The Glory Of Being A Teenager (Part 8 of 12)

The first day of school was really just a time to get acquainted with the teacher and to find out what we were going to learn that year and how we were going to learn it. Not much real school work was done on the first day. However, a few teachers assigned homework. After the first day though, we settled into the routine of school. My over-all memories of high school are great. Although I maintained slightly above a B average in my years of high school, I did my best with out over-stressing on everything. I studied for tests and if I did good, that was great, and if I did bad, well, I gave it my best shot. As a girl later told me, “Don’t let school get in the way of your education.” I think all in all I came out of high school pretty well educated.
One memorable class was Honors Physics that I took in my Junior year. Mr. Duncan was our teacher. In that class I was nicknamed “Force” because some formula had the initials “B. I. L. = force.” When ever Mr. Duncan called on me, he always referred to me as “Force.” The rest of the class called me that, too. The whole science department was in an area of the school which had tiled floors. Whereas the math department was in an area of the school which was carpeted. Mr. Duncan was always saying things like, “In the imaginary world of mathematics, over there on the carpet . . . while over here on the tile, in the real world of physics . . . .” We also had fun by calling the physics students “the Physics Bunnies.” I loved the experiments we did. Once we converted water into oxygen and hydrogen, with electricity. Another time we put water into pop bottles and blew across the top to make certain notes. That was simple enough, but we had to calculate how much water to put in to sound a certain note. Since a large percentage of us were also band and orchestra students, we particularly enjoyed this experiment. Another time, some students built bridges out of balsa wood and the BYU civil engineering department came with a special machine that put weight on them to see how many pounds of pressure could be applied before they broke. The winner was over seven hundred pound of pressure. We also built little race cars which we powered by nothing else than a mouse trap. Mine had a large plastic fan blade that the mouse trap propelled downward and it cased a wind to shoot the car forward. It didn’t go very far, but everyone was amazed at my creative thinking.