My Musings

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Saturday, April 19, 2003

Lab Groups

Some of the labs we do in AP Bio are individual or two-person labs, but a lot of them require big groups of four people. When Mr. Logsdon said at the beginning of the year that we’d be allowed to pick our own groups, my first thought was to try to get in a group with Sam Weinberg. For you non-Bexley people who don’t know him, Sam is one of those guys whose immense intelligence is paralleled only by his laziness; he loves talking, explaining things to people, and just generally taking charge. For these reasons some people don’t seem to like him, but I think he’s pretty cool and I knew that our lab group would have no problems if Sam was in it, because he’d make sure everything went well.

I suppose I need to mention that I am abominably awful at doing science labs. You’d think they wouldn’t be so bad seeing as how they have step-by-step instructions that most moderately intelligent four year-olds could probably follow, but for me, complications always seem to arise and in the end the lab either fails completely or churns out pathetically wrong and nonsensical data.

My luck with lab partners has been as bad as my luck with the actual labs. Sophomore year—many of you have probably heard this story at least a thousand times already—Adam, after putting up with my incompetence all year and completing most of the labs himself, finally couldn’t take it any longer and excommunicated me from his lab group when I accidentally knocked his fruit fly gassing chamber on the floor and all of his fruit flies escaped. He went on to join Chelsea’s group and had great success there.

Last year, Andy was in my chemistry class. This might not seem significant to you until you consider the fact that starting in 7th grade, Andy and I had never been in one class together. So here it was, junior year, and finally we had the same class the same period—chemistry—and Mr. Minot was letting everybody in the class pick their own lab partners. That’s right—you could pick anybody in the class, and they’d be your lab partner! Isn’t that great? Doesn’t it just make you want to partner up with Boris, your best friend since fourth grade? Apparently not. Apparently it makes you want to partner up with Brian Moenter, somebody you’re not even remotely friends with and with whom you’ve never talked to before or since, leaving Boris to stand there and gape open-mouthed with no other choice than to wander around and wait to see who the other loser was that couldn’t find a lab partner and partner up with him. I ended up with Phillip Berg, who moved away in the middle of the year and left me utterly partnerless, at which point I became a rogue lab-doer who prayed at the beginning of every lab that some lab group would pity me enough to let me do the lab with them. Often I ended up working with Dara’s group or with Julie’s group…but never with Andy.

In fact there was only one time in the history of mankind that I ever worked with Andy on a lab. One day Brian was absent on the day of a lab. I didn’t have a partner; Andy didn’t have a partner. The situation was perfect. At last we would work together. I eagerly walked up to Andy, almost shaking with excitement, and asked him breathlessly if he wanted to be my partner. I was fully expecting him to eagerly agree—surely the fact that he had partnered up with Brian at the beginning of the year was some sort of sick accident!—so I was very surprised when his face immediately turned sour and he hesitantly stammered, “Um, sure!…yeah!…I suppose you can work with me and Megan…” making it painfully evident that he would rather have carved a replica of the Venus de Milo out of his own jawbone with a chainsaw than do a lab with me. The thing is, I approached him so quickly that in order to have gotten another lab partner without my knowing it, he must have asked Megan at least a day in advance. I swear he was doing everything he could to avoid being my lab partner. And in that instance I was the one who ended up feeling bad about it, because when the three of us tried to do the lab, it soon became apparent that three people were way too much and Megan left the group, which really sucked because I had basically kicked her out. So I finally got to work with Andy, but at the cost of feeling like a complete jerk. And we really screwed up that lab, too.

Anyway, my point is, I wanted to work with Sam. But on the day of the first lab, I was too slow in getting to him and he found another group before I ever even approached him. I groaned in frustration and was about to resign myself to whatever terrible lab fate awaited me when Amy (or perhaps it was Eleni) saved me. “Boris, do you want to be in our lab group?” she said. The group would consist of me, Ming, Eleni, and Amy. Ming I was friends with; Eleni I didn’t know very well, but she seemed okay; and Amy used to be my least favorite person alive back in elementary school, but over time my reasons for hating her eroded and grew more and more vague until finally I had to admit that she was pretty nice. I had nothing against any of the members, and also Mr. Logsdon had said that the groups were by no means set in stone—we could even have different lab groups for every lab if we felt like it—so it made sense for me to hook up with the girls. “Sure!” I said.

