Having apparently pissed off the universe, our heroine prepares herself for a weekend locked in a closet with lasers….

April 1, 2009 at 4:08 pm (rants, teach this!)

Sure sounds sorta cool, doesn’t it? In actuality, I have two major experiments to do this and next week, both of which involve spending at least 30 hours doing laser microscopy. Again, sounds cool, but what’s the one thing I’m not supposed to do but do anyways ’cause it’s pretty? Look at the damn laser. It’s so blue! It’s my favorite shade of blue! Also if I look directly at it I can tell if my slide is any where near where it is supposed to be….sure, I could do the right thing and look through the occulars on the microscope but doing that too much hurts my brain. The biggest pain the butt is that these are the two weeks I should be studying for my you-qualify-to-be-a-teacher test, but instead I’ll be frying my eyeballs and brains just in time to finish up the experiments and take the test. Grant season is awesome.

Anyway, I know some people like those in the back of my head are thinking, hey, it’s high school science and you have a Masters degree in a scientific field, you fool, what are you worried about? Well, interesting point, and the stuff that I know (biology, oceanography and most geology) I will ace on the test. The problem is that this test is a compilation of all the major sciences- that includes physics and hard (i.e. not bio) chemistry. This is a problem because even though I totally took those classes, they were forever ago and in some cases, such as chemistry, I didn’t pay attention for crap because I thought I was going to be an ecologist and save the world so who the hell needs organic chemistry anyways? Turns out I do. Especially since I’m a physiologist and not an ecologist. Those guys are nuts and their science annoys me now, but they usually fun at parties so I don’t yell at them.

Anyway again, the point I am trying to make is that I cannot keep physics equations in my head, which is a problem because 20% of this test is physics, and not nice general questions that you can reason out but hard, you-better-know-your-shit questions. Another 10% of the test is astronomy, which is mostly ok except when it comes to special relativity and expansion of distant galaxies because I cannot for the life of me wrap my brain around that stuff. Einstein, seriously, what the hell does it mean that when “mass is embedded in space-time it alters the shape of the universe”? My dad tried to explain it in a way that a blanket was a metaphor representing the universe and you throw a ball (which represents something embedded in space-time- this phrase alone makes my head hurt) at it, it makes a dent so the shape of the universe changes.

Um, what? Is it really so simple? And by simple I mean ….what???? Stupid physics!  And then someother guys determiend that the universe is actually flat…what?? See, this is why biology is better. It makes sense! Even the fact that the only absolute in biology is that there are exceptions to every rule makes more sense to me than astronomy physics.

And can I just say, I never had to learn anything this deep in high school! Of course, my biology class was taught by a volleyball coach, my chem class was taught by a disgruntled old man, and my marine science course, which should’ve been my most interesting class, was my most boring. So really even if there was some interesting, deep science in any of those classes, I totally missed it.

Well this post was a pointless rant, wasn’t it? Blame it on the lasers. I think there are lasermonkeys growing in my brain now.