3/11/03

It's 9 p.m. I just got home from work, intending to go to the grocery store, but when I got here, I realized that I left my wallet at work. Not a big deal, since I still have to go back there tonight anyway. But, yeah, a long day gets even longer.

This morning was our third lesson over at the elementary school. I'd set my alarm clock for 6:30, but woke up at 2 a.m., 4 a.m. and then finally at 6 a.m., each time thinking of something that could potentially go wrong with the lesson. Today's lesson was about zebrafish embryos: we planned to bring in 1-day-old, 3-day old and 7-day old embryos and some adult fish. The kids would look at the fish under a microscope, and I also planned to show them some little movies about embryo development in various species on my laptop.

We picked up the fish this morning. As it turned out, the fish didn't lay any eggs yesterday, so we had no 1-day-old embryos. But I was sort of expecting something to go wrong, because something has gone minorly wrong every single week so far, and it was no big deal.

The next big challenge was driving over the hills of San Francisco on the way to the school while my teaching partner held shallow dishes full of water and fish embryos on a tray in his lap. I tried to drive slowly and choose flat roads, but one dish sloshed over anyway, so my partner had to suck the embryos back up with an eyedropper while I continued to drive.

The first class was total chaos. The kids really dig the live animals, so we thought they'd like this lesson a lot, and they did--maybe a little too much. They were all running around from table to table, and we never quite regained control over the class. The movies were also unexpectedly popular--so much so that some of the kids were following me from table to table and watching them four or five times. The human embryo movie was by far the most popular, although several kids were disturbed to learn that they had once had a tail. A bunch of kids also thought that the baby's umbilical cord was a penis, which, if you actually look at the movie, is pretty disturbing. I had to explain the whole umbilical cord phenomenon several times over. One girl was horrified by the whole thing and told me "I'm never getting married!"

We learned from our mistakes for the second class, but for some reason, more things seemed to go wrong the second time around. One group of kids overturned a dish of embryos and then one boy smushed one, causing his partners to yell "fish killer!" at him and to tell him that he was going to hell. The boy then had to be consoled for several minutes, although I think he actually killed the fish on purpose. So he probably really is going to hell.

Mini-crisis number two was when my laptop batteries gave out after only half the class had gotten to see the movies. I hadn't brought my power cord along because I was too lazy to unplug it. As soon as the screen went dead, I reflexively exclaimed "oh, crap!" and then realized that you're not supposed to say stuff like that in an elementary school. I expected the kids to react with shock, but they seemed nonplussed. I did feel really guilty about not everyone getting to see the movies, though.

Worse yet was in the wrap-up at the end of the class, while expounding about the ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny phenomenon, I accidentally substituted the word "orgasm" for "organism." Luckily, the kids either didn't know what an orgasm was or else they weren't listening to me. Their teacher, however, started cracking up immediately, which led my teaching partner to start cracking up, which led to me turning bright red and being unable to speak. Luckily, I was pretty much done, anyway.

Now we just have one more class to go, two weeks from now. What will I write about after that?