Cohesion courtesy of Wal-Mart

Drops on a Penny

I taught the properties of water this week, so of course I had my heart set on doing the Drops on a Penny lab to demonstrate cohesion and adhesion. Unfortunately it came as no surprise that our school, having such limited resources, had neither eye droppers nor pipettes. Determined to do this lab with my classes, I thought I'd try my hand at getting donations or discounts from local pharmacies, so on Sunday I drove around in search of a cheap source of eye droppers.

Walgreens initially sounded very promising. The pharmacist told me that only the store manager could give the kind of discount I was asking for, but that he was usually extremely receptive to teacher requests. However, the extended hours my school forces me to keep prevented me from ever getting the chance to meet him. With few other options, I decided to ask over at Wal-Mart.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were very accommodating. As it turns out, Ms. Ruby Johnson, the manger of our local Wal-Mart, just happened to be a North Panola graduate. We spent almost an hour talking about what the school was like in her time and our thoughts on the recent incident that has led to so much unwanted media coverage. In the end, I wound up with a set of eye droppers at no cost to myself.

I briefly toyed with the idea of offering extra credit to any student that wrote Ms. Johnson a thank you letter, but then I decided that doing something nice is much more rewarding when it's not done for a grade. Instead, I merely suggested to my students that if they enjoyed the activity that we did, they should thank Ms. Johnson. Without her help our activity wouldn't have been possible, and they were all well aware of that. No grade was attached to doing a good deed, and yet I had quite a few students turn in letters the next day, some of them written quite skillfully.

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