You may not know that I began my working life after college as a science teacher. The first building I taught in was Frances M. Grass Middle School. That school no longer exists. It was torn down and replaced with a new building on the same piece of property. The new building is Heritage Middle School, in West St. Paul, MN. I taught 7th and 8th grade science at Heritage for two years in room 143, which is located in the middle “house”, on the first floor of the building.

Why am I telling you this? Because I had a chance to re-live it a little last week when I visited Heritage again for the first time in more than 7 years. Talk about a trip down memory lane. It was interesting to see what was the same and what had changed. One thing that was fun for me to see was that all the work I went through to make sure the classroom I taught in was left neatly organized was apparently appreciated. For the most part, the teacher that replaced me when I resigned left the stuff in the same place I left it, and all the labels I put on the cabinet doors are still there. Wow. That is pretty cool.

As a science teacher, there was a lot to like about that room. Let me try to paint a picture of it for you, since I never took a photograph of it. The room is rectangular, with the front of the room being on the long side of the rectangle. It was designed to seat 32 students at the 16 tables, with two students per table. The perimeter of the room was lined with counters with cabinets underneath, and the back of the room also had cabinets above the counters. We used the counters for lab work as well as a place to hold my various animal cages. At different points in time I had things like a guinea pig cage, a mouse cage, and a freshwater aquarium. On a side note, I also had had iguanas when I was teaching, but they lived in special enclosures that I kept out in the large common space right outside of my classroom. This room is also equipped with a private storage room that is lined with cabinets, and a small refrigerator. This is where I kept my beakers, graduated cylinders, hot plates, and all the other interesting scientific equipment we’d need for my classes.

Being a science room, it has the typical safety features you would want if you were a science teacher. It has a tile floor, which in this case was the typical institutional square vinyl tiles. That made it easy to clean up the inevitable spills when we did lab work. It has a demonstration table in the front of the room with a heat and chemical resistant top on it. On one end of that, was an emergency eye wash station, embedded in the top of table . On that same end there is also a slop sink with hot and cold running water, for easy cleanup after demonstrations. Also, at the front of the room is the fume hood, which came in handy when I was dealing with smelly stuff like petrie dishes with bacteria cultures in them. In the back corner of the room (on the left as you were facing the back of the room) was an emergency shower, which was fed by a 1 inch water pipe, so if you turned it on, the water flowed hard enough to knock you down if you weren’t prepared for it. Right underneath the emergency shower was another eye wash station. Amazingly, I never had a student pull the ring to activate the emergency shower. That corner also had a fire exit that led directly outside, which came in handy when I brought Emmet to school with me. There was also a fire blanket and a chemical fire extinguisher right near the classroom door.

Now that you have a picture of the room, picture this: Me at the front of the classrom saying, “OK class, let’s get out our lab journals.”

Scary, huh?

–Pete