My colleague—a medical doctor and infectious disease specialist—judged her child’s middle school science fair today. It’s that time of the year. A judge at my boys’ science fairs was never a position to which I either aspired or ever anticipated being called—and for good reason.
For one, I’m not particularly fond of fungi, elongated soft-bodied invertebrate animals, or food coloring—especially when they all are combined in the same container to prove some point. For another, I have never in my entire life participated in a science fair. In the 1960’s, in my Catholic elementary/middle school, we didn’t have science fairs—our lives revolved around the Baltimore Catechism. The only science project I can remember was a friend’s pickled bologna and Velveeta cheese sandwich, on white bread with mayo, which spent 4 weeks in his desk, in a plastic baggie, in a brown paper bag. Why that experiment, in that peculiar habitat, is a topic for later discussion.
Had we had a science lab with a microscope, we could have learned a lot about bread mold and spore disbursal. But eventually, some joker would have surreptitiously coated the scope’s optical lenses with charcoal, creosote, tar or some other impression-leaving substance, which would have sent the nuns into a frenzy (and that occurred frequently enough already). The nuns knew us all too well, which probably explains, in part, why, instead of a lab, we had a mobile science “cart,” which they locked in a closet and rolled out once a week for what I vaguely recall as a series of demonstrations about the physical world. Frankly, back then, those demos seemed more like magic acts than hard science.
Of course, eight years with the nuns was like one extended-run magic show! They were always pulling peculiar things out of all those secret compartments in those imposing black and white habits. They had a special talent for making n’er-do-wells disappear and then reappear. I’m convinced that they would have liked to have sawed most of us in half, but even the corporal punishment that they faithfully inflicted upon us had limits. That didn’t stop them from throwing things at us—primarily chalk and chalkboard erasers. Thankfully, the parish priests at least had the good sense to lock all the sharp knives, hatchets, blindfolds, ankle clasps, and the spinning wheel in a storage room in the convent.
They could do mysterious, supernatural things that would make us doubt our very impressionable eyes—like emptying the contents of one poor student’s messy desk onto the floor and flinging it, and then him, down the hallway. Or, like a black and white bowling ball upending an array of bowling pins, a nun once knocked over a half-a-dozen students in about 5 seconds en route to grabbing two blabbermouths in the middle of a pew during a church service, and dragging them both out of the church by the tips of their lobes. They never knew what hit them.
With these kinds of random acts of entertainment available on a daily basis, we never really missed the drama or PE classes that were routinely available to our public school peers. Of course, It’s challenging to have PE when you don’t have a gymnasium. But ducking all those in-coming chalk projectiles, or running out of the classroom to see a student belly flopping down the hall on his stomach, or dodging a nun on a mission from a higher order, kept us all on our toes and in good shape.
We did have “recess,” in the school’s parking lot. Although we weren’t permitted to run, so as not to shred our school uniforms, we did spend a lot of time walking, almost always in pairs. School entrances and exits—at the beginning, middle, and end of the day—were always executed in double file. Confirmation and Holy Communion? Everyone had to have a partner. May procession? Grab a partner, round we go. Religious ceremonies at Christmas and Easter? No one walks alone. (R2D2 and C3PO must have gone to Catholic school.)
Getting back to my unfortunate friend and the random science project, had we had a cafeteria or a lunch room, he could have trashed that sandwich without anyone being the wiser and just satisfied himself with the chocolate Ring Ding he had received from Bernadette in exchange for his Twinkies. Instead, all of us ate our sandwiches, slurped our soup from thermoses (I used to hate how the noodles would always get stuck on the bottom of the container), and drank our milk from 5-cent cartons—in silence—at our respective desks, on a table cloth we brought from home. As everyone knew, nuns had eyes in the back of their heads. My friend understood that his only chance of squirreling away that rejected sandwich was to let his science book provide cover for the bag when he quietly placed both securely in his flip-top desk, as Sister wrote with great earnestness her notes on the board for the next class.
All this to say it’s little wonder that I struggled through introductory physical science, biology and chemistry in high school, and opted for psychology over physics in the 12th grade. I steered clear of the hard sciences in college, of course. But if there is one thing I learned in Catholic school, it was how to survive the mayhem. Those skills have served me well in the 20+ years I have been working in Africa. Now if I could just get a side gig as a judge voting some wackos off an Island, I would be as happy as a toadstool in a fairy tale—or a science fair.
