Thank your science teachers while you still can

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One day this summer I was washing dishes when I discovered my son had placed in the sink a dirty bowl that still contained a popsicle stick and a napkin. He should have known what was coming. I held up the stick and the napkin.

“What don’t we put down the sink?” I asked, hoping he’d remember prior admonitions. He didn’t, so I continued: “We don’t put insoluble solids down the sink. Say it with me: Insoluble. Solids.” Again, a blank expression. “Insoluble means that they don’t dissolve. Wood and paper don’t dissolve. Solids are not liquids or gases. Wood and paper are solids. So, what don’t we put down the sink? Insoluble solids.”

At this point, he probably asked whether he could go watch Paw Patrol, because he’s 5.

Maybe it’s foolish of me to use slightly scientific jargon to teach kitchen etiquette to someone who still thinks dogs can fly helicopters. But I will always, always think of what should stay out of the drain as insoluble solids. And that’s because of my ninth grade science teacher, Ms. Newsom—who, I learned a few weeks ago, recently passed away at age 79.

I can say without reservation that she was one of the most influential teachers I’ve ever had. My first introduction to her came when I was her student in a course called Introductory Physical Science, or IPS, which was basically chemistry, physics, and biology rolled into a neat little ninth grade package. After IPS ended I continued to learn from her, as she also coached our school’s Science Olympiad team and was the faculty adviser to the Newspaper Club. For Ms. Newsom, “ninth grade science teacher” was more than a title. This is a little hard to explain, but she was the sort of person who, if you had asked me to briefly describe her as a human being, I would have said she was a ninth grade science teacher. She just exuded that aura: a friendly, open, didactic, pragmatic woman who sometimes wore a broad-brimmed gardening hat, and no matter how hectic a room of 30 freshmen became she was always firmly in control. She was named teacher of the year, at one point became president of the national Science Olympiad, and helped our school—a middle-of-the-road public high school in suburban Delaware—flourish.

And yet.

It’s been 28 years since I graduated, and in that time, I never once emailed her to tell her what a great teacher she had been. I never looked her up on social media or tried to find her contact information. I went off to college, graduated with a degree in molecular biology, started grad school, earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology, started writing this column, worked at a biotech company, worked for the federal government. I got married, had three kids, bought a house, bought a pinball machine, adopted cats. Life moved forward. I took her lessons into everything I do. And especially in this age of abundant information, looking her up and sending a message of thanks would have taken me five damn minutes.

She taught us “Do as you oughta; add acid to wata.” In case it’s unclear in print, that last word is a deliberate mispronunciation of “water,” and you have to trust me that it sounds better out loud. At least, until you pronounce the word with my school’s native Delaware accent, and it comes out as “wooder,” which has to complete the rhyme by making “oughta” sound more like “ooder,” and by this point you’ve completely forgotten what you were doing with acid.

She assigned us “the sludge,” for goodness sake. That was a legendary ninth grade lab. Older students spoke about it with reverence. We each received a bottle of greenish blackish goo and we had a few weeks, using all the lab techniques we’d learned—filtration, distillation, titration, you name it—to identify all of the ingredients in the bottle. That lab taught us, maybe for the first time, that science doesn’t just mean mixing X and Y to make what you know will be Z; it means learning enough practical methods to solve a mystery without a road map. My friend Steve and I spent an entire weekend writing up our lab report in a unique style (including an audio cassette in which we described our lab techniques in Beavis and Butt-Head voices—hey, it was the early ’90s). We went completely overboard not because we needed to, but I think because we had felt Ms. Newsom’s exuberance for the sludge, and we wanted to respond in kind.

The sludge wasn’t even the coolest lab we did that year. That honor goes to the Rube: an assignment to build a Rube Goldberg machine and run it in front of the class. Hands down, whole career, the Rube was my favorite science project I’ve ever done. For three glorious weeks, I met with my team and built this excruciatingly complicated gizmo, a monument to plywood and hot glue, with no fewer than 61 individual steps. Even though our machine caught fire during the classroom demo (I continue to blame my teammate Steve for being overly generous with the lighter fluid while cackling “huh huh” in a Beavis voice—and I blame all of us, I suppose, both for introducing a machine component that needed lighter fluid and for trusting it to Steve), the Rube was a defining experience in my development as a scientist. I still think of it as the most excited I’ve ever felt about a science project, and when choosing a career, a little part of me knew I had to become a scientist on the slim chance that such a path could recreate that excitement.

I could have told her this when she was alive. I could have looked her up, called, emailed. I could have let her know how her lessons have never left me. I could have thanked her for her wisdom, her imagination, her kindness. I could have told her that, as a science communicator, I understand how challenging it can be to convince children that science is the most fun part of their day. I could have told her that she transformed an obligatory class like IPS into a creative experience I’ll never forget.

I could have told her all of these things any time in the past 28 years. I could have told her all of these things last month.

And yet.

I’ve taught classes myself, and almost none of my students have looked me up as adults to follow up in any way. I get it now. We don’t think of teachers as needing any kind of follow-up. We think we can move on after we’ve finished receiving their services. We don’t think our own success or gratitude will matter to them, or, to be completely honest, we just don’t think about them much at all.

Ms. Newsom, you taught us that an object at rest tends to stay at rest. I suppose a high school graduate mired in the inertia of daily life tends to stay in the inertia of daily life.

You taught us how to calculate an atom’s charge, why mass differs from weight, how to balance a ceramic crucible above a Bunsen burner. You taught us lessons we’ve forgotten and lessons we’ll never forget. You taught us to love science almost as much as you did.

And yet.

I can’t tell you how influential you were, because I missed my chance. But it’s a mistake I won’t make twice.

While writing this article, I tracked down Harry Kreider, my 12th grade Advanced Placement Biology teacher. (It was easier than I thought—maybe because Delaware only has, like, five people.) If Ms. Newsom introduced me to high school science, Mr. Kreider was the other bookend. He had secured some kind of grant to let us try gel electrophoresis, a DNA-viewing technique that felt like rocket science at the time. I remember making him laugh when I asked whether crossing two wild-type genes would yield Gene Wilder. He and Ms. Newsom were among the few teachers I invited to my high school graduation party.

Mr. Kreider, it turns out, is still alive and has email. I’m going to send him a message right now.

If you had a special teacher whose energy and enthusiasm set you on your way to a career in science, I highly recommend you do the same.

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