71 days and counting

Through my involvement with Alpha Phi Omega, the campus service fraternity, I sometimes help out with events for Boy Scouts. This weekend I'm volunteering at Merit Badge University where boy scouts come from all over the state (in this case to University of Iowa in Iowa City) and complete a variety of badges.

Drake hosted one a couple of years ago, but it wasn't nearly as big as this one. Here we have more than 1,500 scouts and 100 APO volunteers. It's insane.

Anyway, I was assigned to teach the Chemistry badge with a girl from the University of Iowa. Now, I'm a journalism and English major. So... the last time I had anything to do with Chemistry was probably six or so years ago.

Naturally, I simply assumed the U of I gal I was with had a science background and I could just be her little helper for the day.

Not so.

As it turns out, she's an English major, too. So there we were, two English majors, attempting to muddle through middle school-level chemistry, being shown up left and right by some high school boys who were actually IN chemistry.

Sadly, I had actually helped with the Chemistry badge at Drake two years ago. But my friend Ryan, a pharmacy student who had been around the chemistry block a time or two, did the teaching part. I got to be the clean-up helper/Vanna White assistant. And I am by no means complaining. Because while he explained the transfer of electrons in a chemical reaction, I wiped down desks.

Unfortunately, I had to actually teach stuff this time and had little to no idea what I was talking about. I tried and tried and tried to remember anything of what Ryan said, but couldn't. Heck, I tried to remember anything of what ANYBODY had ever once told me about chemistry.

I gave up. After we fumbled our way through the badge requirements and several failed experiments, we watched Bill Nye The Science Guy instead.