A Learning Experience

 

Saturday, October 20, 2012 – A Learning Experience

The periodic table of the elements has obviously grown since I sat in Miss Newman’s chemistry class nearly half a century ago at West Hempstead High School.  (Where did all of those new elements come from?)  My high school chemistry teacher was one of those legendary figures that terrorizes her students.  I spent hours and hours doing the homework she assigned and studying for impossibly hard tests.  My grades in her class were the lowest grades I’ve ever received in my academic history.  But I must have learned some chemistry, as evidenced by my passing the end-of-course New York State Regents Exam with flying colors.  Chemistry was not my favorite subject, and at the end of that school year, I gladly freed up hundreds of brain cells to store facts that I found more interesting. 

Now, however, after subbing for a chemistry teacher at AHS yesterday, I will proudly exhibit my newfound (or newly rediscovered) knowledge of the subject.  First of all, I can tell you the distinguishing characteristics of metals, semi-metals, and non-metals.  I know that semi-metals are also called metalloids.  I’ve acquired a new word in my vocabulary:  ductile (able to be stretched into a wire).  This is a physical property of metals.  And there are 7 diatomic elements, which means they’re always never alone.  Of course, I learned much, much more than I can possibly share here.

Impressed?  I certainly was.  If I could gain all of this information from one 90-minute class (that I repeated three times), think of all I could learn over the course of a year!  This just confirms that I have a serious addiction to learning.  It’s been one of the defining characteristics of my whole life.  That’s why teaching was so satisfying for me, and why subbing is turning out to be an important activity in my retirement.  While I feel right at home in an ESOL or history classroom, I’m looking forward to opportunities to sub for less familiar subjects, such as physics, which I never took.  And I’ll even get paid for learning!  What could be better?