Captain's Log: Oobleck and the Obvious

This week in wacky science, I taught kids about states of matter, featuring oobleck (a non-Newtonian fluid). Most of them were familiar with the topic already, which was a relief because I discovered a couple little problems while trying to do my job. Or maybe, in an optimistic way, just a couple little lessons.

First lesson: With kids, corn starch, and slime, things are going to get messy. No matter how many tarps I put down or paper towels I have or things I warn the kids about, things are going to get messy. Tarps will be ripped. Paper towels will become absolutely useless the moment kids get their hands on them, and the classroom will look like a disaster zone even when I tried to prevent said disaster.

And I'm starting to hate corn starch. It's just as sticky and messy as glitter, but without the glam.

Second lesson: The smart aleck in the class can become your adversary pretty quickly. You hope and pray that they will help you because they are older, or know the science, or know the activity. But instead, they try to prove they're mature, above it all, and (most importantly) don't need their time wasted by the activity you're taking to make fun. I'm pretty sure I was the smart aleck in some of my classes when I was a young kid. I hope I had the humor and self-awareness to be helpful to the teacher.

Probably not. To those teachers I say now: I am sorry. Thanks for trying your best.

Third lesson: Paper bowls do not make for good oobleck containers. The porousness of these bowls means the corn starch can basically pack into them, seemingly disappearing from the water and absolutely refusing to part from the material. Yes, you'll get oobleck if you dump the whole or most of the bag of corn starch into there, but that's because at some point corn starch can no longer pack into the holes and it settles on top. It's like the pores of your face when you apply makeup.

I recommend plastic bowls. Cheap plastic for such a quick activity, but plastic nonetheless.

I'm not yet sure how to steer the kids into serious fun science conversations, like "Why is this non-newtonian liquid responding like this to pressure?" without getting some meme-filled response from the loud kids. Do I play along with the silliness of the classroom, go from serious-and-fun-science teacher to silly-and-fun science teacher? Is it even an option? How do I do this?

At the beginning of the year my mom asked me if I wanted to take more educational classes on teaching kids. It required money and for me to go to classes and do homework and stress about grades once more, and it was after I'd gotten my master's degree. I felt done with the student experience. The thought of going to a classroom, sitting at a desk and taking notes as a professor is speaking, and worrying about the test based on these notes and the grades based on the tests and the consequences based on the grades exhausts me.

But I'm still the student of real life. I'm learning - the hard way - how to be a good teacher and how to deal with these kinds of students. How to communicate the lessons to them and have them stick. How to manage my classroom time well. How to do the experiments and get the classroom clean afterwards.

Am I going to research on what I can do to be more effective? Absolutely. I'm a problem-solver. Or maybe, a problem-researcher. But the switch has flipped in my brain, and for now I can't be the one sitting at the desk. In the future, maybe.

What can I say? I'm stubborn, and I want to be outside of the classroom. So I'll learn the hard way. Eventually I'll get it right.

Right?