Overdose? Part 1

After my first week of teaching Biology to second year high school (former Filipino streets kids) students in Cebu, it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t going to be enough to teach them theoretical things, and that if I were to try keeping them engaged I would have to somehow come up with something practical for them to do. There were however limitations at Nehemiah – for example, one doesn’t have the normal set of science apparatus which as a science student I had completely taken for granted. There is also no such thing as a science lab – the importance of which I was unaware until now.

And in my Biology classes, I knew it would not do to learn about animal and plant cells by only drawing diagrams on the blackboard without having a look at how such cells actually look. Unfortunately, the only microscope they had at the Nehemiah school is no longer functioning, so short of finding a huge sum to buy a microscope, we would need to be creative and improvise somewhat.

Going through the Biology textbook, dense with long definitions and historical facts which seemed a bit obscure for Filipino students in the 21st century, I was relieved to find an experiment which might just do the job. The hypothesis was this: Paracetamol prolongs the life of plants such as roses.

So, at the start of the second week of school, armed with a dozen of red roses which we bought on the roadside of a church, two tablets of Paracetamol and three empty 1 litre Coke bottles, I presented the project to the excited second years. We got busy filling up the bottles (estimating the same volume as best as we could, though without a measuring cylinder!), cutting the thorny roses (with normal paper cutting scissors) and crushing the Paracetamol (using a plastic bowl and a spoon from the kitchen).

The textbook did not specify how much Paracetamol to use, so I just thought let’s go for the usual human dosage of two tablets (which admittedly isn’t exactly very scientific of me, oh well).

Vaguely remembering that I didn’t use to make much connection between theory and practice in school, I tried to help the class apply what they had been learning the previous week – about scientific thinking and how experiments work, testing them on why they thought a certain way, and keeping the questioning until they gave me an explanation for their answers.

The second years share the chapel area with the first years, the classes being separated by a few blue hand-painted dividers. The chapel was also accessible by students from other classes during recess, so conducting the experiment in their classroom without risking having all the rose petals plucked out by an enthusiastic 9-year-old was impossible. This meant that each day I would have to ask a couple of students to help me transport the bottles up and down from our room on the third floor to the classroom in the basement.

Each day the students examined the roses with excitement and anticipation, but as the week went on, it transpired that perhaps we were discovering a different kind of result than in our hypothesis. The roses in the bottle labelled Bottle B: Experimental 1 – Paracetamol were looking very tired, and it seemed that they would actually be the first ones to bid us goodbye.

Next week I will write about what happened next!