Australia's Science Forum

Hello all,

I desperatly need to vent a bit, so here we go... Yr 7s are currently doing some crime scene investigations here at my school, and as a part of that they are looking at different hair/fibres under the microscope. Well we are very fortunate here to have an excellent camera microscope, so I had set that up for the teacher in question with a perfect image of the mystery fibre found at the crime scene. So all is good until half way through the lesson when the teacher comes rushing into my office, where i am busy making agar plates, and says to me ' Sanscha I placed some other fibres and some other hair under the microscope but it wont come up, I dont know what to do' , sounding like it was the end of the world at least. So I then had to desert my precious agar plates to go and help her, and I literally dropped my chin cause she haddnt even put the fibre on a slide, she simply just dropped it on the stage!!! So I said to her' well of course you cant see it like that you need to mount it on a slide, its not a stereo microscope' . Her reply 'Oh really I have never done that before, could you please do it for me?' I was like what do you mean? 'I have never used microscopes before, I dont know how to mount slides or use a microscope'

What the F@&^%@%#&k!!! I thought they had to teach the students to do that??? I am speechless... Sometimes stuff like this makes you wonder what kind of idiots are out there pretending to teach our kids!

Ahhh thanks for that labbies, I feel much better now! Now I have to start my agar plates all over again...

Cheers Sanscha

Well how did they get through high school, let alone Uni without touching a microscope? Sounds like learned helplessness if you ask me!

Mind you we get biggish cherubs (as opposed to little ones) who get flung into teaching Science from multitude of other subject areas, like PE or Maths. Every year there's always a certain amount of babysitting goes on.

Cheers, K

I think we should all add 'babysitter' to our Job Descriptions! The ones I love are the teachers with equipment blindness.. you know you put gear out for them on a trolley, maybe even set it up - and they come chasing you for their gear because its "not there" ... and they arent all male!

How very very true.

Due to the shortage of teachers here in wa, we often have teachers from other backgrounds posing as science teachers when they have no background in science at all. Not their fault of course but I do worry that the kids are missing out on a lot.

I'm happy to help if asked with pracs but fair dinkum there are a few sandwiches short of a picknick out there.