Part 1 is here

In Part 1 I mentioned that my 7th grade science teacher had a tendency towards public humiliation. Imagine taking a quiz and your teacher reading the grades out loud the next day. How would you feel if you had the lowest grade in the class?

Well, she used to do that. Quite often, in fact.

Being a good student, the only times I was the butt of her humiliating commentary was when the class would be assigned into random lab groups and I would end up with morons who couldn’t do their share.

The year’s major lab project was the building of solar-powered cars. Our teacher had obtained one solar panel for each group as well as a small motor, some wires, alligator clips, and 4 wheels. These she handed out to each group and showed the class a movie about that solar car race they have in Australia every year. That’s about all of the instruction she gave us.

The kids in my group were a guy with two broken arms (he got hit by a car and broke one arm then on another day he got hit by another car and broke the other) and a kid who barely talked and looked like he had a pound of grease stored in his hair. They spent the first day figuring out how to make our car look cool like the cars in the video.

Our car looked nothing like this.

So after one day of work our group divided up the labor as follows: Broken arm boy was to collect 2 liter bottles and Styrofoam to use as the body. Quiet kid wanted to draw graphics and design the body shape. I got stuck figuring out how to make the motor turn the axles and how to mount the axles on the “frame” which was just a piece of balsa wood.

By week 2 all we had was a balsa wood sheet with 4 wheels and an engine hooked up to it. It crawled forward pathetically slowly when a 9V battery was hooked up to the motor.

The body that quiet kid and other kid had designed…was basically half a 2 liter bottle with flames painted on it. The problem with this was oh, I don’t know, maybe that it’s impossible to mount a solar panel on top of a rounded surface. That and the fact that the solar panel was so huge it covered up all of the “graphics.” They hadn’t figured out any way to connect the body to the frame so it all fell apart when the car started moving anyway. We decided to ditch the body and just use a dixie cup to mount the solar panel to the frame. Our car looked stupid (motor exposed, wires sticking out all over.) but it was lighter and faster than any other car in the class.

When it came time for the class to go outside and race our cars the teacher (and I remember this PERFECTLY as if it were a TV show I watched last night) saying “I have disqualified one car from the race because it violates the rule that says all cars must have a body to compete” and pointing to our group. “You guys can still test your car but you have to do it off to the side.”

What an enormous mound of horse shit. She never gave us any “rules” at the beginning of the project. We skirted her preconceived notion of what a solar car should look like and built a lean, mean speed machine. She found an excuse to humiliate someone and she used it.

In the end, we were unsupervised while everyone raced their cars. We cheated and hooked a 9V battery up to ours. To those in the class who watched us run our “solar” car it appeared that it HAULED SOLAR ASS (all the cars went really slowly. 1 meter per minute, maybe. Ours was the least slow.)

I honestly never found out what grade we got. The race was on the 3rd to last day of school.