Chemistry

While growing up, I never could see why toy manufacturers made "Chemistry Sets" for kids when the school system did not teach chemistry until grade eleven, and my wondering was focused on the school system not the toy people. Without the information, very little could be done with a chemistry set, and the knowledge brokers were not about to divulge that information. Actually, I doubted that the elementary school teachers even knew much about Chemistry, a fact I later found to be true.

I do recall a chemical moment of discovery in my junior-high days. We had been putting iodine on food items in order to note their starch content. When I came home, I was putting it on everything I could find. When I tried iodine on corn from the garden, I hit the jackpot and went running upstairs to share my discovery with my family. My dad reached up into the cupboard and held up a box of cornstarch and said "Yea, I know".

At senior high level, it was all a jumble of chemical formulas and some sort of chart that was supposed to be of some great significance I still have never figured out. Apart from acid eating my pants off, and the girl at the next lab table, I have few memories of chemistry. I never did find out what to do with all those colorful little vials of chemicals in my chemistry set, and I guess they eventually were thrown out. It is strange how I can picture them so clearly even now. I guess I took them out over and over again, and then had to place them back in their box on the shelf...until someone could teach me what to do with it.

Maybe this sort of experience is why they say that school science fairs are competitions amongst the dads. We never got fun things like science fairs, and now we're older, they say it's just for kids, and shut the schools at 3:30. Heck, most of them don't even want it!

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