Science is gross

Lakeview Elementary had a science fair this week. I got to go with the boys, who each had something on display. Sam was required to attend from 6-7 pm as part of his assignment grade, so he could be on hand to explain his project to any interested passersby.

Nick’s project was a wooden catapult that he'd constructed with a lot of his dad's help. Both boys and Steve had spent a rollicking hour in the attic flinging marshmallows during the past weekend. You could hear the whoops and thumps from two floors away.

At the fair, Nick's project, along with about 30 dirty marshmallows, was placed on a table with the other simple machines. These were inventions built out of wood or cardboard. Most of them used pulleys and counterweights and levers to solve an obvious problem. Sometimes the problem involved something that the third grader was required to do but didn't like to. My favorite of these was the "Pet Letter Outer." Nick's catapult was named "The Hurler." I'm not sure what problem it was supposed to solve unless maybe it was the problem of what to do with an extra bag of marshmallows that would otherwise just lay around, useless.

We milled around the gym and it reminded me of every other science fair I'd ever attended. There were the usual 20 displays comparing battery strength and dish soap bubbles. No clear winner emerged from any of those. Dawn was the favorite on the north side of the gym, while on the south side it was Ajax, hands down. It was Everyready Alkaline at the front and Duracell at the back. One project explored how long it took little metal mailboxes to rust in various planetary atmospheres, using ball jars and complete with a backdrop of heavenly bodies. This will be important when we finally colonize Mars and need to receive mail there. Most of the displays featured obvious signs that someone's parent had gotten involved, like coordinated computer graphics, scientific sounding language and correct spelling.

Sam's project was a comparison between human spit (his) and cat spit (Kato's) to see which grew more bacteria over time. It showed, clearly, that the cat's mouth was cleaner than his, which sort of surprised me, and I had to wonder about his methods. He used six petri dishes, some sort of gel and the warm, dark confines of the guest room closet. The final display featured scribbles meant to be many-legged amoebas and pictures of yawning cat and human mouths, cut out with undulating edges and pasted wherever they happened to fit. As he neared completion on his board he'd tear off a picture to put something essential in its place, like a conclusion or his results. He didn't record his data in a notebook, per his dad’s suggestion, not bothering with writing down his observations during the experiment and instead relying on his “photographic memory" to assemble a graph, making up an arbitrary scale to use instead of an actual culture count. He still earned a score of 89, getting 10 out of 10 on his oral presentation, which just goes to show that he’s inherited my talent for talking but none of his dad’s talent for details.

Nick's catapult was the object of many admiring looks, right up until one of the older boys discovered that it was capable of flinging marshmallows 15 feet. After that it was hidden behind a press of small bodies and marshmallows kept popping out over the heads of the crowd at the rate of about 1 every 3 seconds. There were little boys chasing marshmallows all over the place. The missiles dropped onto the floor, plinked off of project boards and even smacked one mother in the face until one of the teachers, Mr. Petersen, stepped in and shooed the kids away. Nick was relieved his machine had suffered no damage during the mayhem and gathered up the catapult and the remaining half dozen marshmallow missiles, declaring himself ready to go home, which we did.

The next morning, I went out to the car to take the kids to school and discovered Sam already in it, waiting to go. He was chewing something and I asked him what it was, thinking he'd found some candy somewhere in the car. I was getting ready to deliver Standard Parental Lecture Number 366 about the follies of consuming so much sugar right before class. He didn't want to tell me what it was at first but eventually he opened his mouth and I saw the remains of a marshmallow in it.

Realizing that the only marshmallows in the car were the ones that came home with us from the science fair, the following thoughts raced through my head: Nick hadn’t taken the marshmallows inside last night. Those things had been in the hands of at least 20 kids, not to mention on the floor and the walls, and ricocheted off at least one person’s face. I was surprised and then grossed out. This was much worse than just sugar before school. "Do you realize how many kids had that thing in their hands last night? And it was on the floor, too. Yuck, Sam! How can you put that in your mouth?" I asked him. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled at me. "It tastes good," he said, as if that explained everything.

Which it did, in a way. At least, I believe the results of his experiment now. Ew.

Marie Marfia
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