By TONY MALESI
A While walking down the street the other day, I saw my for chemistry teacher. This is the man who single-highhandedly ruined my chances of getting into a serious profession in this country, by giving me-and I believe a host of many other hustlers, an extremely poor foundation in Chemistry.
Seeing him painful reminded me of one fact which will infuriate – beyond human endurance, most hard working parents who paid our fees back then: We never ever not only finished but also successfully carried out a Chemistry experiment!
FRUGAL
They were either incomplete or we ended up with the wrong results, and to either of the two scenarios, the teacher always had this irritating way of summing it up: “ we will assume that this thing was successful!” His Achilles heel was that he was always time barred and overly frugal with reagents!
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You see, he was too mean and the quantity of reagents he scooped during experiments spoke it all. I once overheard a naughty backbenchers, albeit under his breath, inaudibly chide him. “One would be forgiven for thinking that the money used to purchase the reagents and specimen was deducted from his salary!” He was so mean and I even suspect if he was to run for any office in the just concluded election, he would have not wasted money printing posters, but instead banked on word of mouth!
That he was a brilliant chap was not in question. He was an intellectual, its just that he didn’t have proper communication skills; speaking too fast and hardly audible.
BURETTE
Much as he introduced us to some nice sounding terminologies, some of which (and I confess) I only came to know their correct spelling long after I cleared school, they are all useless. I mean, I have never been faced with a situation in life, for instance, in general conversation in which-just for the sake of even sounding intelligent, I could incorporate them. Anyone who has ever been confronted with a situation in life in which he used words like pipette, Bunsen burner, and burette please step forward!
You see, this teacher wasted half of the double lesson setting up apparatus and equipment for an experiment. And just after we had launched into it, and things start reacting, the timekeeper would ring the bell, marking end of the lesson. Mind you, that was when we had just started recording the observations and before we could see the final results.
Just then, you would hear the teacher, “young men, time is not on our side, we will assume that this thing was successful…the flame will turn blue, some whitish residue will collect at the bottom of the beaker, blah blah…ok?” And funny enough, we, very tired, bored and amid yawns would respond sheepishly, in fact, in unison, “yes”!
SHEEPISHLY
The lesson always ended in that fashion. But sadly, the examiner always set exams from that tail end of the experiment, which we never saw anyway. And you expected me to pass? Ha! You can dream.
Were it not for such poor foundation in chemistry, I would not be wasting time cracking stale and dry jokes or doing social commentary in newspapers. Instead, I would be some serious chap squinting my eyes into a microscope and mixing chemicals somewhere in industrial area. Or better yet, other than my silly ‘one plus one equals eleven’ discovery that was rubbished, I would have perhaps discovered the cure for HIV/AIDS. Or better still, bagged a Nobel in chemistry! Who knows!
