Beware The Tactical Assault Cereal (Originally Posted November 2016)

I teach physics, chemistry, and literature to teenagers. And this week, I became frustrated enough to slowly chew and digest a 40-watt light bulb.

Not at the teenagers; they're fantastic. I love every quirky, goofy kid I've ever taught, and I will never understand the grumpy adults who make a conscious decision to go into teaching and then are just bumfuzzled to learn they're actually expected to hang out with students all day.

So it certainly wasn't the kids; I was angry at a textbook. But only metaphorically. The textbook in this case served as a surrogate for a culture that is now so obsessed with safety and terrified of litigation that we're doomed. I mean that literally; if nothing changes, our culture will cease to exist, dragged to the depths of irrelevance by the self-imposed chains of our own neuroses.

(William Blake would call them "mind-forg'd manacles," but he is a famous poet and I am just a dude with a blog.)

BUT JAY WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

Let me explain. I will have to be slightly dorky for a moment. If you don't want to read that, skip down to the line below.

*ahem*

Explaining the concept of atomic mass is sometimes difficult. This is because atoms don't have a standard number of neutrons. For example, consider carbon. Every carbon atoms has 6 protons; most have 6 neutrons.  But the number of neutrons can vary; 7- neutron carbon atoms are fairly common, and 8-neutron carbon atoms occur infrequently.

We call an atoms with identical numbers of protons but slightly different numbers of neutrons isotopes of one another. If you go look at a periodic table, you'll see the mass of carbon atoms given as 12.011.  The mass number of an atom is the total number of protons and neutrons. For carbon, that's typically 6 protons and 6 neutrons, which would add up to 12. So why the decimal?

The reason the mass number is a decimal is essentially because it would be really inefficient for us to look at each individual carbon atom and see how many neutrons are in there, so scientists have figured the AVERAGE mass of a carbon atom, which they use in all their calculations.

This can be difficult to explain to students, obviously.

One way to do it, which is pretty helpful and very simple, is to use snacks. Bring in, say, 10 cheerios. Have the kids take the mass of each individual cheerio, and then find the average. Have them use that to predict the mass of 100 cheerios, then weigh 100 cheerios and see how close they were.

This is a good way to get them thinking about how we use average mass, and how small differences in individual measurements sort of cancel each other out when we use averages in calculations.

---

There. The dorky stuff is over. You made it.

So there I am, prepping for the next day's lab, when I pull out the Officially Approved Lab Curriculum. And there it is.

A safety warning.

For a lab involving pretzels, cheerios, and Chex mix.

See the Big Scary Official Safety Precautions?

Here are my thoughts, enumerated for your convenience.

1. I understand why they included "don't eat food used in lab work." That one makes sense. There are chemicals in any lab that can hurt you. Eating in a lab is, generally, an awful idea.
2. However, the first step is "read and complete the lab safety form." Beyond "don't eat this crap," there should be no lab safety form for a procedure involving weighing cheerios.
3. LOOK AT THOSE SAFETY ICONS. JUST LOOK AT THEM.
4. One picture means "make sure you wear goggles during this lab." It is easy to tell because it is a picture of goggles. Because cheerios may leap aggressively into your eyeballs at any moment, as any respectable scientist knows. The instability and volatility of cheerios is the stuff of legend in many major labs.
5. Another picture means "make sure you wear an apron during this lab." This one actually makes sense, because it could theoretically possible for the snack mix, under the right circumstances, to NO WAIT IT'S ACTUALLY NOT POSSIBLE FOR SNACK MIX TO HURT YOU AT ALL BECAUSE NO ONE HAS EVER BEEN HARMED BY SNACK MIX IN THE HISTORY OF SNACK MIX.
6. If I am wrong, and snack mix is dangerous, we could solve ISIS in an hour. Airlift a million pounds of trail mix in, and watch them undo themselves with pretzel sticks and stale Chex.

How am I to get my students to take science (or school or adults in general) seriously when their lab manual informs them that they could be grievously injured by snack mix? And what happened in that editorial meeting? Because here's how it should have gone:

DUDE WHO WROTE THE MANUAL: "Okay. So this lab is about cheerios. I wasn't sure if we should tell them to wear goggles and aprons or not."

LITERALLY EVERY OTHER SENTIENT BEING IN THE ROOM: [sounds of violent slapping as they assault him]

And why, pray tell, does any of this matter?

It matters because it's not just high school lab manuals in rural Alabama that are overly worried about safety.  It matters because major universities, fearful of litigation and determined to make students feel as ensconced in the womb as possible, now include concepts like "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" in classes, to ensure that no student gets the Yucky Feels and sues them for some cockamamie American reason.

So kudos to the University of Chicago, which is (as far as I know) the first Officially Important University to tell people attempting to attend college to be a dang grown-up if you want to be taken seriously.

Which is sort of the point of life, right? You're gonna get knocked around a bit, you're gonna make a few mistakes, but in general you're going to come out alright if you just keep swinging.  There are no guarantees, of course, but it's pretty dang likely you're not going to be killed or irreparably maimed by your campus environment, your professor's words, or your lab teacher's cheerios.

Risk it.