‘Science Teachers Don’t Cry’

John Addyman  |  john.addyman@yahoo.com

I know desperation … I’m a teacher.

Yes, it’s true. After decades out of the classroom, I got talked back into it last spring.

This time it was going to be different. I was in a non-public middle school, the classes were all small, the kids remarkably well-behaved and the principal was a ball of upbeat fire.

What could go wrong?

They say teachers are lifelong learners. I started learning all over again 10 minutes into the job when classes opened in September.

First, kids are different. Curriculum is different. Technology is way different. Teachers are different. Education is different. And because I had been out of a middle school classroom for what? — 43 years — I was different.

I found I had to invent a lot of things for class every day and I was teaching six subjects. When I started teaching in the 1960s, I had six classes a day with 45 kids in each class. Now in my new school, there weren’t 45 kids in the whole four grades of the middle school.

Along the way I found help from Cathy, the teacher I replaced, bless her heart, and from my colleague teachers: they knew what I was going through.

The day came in late January when I had to teach a genetics lab. Here I reached out for a resource to make the lab interesting, fun, educational and easy to do. I tapped an organization called Teachers Pay Teachers, which sells — for very little money — lessons invented and successfully used by other teachers.

Everything I needed to do in the lab — instructions, handouts, worksheets and colorful stuff — was in a $4 package.

And that’s why I found myself on the floor in our local Wegmans, crying.

Crying.

I’m not proud. I was desperate.

The exercise I bought is called “Gummy Bear Genetics” and it was developed by a middle school teacher in Illinois who goes by the pseudonym “BioHero.”

Beyond the four bucks needed to purchase the lab I had to do just one more thing — buy 256 gummy bears — yellow and green only.

“No problemo,” I said confidently to my teacher-sourcing self. “Piece of cake. Can of corn.

William Mattar and I got this.”

I don’t eat a lot of candy, but I’ve run through the part of our beloved Wegmans where they sell candy out of little bins — perfect, I thought to myself. I’ll just sashay over there and figure out some way to scoop gummy bears out of the bins, separate the yellow and green ones until I have enough and I’m home free. My kids will love this lab.

BioHero had foreshadowed this plan of mine with a caution: “I usually have to buy quite a bit of gummy bears.”

I’ve been a teacher a long time. I know when to ignore good advice.

BioHero should have extended her warning a little, to, “Ignore my advice at your peril.”

So here I was at Wegmans two whole days before the lab. It was a Sunday night with very few people in the store. I confidently walked — no, in truth I strode — right up to the places where all the candy bins were, looking for the ones I knew contained an abundance of gummy bears. I hadn’t quite figured out how I was going to cleanly separate the yellow and green ones from Wegmans’ vast supply of gummies, but I was confident I’d figure out that minor detail.

My wife had already gone to the other part of the store to get some salad stuff, so I was alone as I walked down the aisle.

But where were the bins of candies?

OMG! They were gone.

Wegmans had decided to package gummy bears in little plastic boxes. I couldn’t sort through a bin and pick out the yellow and green gummies I needed. I went down those two aisles four times. I went up and down every shelf. I picked up package after package, different sizes of gummies, different prices, different kinds (little ones and littler ones), sour ones, different-flavored ones.

“Oh no,” I said to myself as I slumped to the floor. “I have a problem. I’m going to go home tonight with umpty-jillion gummy bears and spend the rest of the night sorting through all the packages.”

I never cried too much when I taught science in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But there I was now with a tear rolling down my cheek.

“Science teachers don’t cry,” I said to myself.

I got off the floor just as my wife arrived and I told her the problem, showed her the little plastic boxes of Wegmans gummies and all the other packages of gummies. I showed her that each package seemed to contain just a few green or yellow gummies.

“How many packages are you going to buy?” she asked.

It took a while to answer that question.

We bought some of the bigger bags of gummies and emptied the shelf of the smaller packages. And I took them all home, walking out with my jacket pockets full to bursting with gummy bears.

I wondered what would happen if a police car stopped us on the way home and the police officer asked, “What do you have bulging in your pockets there, fella?”

“Gummy bears,” I’d answer sincerely.

“Sure,” he’d say.

We got home and later I realized I didn’t have time to separate the gummy bears that night and Monday night would be even busier — and the lab was Tuesday.

“Honey?”

“You’re not going to ask me to separate all those gummy bears on Monday, are you?” my wife asked.

I did.

And she did. She was once a teacher, too … and she knew desperation.

Bless all science teachers’ spouses.