A Science Guy's Almanac: A Room with Tables: Part 2 – Identifying the Room

A Science Guy's Almanac
A Room with Tables: Part 2 – Identifying the Room

When we left this blog thread two weeks ago, California had adopted successful completion of two-years of “real” science courses as the new high school graduation requirement. Part 1 concentrated on finding qualified teachers or qualifying them in-house.

Besides needing more teachers, science departments also needed more rooms. There was general agreement that a real science room should be at least lab-ish. In the Grossmont District, no classrooms except science and home economics had water in them. Since there weren’t enough science rooms and the home economics departments weren’t about to give up their space, some wise soul at the district office determined that what a science classroom really needed was tables.

Armchair desks were dispatched to some desk cemetery. Shiny, black tables arrived. Those tables, and sometimes a strip of electrical outlets around the room’s perimeter, “upgraded” any room to science. Hence the unpublished title of this memoir: A Room With Tables—every science teacher’s dream habitat.

I taught in three of these “upgraded” rooms while at Monte Vista. The first was a very small, maybe 20 foot by 20 foot room that was originally designed as the “lecture room” for one of the shared lab rooms in the “200 Building.” Since I still had access to a “real lab room shared with other teachers,” the fact that there was little room to move around in the tiny space where my class met daily was dismissed as irrelevant.

The second “upgraded” room I occupied was an English classroom at the furthest point on campus from the real science building in which I taught prior to this time. While I can’t be sure, I think I remember this being a first-semester only situation, because of The Cave.

This is The Cave, an original Room with Tables. If you look closely, you can see the electrical outlet strip on the wall below the whiteboard in the upper left.

 The cave wasn’t actually a cave. It began life as a Social Science overflow room. However, since it was adjacent to the “Little Theater,” it was quickly commandeered as the Drama Production Green Room. I suspect it took an entire semester to clean out all the junk, er, um, I mean props, costumes, and other supplies from Room 1011, which is why I spent that glorious time in the English room.

The district did add the electrical strip around the sides of the room, so we had tables and electricity. Water was supplied in a plastic 5-gallon container with a pump faucet found in camping trailers. Thirty students and one pump faucet meant that almost all labs were done by trading rooms with a teacher who was assigned a “real lab room.”

While I was “blessed” to teach in the three above-mentioned rooms, at least 18 of my 23 years at Monte Vista was spent in Room 1007.  When built in 1971 was one of two mirror-image lab rooms that were associated with a large lecture hall. That is the building referred to in one of the preceding paragraphs as “the further point on campus” from the English room I occupied.

Unfortunately for the Science Department, the lecture room had a sloped floor and a stage—it was quickly usurped by the Drama classes and was henceforth known as the “Little Theater.” In all the twenty-three years I worked at Monte Vista, science used that lecture hall maybe half a dozen times. But back to Room 1007 . . .

Room 1007 was about 30 feet wide by 45 feet long. There were five rows of chair-height tables with six drawers per seating space bolted to the floor. Each row was capable of seating six students. There were counter height cabinets down each side of the room with five sinks on each wall. Storage was maximized by an industrial strength adjustable shelving system above the side counters. Three microscope cabinets graced the wall across the back of the room.

The teacher station was a raised demonstration table. It was two full steps above the floor of the room and was a least six feet deep.  Originally the front wall was held a sliding chalkboard system, which was later “upgraded” to whiteboards. The projection screen was 8’x8’ and speakers were built in to the ceiling. There were no windows, so external distractions were minimal. On the wall to the immediate right as you entered the room was a large display cabinet with glass doors over a set of four drawers that completed the layout. 

Teaching station in Room 1007. I'm wearing the scarf for no special reason. Candace Aguirre, classmate and later colleague at MV is to my right. You can see the sliding chalkboards--prerunners to sliding whiteboards--and the 8'x8' projection screen.

The room actually had six doors in it. There was the “outside door” described above. On the front wall to the right of the “outside door” was a door to the biology prep area. On the back wall, one door went to my office and another door opened into a storage room that I renamed the “Extra Credit Room” because all the extra credit in the universe was stored there and could never get out.

On the wall opposite the entry door, two doors opened into the adjoining biology lab—Room 1004. It was an ideal situation.

Room 1007. The door to the prep room is below the clock on the right. The door to 1004 is by the giant arrow and seagull on the left. The door to the room is to the right of the overhead projector.

Room 1007 had one very special feature that I’m sure the architects did not plan. The way the ceiling was designed, it funneled just about any sound from the student desks to the teaching station at the front of the room. If you’ve ever visited any government building that looks like the Capitol Building, it’s likely that you’ve heard similar stories about at least one spot in that rotunda.

Hundreds of my students were convinced of my psychic powers as I would join into sotto voce conversations being conducted in the third or fourth row of lab tables. For example

“Did you hear about Mrs. English Teacher?” asked Student 1.

“No, what about her?” replied Student 2.

“I heard she had a nervous breakdown.” Student 1 said.

“Mrs. English Teacher had the flu and was dehydrated. They called in a sub yesterday,” I interjected.

“How did you know what we were talking about?” they would ask incredulously.

“I know everything,” was my standard reply.

A trick like that does wonders for your reputation.

My office had an outside door in addition to the door into Room 1007. There was a plate glass window in the wall between the office and the classroom that must have been at least 16 square feet. It was covered with Venetian blinds. If I adjusted the blinds properly, I could see into the room, but students could not see into the office. When I had student teachers, I could observe without anyone knowing I was in the building.

The biology prep room was longer than the width of Room 1007 and was at least ten feet wide. It was equipped with probably 40’ of counter height cabinets with doors and drawers, a wall of 8’ high and 24” deep cabinets for storing models, upper cabinets above much of the counters, two sinks, a seriously strong garbage disposal, and a door into the “Little Theater” that was locked from both sides with different keys.

When I first started teaching, teachers made all solutions, agar, etc., from scratch. Agar is essentially powdered seaweed. Nutrient agar is powdered seaweed with beef extract added. We had an autoclave for sterilizing the nutrient agar. To get it ready to sterilize, you added beef extract from a squeeze tube—like toothpaste—to agar flakes and water.

Popping that mixture into the autoclave for 15 min at 15 psi of steam produced sterile nutrient agar to pour into Petri dishes. I haven’t done that in over 35 years. It’s amazing how some things stick in your brain.

Next Almanac: Coaching Freshman Football

  

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