The Science Fair

We went to our son’s school the other night to see his science fair project. He did a nice job! He made a wind turbine with a plastic cup, a pinwheel and a hair dryer. It had nice information on that tri-fold display that we all remember from school.

Hopefully, he’ll be better at this type of thing than his old man was. The science fair was my nemesis. I half-assed it every year, since I didn’t care. Everything was last minute, which would really aggravate my parents.

In eighth grade, my science fair project was checking the accuracy of local weather forecasts. Every night, I would do the hard scientific work of watching Action News to see what they said. Then I would note the weather the next day. Did it rain as they predicted? How accurate were the highs and lows? My project answered these burning questions.

Freshman year of high school, I explored the wonders of photosynthesis. I grew plants under different types of light: natural, incandescent and fluorescent. No record survives of which type of light was best but I do remember the title of my experiment: “The Light That Sustains.”

One year, I think my experiment was which type of detergent cleaned clothes the best.

Either junior or senior year, my science fair project was a report on global warming. I gambled that the picture I drew for the cover would distract the teacher from noticing that I didn’t actually have an experiment; it was just a report. The teacher bought it.

So I was never one of those kids who would take their science fair projects for judging at the Granite Run Mall and then onto Regionals. It just wasn’t for me. I distinctly remember the feeling of liberation I would feel whenever I brought my science fair project to the cafeteria and was done and could get on with my life.

Now that I’m a parent this just makes me look back at what turned out to be important in school and what didn’t. Because of what I ended up doing in life, diagramming sentences and learning about gerunds turned out to be useful, while trigonometry and calculus didn’t. For other people, it’s the opposite. With our son, we don’t know yet what he’ll find worthwhile and what he won’t, but the fun will be him exploring and finding out.