 'reporters' and 'anchors' were kids--I'm not kidding, we did everything. Adults hardly featured in it at all. It was actually kind of cool. I preferred being behind the scenes rather than on camera (I had--and still have--a huge hangup about my voice and my accent), but for some reason I was harangued once into doing the weather broadcast and since it was recorded, Mrs Eggleson kept it for years because she said it was one of the best weather reports ever done. I can't really fathom why. A student news program was such a novelty back then that we ended up going on a field trip to the state's news headquarters to learn how grownups worked in the news--we got a segment as a fluff piece on air. Just one of thsoe things that's normal to me that turns out to be quite unusual.