Several months and many labs later, I was liking my lab group a lot less than I had at first. For one thing, Amy was never there, and while I don’t resent that at all or blame her for it, doing four-person labs with only three people is not fun. It also turned out that Eleni was only slightly better at doing labs than I was, which wasn’t very good, and while Ming was fairly decent, she spent a great deal of time wrapping random objects in Parafilm. When she ran out of objects to wrap, she would just take out the Parafilm squares and stare dreamily at them while stretching them as far as she could, one square after another, kind of like a chain smoker, actually, only a lot weirder. Naturally, most of our labs were utter failures. Mr. Logsdon fortunately doesn’t dock points for messing up the procedure and/or getting really bad data, but botching the labs again and again began to get irritating.

Aside from the repeated bio lab failures, another thing that began early in the year was a “bio group” that still stands to this very day and consists of me, Marina, Julie, Ming, Lila, and Josh. The idea was that we’d get together and study biology, but in reality the bio study sessions take the cake for complete and unabashed lack of any productivity whatsoever. Our efforts to prepare for looming tests somehow bring us from biology to the following conversation in an unnaturally high frequency of cases:

“Dude, did you know that so and so [from BBYO] hooked up with so and so [also from BBYO]?”
“Really?! So and so?! With SO AND SO?!?!”
“Yeah!”
“How do you know?!”
“Because so and so [also from BBYO] told me.”
“How do you know they’re not lying?”
“Because so and so [one of the hooker-uppers] told so and so, and so and so told me.”
“[still a bit suspicious. After all, it’s so and so we’re talking about here. Ugh.] Well, if you say so…”
“It’s true! I’m not lying.”

If not that, then we either hear from Marina’s endless of stock of stories involving hot guys she fell in love with but never managed to get on, or from Julie’s endless stock of stories involving guys she never really liked all that much but still somehow always ended up making out with anyway. [Marina's comments on the above statement: “Okay, that makes me sound like I’m a dirty whore, but I'm really not."] Lately, thongs have become another popular topic for discussion. Needless to say, very little studying actually gets done and actually I think Ming got fed up and quit coming ages ago. Oddly enough, Julie is the only one who ever actually succeeds in forcing the group to do anything, but unfortunately she’s always leaving early for one reason or another—she’s got homework to do, or she has to watch Alias at 9 o’clock, or she needs to go home and study for a big biology test tomorrow—and all work ceases the moment she leaves. In short, we don’t get a lot done, but we have fun, and so a few months into the school year I became better friends with everybody in the group, most notably Josh and Lila, who are also in my 4th period bio class. They were in a lab group with Ross and Elan and it turned out that they were just as annoyed with their partners as Ming and I were with ours, so we decided to ditch our current groups and form a new lab group with the four of us. We didn’t think it’d be a big deal; after all, Mr. Logsdon allowed and even advised people to form new lab groups if they didn’t like the ones they currently had.

I don’t know if four intelligent people have ever been so wrong. Switching lab groups almost caused a riot. Probably our biggest mistake was that we didn’t inform our group members of our plans in advance; the bombshell was dropped on the same day of a new lab, so our former group members had absolutely no idea what was coming. Boy were they pissed. In effect, we forced Amy and Eleni to team up with Elan and Ross, an arrangement that apparently pleased none of them, and our move was widely regarded as the biggest scandal to ever hit AP biology. Ross went so far as fling water at Josh and make him the receiving end of a very nasty word and possibly also a very nasty gesture; Amy, meanwhile, gave Ming and me the following speech in a quiet but very bitter voice: “Boris and Ming, we just want you to know that we think what you guys did was really mean, and we’re glad that you switched groups anyway because they are a lot better than you are, and we don’t like you anymore.” Yes, those were tense times. People muttered about our daring coup behind our backs for a long time afterwards. But eventually the antipathy began to subside, and even the ditched group members got over it. Heck, Elan asks me for help with homework all the time. “Ahhhhhh I have no idea what the hell I’m supposed to do!!” is an AIM message I often receive from him late at night. Sometimes I even help Elan with bio labs, ironically enough. Usually, though, I end up getting really tired and going to sleep before Elan finishes asking me for help and then he gets mad at me.

So anyway, my point is, I’m against the movement towards “hands-on learning.” I’d rather read about an actual, useful experiment that an actual, useful scientist performed at some point than go and do one myself. Blank and pointless regurgitation of facts all the way, baby.

.: posted by Boris 11:18 AM

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