On the first day of 5th grade, I and the 23 other little, excited 11-year-olds from Mrs. Lewiston's 4th grade class found out that we would be taught for the next year by a Ms. Calamine--the same woman.Over the summer, she had gotten a divorce, lost a significant amount of weight, and colored her hair from it's original dark raven color to jet-black with a blue-ish tint.
She was a great teacher--smart, fun, and interesting. She was strict, but she also made us feel cared for, and the two things together made her students perform better.
She was someone whom 11-year-olds were dying to impress. For instance, a group of girls once taped several pieces of paper together and wrote out all of the zeroes in a googol (all 100 of them), and gave it to her as a gift.
Over the two years I spent in her classes, she read aloud the entire Black Cauldron series and the Dragonseeds series. I remember being enamored with the way she sounded when she read to us. At the end of her sentences, she would lilt medially, which sounds similar to a news reporter on NPR. When I was 11, though, it just sounded smart.
But I never really impressed Mrs. Lewiston, and I believe I was someone who made Ms. Calamine worry.
When I first moved to South Boulder in the summer before third grade, I was immediately unpopular. Or, perhaps I was just more aware of it because I missed my friends.
I began to slip as a student right around that time, but I established the pattern that would stick with me until the day I walked out of high school ungraduated. While my general studies were abysmal, I showed promise in the areas I was interested in. Both my 4th and 5th grade years, it was science.
The yearly science fair was a special event at my school, comparable to Field & Track day or the holiday concert. Kids planned for it months in advance, and they worked countless hours cutting out pictures of tidal waves or tooth decay and pasting them to tri-fold paperboard backdrops.
We also had a train enthusiast in our class named Iver, who would always make eerily realistic models of familiar places with the creative addition of something threatening. Pointing down one of the hills, he would explain, "This is what Boulder Canyon would look like if we had an erupting volcano among the Foothills." Then he'd pour a cup of vinegar into an unseen receptacle and fiery-orange foamy lava would pour down the mountain, covering Pearl Street and Crossroads Mall.
In fourth grade, I did the plants-love-music experiment. The classical music plant, which sat on my bedside table for a month, grew the fastest by far, but it also got me hooked on sleeping to music. The rock & roll plant sat out in the garage, and it didn't grow very much at all.
To me, this was science. Nevermind the fact that my room was very sunny and the garage was stuffy and dark.
The next year, though, was especially lonely for me. After two years at my new school, I had given up on being popular, and the kids gave up on me becoming cool. Thus, I spent a lot of time at the library.
At one point, I decided that I wanted to test the effectiveness of vitamins. My mother was obsessive about our diet and nutrition, and she was always talking about vitamins, but I realized that I didn't really know much about them. What is it, exactly, that they do for us?
So I set to work reading vitamin books. Some claimed that vitamins would improve skin tone and promote healing. Others claimed to ward off illness and boost immunity. I wasn't willing to wound myself or catch a cold to prove either of these claims, so I had to find a different claim to test. Vitamin B12, according to one book, was supposed to improve memory and retention, and I thought up a way to test it.
That weekend, my mom took me to the art supply store to buy a large sheet of foam-core and the pet store to buy two white mice. I kept them separated in their wire cage by inserting a piece of foam-core in the center. I fed them the same things. They both had a wheel to walk on, and they both showed the same amount of energy and curiosity.
With the rest of the foam-core, I made a fairly complex maze. There were dead-ends and loop-backs and only one correct way to the end. Then I ran both of the mice 25 times to establish a baseline. Both mice got it right a few times, but only after lengthy periods of inactivity and aimless wandering. I decided that a 5-minute run was the maximum allowable.
These time-outs frustrated me. I remember feeling like they weren't focusing on the object of the exercise. Instead, both Tiny and Rascal sat and pooped a lot, and they liked to pee on the run.
After their trial runs, I dissolved a pink vitamin B12 tablet in the water bottle hanging into Tiny's cage. Then I put tap water in Rascal's cage.
For the next two weeks, I ran the mice 10 times every day, and they both seemed to become familiar with the feeling of being in a maze. Yet Tiny was the only one who showed improvement. In fact, near the end of the two weeks, Tiny was running the maze in 45 seconds, which, as compared to Rascal, who still sat listlessly in the dead ends for minutes on end, was undeniably a learning improvement.
The experiment got a lot of attention at the science fair. I remember someone asking me where I had heard about this experiment, and I told him, "I read about vitamin B12 in a book."
"But the experiment... Where did you get it from?"
"Well... I made it up."
He didn't seem to believe me.
At the end of the science fair, I was awarded the blue ribbon and asked to take my experiment to some sort of higher-level competition. I know I lost at that next level, but I don't remember much about the experience.
For a lackluster student, my expirement was something that made me very proud. I felt an overwhelming affection for my mice, and I spent a lot of time playing with them and making improvements to their cages. It had become routine to dissolve the vitamin pill in Tiny's water, so I kept on doing it. I was also curious to see how smart he would become.
In the middle of the night one week later, my mom came into my room and woke me up. "Ross!" she squealed while shaking me, "Come see this!"
I got up and followed her into the hallway outside my room. She pointed at the half-open door to the bathroom. I could hear a little sound like nibbling on metal (something you become used to when you live with mice), but I couldn't determine its source. Then, my mom whispered, "The doorknob."
I looked closer, and there was Tiny sitting up on top of the doorknob, chewing at the metal.
Alarmed, I said, "HOW'D HE GET UP THERE?"
"Look at the towel," my mom said.
There, directly below the doorknob, was a towel laying crumpled on the floor. It was the same towel I used in the mornings... the same one I left hanging on the doorknob every day.
It all became clear: Tiny had 1) found a way out of his cage, 2) wiggled under the door of my room, 3) climbed the towel, which hung 1-2 inches off the floor, and 4) managed to stay on the doorknob when the towel slipped off.
My mom picked Tiny up off the doorknob and cupped him in her hands as if to put him out of her mind for a moment. "I think it's time we stop feeding him vitamins, sweetie," she said gently.
I put him back in his cage, and there was Rascal, who seemed aware of Tiny's return but ashamed as well, as if he knew that Tiny was leaps and bounds ahead of him.
