Ode To Mr. K (& Middle School Science Disasters)
Let me tell you about the time I became a human mood ring in Mr. K’s seventh grade life science class.
Mr. K loved science. I mean, really loved it. To him, photosynthesis was a symphony. Mitosis, an opera. The periodic table, Shakespeare. To me, these were things I had to learn in order to make it to eighth grade. My goal was to memorize the facts (Interphase, Prophase, Metaphase, Anaphase, Telophase, Cytokinesis…that’s right, baby) and move on.
Until one day when everything changed.
We were in the midst of an experiment (I don’t remember the end goal). Each team had several beakers with small amounts of liquid that we were tasked with mixing together. Mr. K warned us to be extra careful not to spill anything, because the resulting substance could “cause damage to the desks and be very difficult to clean up.” I, lacking any semblance of coordination but apparently possessing impeccable timing, waited until my lab partner had poured the last beaker’s worth of liquid before tripping and knocking a book into the fully mixed concoction, which subsequently fell into my lap. Green liquid splashed all over the place. My khaki pants, my tan Hush Puppies shoes, my white collared shirt, my frizzy brown hair, my pimply face, my tiny, carnie-like arms and hands…everywhere.
Mr. K, drawn from his desk to my station by the laughter and pointing of my classmates, told me to go to the sink, wet a paper towel and wipe my clothes and skin off. I did as I was told, and the green marks easily disappeared. It was as if I hadn’t spilled anything. No fuss no muss. Or so I thought.
In my next class, I looked at my hands and noticed that there was a slight discoloration on the skin where the chemicals had spilled. It looked as if I had been bleached, just a little lighter than my natural tone. I thought maybe it was the lighting in the cafeteria. An hour later, I walked past a mirror in the girl’s locker room and was surprised to see purple blotches everywhere the chemicals had touched. Two hours after that, I was brown. Then orange. Then green. All told, that day I cycled through every color of the rainbow and then some. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
I remember a few other things about that day — my mom’s panic when I arrived home blue (not sad blue…blue blue…toilet bowl cleaner blue) and the subsequent 3 hours I spent in the dermatologist’s office being wiped down with something that smelled like nail polish remover – but what stands out most clearly was that being the first day I was really excited about science.
I’m thinking of this because, sadly, I found out that Mr. K passed away last week. I hadn’t talked with him in sixteen years, but I wish I could thank him now. His class turned me on to how cool science could be. That excitement stuck with me through eighth grade earth science (where my only mistake was to get caught eating the graham crackers and icing we were supposed to use to model tectonic plates and seismic activity). Through Honors Biology, Honors Chemistry and AP Physics in high school. It is what drove me to major in Human Biology as an undergraduate and to take a summer internship at a medical device company building a new kind of colonoscope (ask me about the off-color slogan I suggested at an all-hands meeting on my second day of work), which is where I first was exposed to working in marketing. Even though I’ve chosen to pursue a career in marketing in a different field, I haven’t lost that excitement for science and still geek out reading science news every day.
I can rarely tie my current interests back to a particular event, but with science, the thread is very clear for me. And it all started with that one absurd and colorful (ha…ha…) experience in Mr. K’s class.