When I was eight or nine years old, I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up.
Someone gave me a scientific microscope for my birthday around that time, which was probably one reason why. I would use the tweezers to pull out a hair from my head or tear off tiny pieces of leaves, put them on the slides and examine them. I’d fiddle with the covers for the slides as I tried to figure out how the professionals were able to flatten out a piece of twig between two small pieces of glass or plastic, often breaking the slide covers in the process. I’d play around with the focus and the zoom lenses and pretend I was doing experiments even though, in my head, I was wondering why it mattered what a leaf looked like when it was magnified at 16x. Continue reading “The Wonders of Science (or, How to Gross Out Your Child With Education)”
