Deliver me from the evil of ever having to do another one.
By Susan Anspach
Illustration by Matt Mignanelli
To you scholars of Northern Virginia, young and old, the region over: Happy first days of school.
This month, I wish I were you. I always loved school. I always loved the first day. This didn’t put me in the running for cheer squad, but I could pull myself out of bed in the morning the whole year—very nearly the whole year.
At year’s end, though, came the science fair. This I could do without. I hated it the way people hate Internet service providers: with my whole heart, and helplessly.
Science was never my strong suit. I only managed to pass high school physics by making friends with the teacher’s son, who was my age and in the same class. His mother would take pity on a small group of us the nights before tests and let us host a study group at her house, where we would beg help off her like hungry, motherless kittens.
Was it necessary to doctor my personal ethics for a grade? Yes, absolutely it was. The first F I ever brought home was in the third grade, on a quiz on converting Fahrenheit to Celsius. Every answer was wrong; the paper came back looking like it had been used to wring blood from an animal.
To be clear, this was a crushing blow. School was a big part of my self-worth as an 8-year-old, a year when I did not have great clothes or hair. My social skills were also subpar; for a month, my best friend was a girl I’d drawn on lined paper. I liked reading, to the point that I did it on the walks to and from school, bumping into small trees and dogs. People told me I had a great imagination, which was putting a compassionate spin on things.
Right-brain dominance was still no excuse in my family, especially not among the women. My mother, a recreational meteorologist, probably knows more about weather patterns than Topper Shutt. My girl cousin’s Great Famine science-fair project gained national recognition. I think that was the year I made soap. And my parents still have photographs of my sister, who today leads a team of anesthesiologists, as a toddler holding a stethoscope. As far as signs go, my quiz was another clear one, dashing my hopes of going into marine biology and telling me to watch out for the science fair, which was, hideously, to be the first of many.
I don’t remember the weeks leading up to my first science fair. I did know it meant three-fold poster boards and coming to school on a weekend, a privilege typically held in reserve for janitors and members of the First Korean Presbyterian Church. It was enough to make me snap.
My project was on the most important ingredient of a cupcake. It’s flour, by the way. I distinctly remember that: It was flour. I don’t think I guessed right. And my hypothesis wasn’t worded correctly, which was the only feedback I got from the judges. I didn’t win a prize.
I also remember thinking: I, Susie Third-Grader, had to, with my project, discover something for science, like find water on Saturn, or reinvent the eggplant. It was an immense load of pressure. I didn’t know most kids trotted out the same projects each year. My mother assured me cupcakes would be fine, and I thought, she’s probably right. No one’s ever baked for a science fair before. This flour business is going down in history.
My mom didn’t do my science-fair project for me because she was a teacher and refused to on principle. I won’t do my son’s for him because I’m never doing another science-fair project. Ever. Again.
I don’t remember what the other kids’ projects were. What I remember is the way they made me feel, like the time I’d entered a brown-bag puppet in the school’s art contest and later found it crushed underneath a behemoth of papier mâché taller than I was.
It was a tough year, the third grade.
It’s hard to quantify what I dreaded about them so much. Science fairs are, by their nature, hard to quantify. There aren’t clear academic guidelines on how to conduct yourself at a science fair: what to enter, how much work to do, what your results should look like or how to present them. Not one of us third-graders knew what we were doing, beyond wearing shoes left over from weddings. I’d love further to know how Manassas’ Haydon Elementary picks its science-fair judges. I didn’t get the impression ours were scientists, in the traditional sense. If I had to guess, I’d say they were volunteer parents and local small-business owners less than thrilled about having to wear ties on a Saturday.
A memory fog surrounds the ensuing years’ fairs. I’m sure my subconscious has its reasons.
Eventually I caught on, singing to plants and mixing borax with glue. I made it by for a while that way. Down the block, my friend wrote a computer-operating system that ran multiple programs at the same time, unheard of at our middle school, circa 1996. He liked to wear clown wigs. The United States government hired him at 16 to work for Sandia National Labs.
That young man was a genius and thus had no place at the science fair, which is more about sales than results.
In the 10th grade we were allowed to buddy up—a day I’d been waiting for. I snapped up two of my friends: one who went on to Columbia Medical School and another who recently earned her Ph.D. in public health. I knew they were smart but had miscalculated their levels of ambition. They didn’t want much to do with my jazz mixtape for green beans. The project they came up with had to do with determining the chemical composition of various samples of soil, which our chemistry teacher warned us would be too hard to do.
He was right.
The med student pulled an all-nighter puzzling over chemical equations. I called a Home Depot and spoke with a teenage cashier. At the end, we had nothing. We proved nothing. But we whipped up a slick PowerPoint and took home first place, the winners of which the chemistry teacher had promised A’s for the quarter.
Last week, I cooked up a pot of homemade Play-Doh. You could call it a science experiment, of sorts. I used fire and food coloring, though it wasn’t comestible—a major shortcoming in the eyes of my 2-year-old, and one that in no way stopped him from eating it. We pounded out a two-dimensional Cookie Monster on the floor in the living room, where it dried and stuck, and remains.
But I just checked, and the top Google suggestions for kids’ science projects are making a string phone, dropping an egg without letting it break and—believe it—singing to plants.
So the plan is to shoot eight by-day pictures of the Cookie Monster Play-Doh, which is slowly curling in on itself, withering from blue to a lifeless blue-ish ash. Pretty scientific, if you ask me.
If we’re still looking at plant songs in five to seven years’ time—the years my son’s likely having to enter his first science fairs—I’ll slap the photos to a poster board and let him take it in.
It won’t prove anything, but I’ve gotten great at PowerPoint presentations over the years.
(September 2015)