My school days during 11th grade started with a class that I thought was going to be really difficult: Chemistry. I made it through Biology okay without having to work hard for my A. I was under the impression that science was going to bite me in the butt this year, but surprisingly, it didn't. If anything, Chemistry wound up being easier than Biology.
A lot of it had to do with the fact that our school had gotten a new Chemistry teacher who had previously worked at Sandia Labs in Albuquerque. For whatever reason, she decided to stop being a scientist, become a teacher and come to Artesia.
The old Chemistry teacher just sort of decided to stop working. He had been my homeroom teacher the year before. I don't know what happened. He was WAY too young to retire. In addition, he just stuck around Artesia. Several years after high school, he was visiting my Mom at her house. He didn't really remember having me in his homeroom class.
I don't know if we were being taught Chemistry improperly, but it did seem fairly simple on the surface, and there didn't seem to be anyone in the class who was having trouble with the material. But it didn't look like she was that good a teacher because she wasn't rehired for the next year. I do remember kind of slacking off during the last few weeks and was facing the possibility of getting a B for the semester. I asked her if she could just go ahead and make it an A, and she did just that. I guess she just wanted the students to like her. I probably wasn't the only student she did that for. Probably she didn't get rehired because she had too many students passing her courses.
One of the things she would do is, once a month, have food labs. Basically, during class, we would run to Safeway (which was near the school), buy some food and cook it on the bunsen burners. Then we would eat it. We didn't really learn anything those days.
So yes, I did the thing that virtually every Chemistry student has ever done. Once, during down time in class, another student and I got several of the bottles of chemicals and mixed them all together in a beaker. Nothing exploded. Then, we put a penny in the beaker and put it in a safe place. Three weeks later, We checked the beaker. The solution had turned dark green and had crystalized. On top of that, the penny was nowhere to be found. The teacher told us we shouldn't be doing stuff like that. That was probably the only time she ever got mad.
The teacher happened to have a daughter who was a sophomore at the school that year. Her name was Triz. She was very cute and very smart. I liked her, but I really didn't get much of a chance to know her because that meant I would have to get to know my teacher better and I didn't want to do that. I did ask Triz for a dance at Homecoming that year and she agreed. Oddly enough, I discovered that during first period, she occupied the same desk I sat at during my second period Algebra II class. That was the extent of my contact with her. I guess at some point during the year, I might have mentioned to my Mom how I had an interest in Triz (which was odd, because I learned a couple of years earlier I could never talk to my Mom about girls without her getting all excited over the prospect of me not being gay). After it was determined that the teacher wasn't returning, Mom told me that Triz would have like to have gotten to know me better. A missed opportunity. Well, I would have more of those later.
I guess I wasn't too inspired to focus more on Chemistry after high school. So much so, that when I was in college and HAD to take a science class, I took Biology instead of Chemistry. College Biology stunk because I had a professor who was even worse than my Chemistry teacher. I should have taken Chemistry. Maybe I would have gotten to mix more chemicals together and do some real damage.
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