Overdose? Part 2

By Thursday, the second years were looking rather despondent as they examined the roses in Bottle B, while I tried desperately to encourage them to keep making their observations and wait and see what happened in the end.

On Friday, with the Paracetamol roses looking very distinctly the deadest of all, we talked through the experiment as a class, and concluded that we should repeat the experiment, on the assumption that, maybe, the dosage of Paracetamol was too high. For the new experiment therefore, we would use more bottles, with more roses, and also have some bottles with smaller amounts of Paracetamol.

Over the weekend, perplexed, I decided to do what I should have done much earlier – a Google search to find the amount of Paracetamol I should have used! However, instead of finding hundreds of websites with immediate answers I found only one which claimed that rather than Paracetamol, it was actually Aspirin which contained a particular chemical that acts as a plant hormone, the presence of which makes the plant retain water better, and hence the growth process slows down. This site also explained that often people can confuse Aspirin with Paracetamol as both drugs are painkillers available over the counter in pharmacies.

Evidently the textbook, written by some PhD expert in Biology (who had never met, or perhaps never even been a child), proved to be completely unreliable in this instance.

It was already past 7pm on Sunday night when I made this “discovery” so Rob and I made a quick dash to the nearest pharmacy to get some Aspirin. The next morning I woke up with a new nervousness – I had to convince the second years that we were mistaken the first time, and also the second time when we reassessed the experiment, and now we needed to redesign it again. I wondered if they were going to distrust science teachers from now on.

Rob was, on the other hand, cheerful and upbeat. He thought the best kind of experiment was the sort for which you didn’t necessarily know what the result might be. Which I agreed – to an extent – but nonetheless I thought it would be rather unsettling for a bunch of young minds which were beginning to find their bearings in education.

The second years, to their credit, were understanding and their enthusiasm didn’t vanish as I explained my findings to them. They came up with a good set up for yet another experiment and this time we would have two bottles containing different amounts of Paracetamol, two bottles containing different amounts of Aspirin and one bottle as the control.

So, in our last week of teaching at Nehemiah, we launched Experiment Take Two. By the end of the week, whilst all the other roses had wilted, some of the ones immersed in water with dissolved Aspirin, though rather tired-looking, were still alive.

I couldn’t help but notice that the students were relieved to observe a result that made some sense.

Perhaps our next project should be to write to the authors of the textbook with the findings of our Real Experiment. Suggested hypothesis: Aspirin, not Paracetamol, prolongs the life of roses.