Funny, the things you remember.

Years later, something triggers the memory, and, if you have time, the details come back.

I was in high school. Tenth grade. The science class that year was Biology.

The curriculum was arranged and graduated so that in four years you would cover everything.

In Math, we went from Algebra 1 in the 9th Grade, to Geometry in the 10th, Algebra II and Trigonometry in the 11th and Calculus in the 12th, our Senior Year.

In English, we read Shakespeare every year. In the 9th Grade, it was Julius Caesar. In the 10th, Romeo and Juliet. If we had a good teacher, and I did, she included A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice, where we learned to be tolerant if we weren’t already, and “the quality of mercy is not strained.” In the 11th Grade, we got into the tragedies with Macbeth. In the 12th, of course it was Hamlet. We did in-class readings. I was Hamlet. Some lucky classes with an ambitious teacher also added King Lear.

The rest of literature was also calibrated. 9th Grade to get your feet wet, maybe with Robert Frost. 10th Grade, general. 11th Grade, American Lit, 12th Grade, World Lit.

They wanted us to know everything.

It was the same with History. We went from General, to American History in the 11th Grade to World History in the 12th, with the added bonus of a semester of Civics, a required course to get us ready to vote because by the end of the Senior Year most of us were old enough.

That’s why, in the 10th Grade, we had Driver’s Ed, because the age for a learner’s permit was 15 ½.

And in Science, we went from General Science as Freshmen, Life Science Biology in the 10th Grade, Chemistry in the 11th and Physics in the 12th. Our 12th Grade Physics teacher had a Doctorate degree.

It was quality all the way. Our Calculus Teacher was imported from Denmark. Our French Teacher was imported directly from France. Our Industrial Arts Department was staffed with working professionals. And this was just a public high school!

And here is what I’m now remembering from 10th Grade Biology. The year culminated in a Science Fair where we displayed our Science Projects for Open House. An entire room was devoted to the display.

The Teacher helped us choose a topic. I was guided toward an ambitious endeavor which sounded interesting in the literature. I titled it “Ratiocination in Rats.” The pun betrays my English class tendency to infuse all classes and avenues of learning with words.

The Project required equipment and lots of time. I was never very good about organizing my time, and I became a master of disguise to cover up my short comings (yes, I was short) and my inherent laziness, which has been with me all my life, and a ready excuse for why I didn’t do more.

I bought the equipment from 3-S, Student Science Services, in Glendale, a store that catered to students in science classes anywhere in Greater Los Angeles. Science Teachers all knew the place, and sent their students. The store staff was knowledgeable and helpful and knew their stuff and made recommendations. I patronized them over the years when I was teaching science to my Fifth Graders at Longfellow Elementary in Pasadena.

The store, Triple S, had test tubes and retorts and chemicals, including dangerous concentrated acids. You had to show documentation to buy those. I loved the Erlenmeyer flasks.

I learned how to use a retort. From my English classes, I knew a retort as a sharp and witty response. In Chemistry, the same word now referred to the glass apparatus used for distillation. Apparently reducing down to the basics united the disparate meanings of the same word.

I bought what I needed, and then got two rats from a pet store. They were sold in pairs. A matched set, big white rats, a boy rat and a girl rat. I named them Socrates and Xantippe, his wife rat.

My Father helped me build the apparatus. It was along the lines of the rat maze which is popularly known.

The maze, open at the top so you could see and chart the progress, was designed so a rat, kept hungry, was released at the start, eagerly explored the passages, going from one dead end, backing up, going down another dead end, until finally reaching the end where the food was. The rat could probably smell it, and it drove him crazy enough to keep going until.

You would time the rat, record his passage, then start the process again to see if he remembered, avoiding the dead ends, and rushed to the reward. If he did it faster, that was evidence that he remembered and learned. You could graph the higher order of rat learning.

My experiment was similar but different.

An enclosure with a glass ceiling so you could watch the progress, ended in a wall with three swinging doors. The doors had different symbols on them. Two were locked. One door would swing inward when you pushed it and behind it, food.

The joyous rat would eat. Then you removed him, still hungry, in mid-chew, changed the order of the unlocked door, then re-inserted the rat and watched him try the doors.

The idea was (as it was with the maze) that if he more frequently chose correctly, the door with the symbol he recognized as unlocked for food, he was displaying higher order thinking, real rat ratiocination. Some researchers even argued that if the winning symbol were presented as letters spelling words, like “food”, the rat was learning language, even English. We all knew that Doctor Dolittle would “talk to the animals,” and they would talk to him.

When I later taught in elementary school, I chose not to teach the primary grades because I was not convinced that rote learning was the only way. Children are not rats. Not even mice. Not literally.

The rat experiment took me so long to assemble that I ran out of time to do enough trial runs to collect enough statistics to draw any sort of conclusion.

So I made the whole display look as professional as I could, included articles about the back story of actual experimentation. I included a graph of what the results would look like. This was not the first time that science has fudged the results.

The display drew attention, because it was more involved than most of the high school “experiments,” and the presentation caught the eye. The subject made you stop and think (audience ratiocination).

One interested viewer asked, “What conclusions were you able to draw about the way rats think?”

I answered, employing my verbal experience acquired on the debate team, “Conclusions are yet to be determined.” I sounded like a politician. “I have a concept of a conclusion.”

I got a high grade on my “project,” which I didn’t think I deserved, since I didn’t really do anything.

I toyed with the notion of continuing with the project, further experimentation, but my practical side, abetted by my inherent laziness, decided, “No,” and “Why bother?” and “It’s somebody else’s experiment and they’ve already learned what they wanted or needed.”

I was left, however, with another problem. Socrates and Xantippe had done what rats do, and I now had a litter of little white rat babies on my hands. I was not in the pet procreation business, and returned the whole lot to the pet store, not seeking recompense or a refund, just as a donation with sudden relief.

Socrates and Xantippe were returned as an older couple. Let the store find a buyer.

I washed my hands of rats and the whole non-experiment, and went on to the Eleventh Grade, where we studied Chemistry.

Uh oh… Hydrogen!