Science Trauma

Both my parents teach science at the secondary and college level. Ever since I was young, I was very interested in their books as they had a lot of diagrams. I had my mother order test tubes and beakers for me and my father bought me batteries, wires, switches, and sometimes brought home a voltmeter or ammeter. These things fascinate me even now and I am quite good at making simple circuits, and science in general. I had planned to go into applied science ever since I was in the 5th grade. This plan was somewhat dampened after my health failed in the 8th grade, but still I had my heart bent on studying science after school. But an incident in the 10th grade made me despise the way science is taught here.

It was a Physics laboratory in the 10th grade. It was a Saturday. I had been given an experiment on optics – to find the focal length of a lens. I am very diligent with experiments and as usual I did the whole experiment with great care. I took the observations minutely and carfully jotted them down. It was perfect and I was very proud of myself. I went ahead to show my results to my teacher.

When my turn came, he looked at my copy and frowned. What he proceeded to tell me, or accuse me of, mortified me. He accused me of cheating because my observations were “too perfect”. He concluded that such observations had to be a work of plagiarism from a book. He admonished me for such an act and ordered me to start the experiment all over again. I sulkily went back to my table, erased the observations and tinkered with the results to give it an imperfect look. After that I sat down and chatted with my classmated for some time. I did not touch the experiment at all. I went over to my teacher with this work of fiction and he seemed to be quite proud of me.

After that I never took experiment very seriously. I did my experiments diligently but when it came to writing reports – well, that was just a work of fiction. It was after this incident that I decided that I could not study applied science under such circumstances. So after school, I just took up a subject I liked as much as science – History. I still love science and toying with circuits and gadgets, and I know a little bit of concepts too. Maybe, given the right opportunity, I would like to study applied sciences again.