Oak and tart blueberry jam. Enough said. 4/5 stars.
I feel like I have a disappointing relationship with experiments. As a child, without any true understanding of chemistry, I was sure that I could combine various ingredients that I found around the house to create something spectacular. I had this unrealized expectation that some combination of WD-40, water softener salt, and milk (or other random items I found) would result in an exciting reaction. Maybe flames, maybe bubbles, even a small explosion would have been welcome. Instead, every time, I ended up with a small pool of nothing. If I had understood the scientific method, or cared, I would have kept notes and carefully modified variables one at a time. It was probably a clear indication that I wouldn’t be a good chemistry student.
When I had the opportunity to actually study chemistry in high school, the disappointment continued. While the teacher would occasionally demonstrate exciting chemical reactions, like elephant toothpaste or flaming bubbles, most of what we did as students was significantly less interesting. I distinctly remember a particular experiment where we mixed items together to make… paint. It was yellow paint with lead in it, so that was mildly stimulating, but still. Paint. Then, you’ll never guess what we did next. We watched the paint dry. Granted, it was over a bunsen burner in a crucible, but we still had to watch paint dry into a powder. This had to be some curriculum designer’s idea of a joke.
My least favorite part about chemistry was the lab notebooks. I found lab notebooks to be incredibly tedious, even when I had to do them in college, but as a teenager it felt excruciating to write down the steps, measurements, processes, and results for an experiment that was thoroughly documented in our textbook. There was no joy in achieving an outcome that was predestined, and then having to explain why it happened. Ugh. And then there was the grading. Lab notebook grading always felt fairly arbitrary to me, which is saying something considering my main academic focus was in arts and humanities. I wasn’t a fan of all of the memorization in chemistry either. The tables and formulas and vocabulary felt intentionally obtuse, and I did the work grudgingly. I have a fairly good memory, and so it wasn’t difficult for me per se. I just didn’t see the point. The part that I wanted to get to, the sexy explosions and thrill of discovery, required too much menial work to achieve in my opinion.
It’s funny because, when it came to other areas of study, I didn’t shy away from putting in the work. I studied music from elementary school all the way through a graduate degree. But the things that set music apart from chemistry were what kept drawing me back in. Music is all about nuance, while chemistry is about control. What I imagined experimentation in science to be, improvising until you hit the right combination, was what I actually found in music. So, maybe I don’t have an issue with experimentation after all. Maybe I needed to find the right type of experiment.
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A Beer a Day 