Saturday, August 07, 2004
Soon after I began teaching, back in January, our headmaster announced that there would be a regional school exhibition in August. Every school was to prepare at least two exhibits, and there would be a $10 award for every participating school and a $100 fine for those who did not. Last year Nsumbe paid the $100.
I downloaded a bunch of potential science fair projects from the internet and tried to generate interest in doing several of the projects as an intramural competition to get ready for the regionals, but the idea died from lack of interest.
Last night at 6:00 a delegation of teachers arrived at my hgouse and interrupted an ad-hoc discussion with a dozen students about US politics and stuff. "We need a chemistry exhibit for the regionals tomorrow, can "we" prepare something?" I pulled out the list of possibilities from months ago, and we decided we could make acid-base indicators from flowers and show that. So five students were summarily recruited and told that they would prepare this exhibit. Then bagan a frantic disorganized search for flowers (it is dark by 7:00) and unbroken lab equipment. I initiated a hasty course on acid-base indicators. There was no water in the lab so we brought a buck of water from my house. Along with my little filter and napkins to use as filter paper. The extraction requires methanol. A search turned up a big bottle of it in the stockroom, but it was water instead. Finally we found 300 ml in another bottle - enough, but barely. We extracted four types of flowers and fortunately the red hibiscus gave us acceptable results. Then the electricity went off for 10 minutes. But by 11:30 or so we had successfully completed a trial run of the experiment.
This morning we reassembled materials, found more alcohol, and made a poster. The academic master cam in to tell us that the program, at a school downtown, begins at 9:00. The current time was 8:55, but this is Tanzania. We left Nsumba at 10:30 and got to Mwanza Secondary way too early at 11:15. The judges got to our exhibit at 2:30. I took the 5 students who had participated out to an African dinner at the market and gave them money to get home by daladala.
The science project? We won't know the results until ???, but it seemed to go OK. We did a hibiscus extraction in real time and it turned orange juice red and water from ashes (we also burned banana leaves right there in real time) dark green. Now if we had had some time to practice what to say ...
I downloaded a bunch of potential science fair projects from the internet and tried to generate interest in doing several of the projects as an intramural competition to get ready for the regionals, but the idea died from lack of interest.
Last night at 6:00 a delegation of teachers arrived at my hgouse and interrupted an ad-hoc discussion with a dozen students about US politics and stuff. "We need a chemistry exhibit for the regionals tomorrow, can "we" prepare something?" I pulled out the list of possibilities from months ago, and we decided we could make acid-base indicators from flowers and show that. So five students were summarily recruited and told that they would prepare this exhibit. Then bagan a frantic disorganized search for flowers (it is dark by 7:00) and unbroken lab equipment. I initiated a hasty course on acid-base indicators. There was no water in the lab so we brought a buck of water from my house. Along with my little filter and napkins to use as filter paper. The extraction requires methanol. A search turned up a big bottle of it in the stockroom, but it was water instead. Finally we found 300 ml in another bottle - enough, but barely. We extracted four types of flowers and fortunately the red hibiscus gave us acceptable results. Then the electricity went off for 10 minutes. But by 11:30 or so we had successfully completed a trial run of the experiment.
This morning we reassembled materials, found more alcohol, and made a poster. The academic master cam in to tell us that the program, at a school downtown, begins at 9:00. The current time was 8:55, but this is Tanzania. We left Nsumba at 10:30 and got to Mwanza Secondary way too early at 11:15. The judges got to our exhibit at 2:30. I took the 5 students who had participated out to an African dinner at the market and gave them money to get home by daladala.
The science project? We won't know the results until ???, but it seemed to go OK. We did a hibiscus extraction in real time and it turned orange juice red and water from ashes (we also burned banana leaves right there in real time) dark green. Now if we had had some time to practice what to say ...
