Having caught our attention, she delivered a brief talk about the value and importance of science and the adventure in learning that we were about to undertake. I’ve forgotten nearly all the details of this talk—in fact, as I attempt to reconstruct it now, it seems to be largely about legs, which I know can’t be correct—but I do remember that at one point she spoke about “opening our young minds.” This sounded like a more direct and terrifying pedagogy than any that had been tried on me yet, and it made me a little queasy. A glance around the room told me that I wasn’t alone.
“Now I’m going to conduct an experiment,” she said, again without transition, “and I want all of you to pay very close attention.” How it would have been possible for me to pay closer attention to her than I already was I could not—I cannot—imagine, but I sat up a little straighter and narrowed my eyes so that she would see how keen I was. “The reason I want you to pay close attention is that I’m not going to tell you what the experiment is. I want you to observe, and I want you to observe closely.” More uneasiness. How sad it would be if our beautiful science teacher turned out to be insane.
She brought her handbag out from a desk drawer and placed it on the top. This too was an extraordinary thing to do, introducing a personal possession into the impersonal world of the classroom. I think that never before—and I scanned my memory very carefully before writing this—had I seen so personal a piece of equipment belonging to any of my other teachers. Then Miss Rheingold opened the pocketbook. In memory, I hear a soft male sigh from every corner of the room. If she would do this for us, open her pocketbook, within which, it was generally understood, the most intimate and intriguing feminine secrets were locked, what would she not do? What limit was there to her generosity toward us? How far would she go? From the pocketbook, she took a tiny perfume bottle. She set it on the desktop, and she removed its stopper, which she laid on the desk beside it.
“Now,” she said, “let’s talk about your science projects.” I know what everyone in the room was thinking at that moment: What? What happened to the experiment? I know what everyone felt, too: She may be beautiful, but she’s completely nuts.
“Please copy this into your notebooks,” she said, and she began writing on the green blackboard. I still have the notebook in which I copied the assignment, in a handwriting quite different from my usual, an attempt to duplicate her loops and curves. It was this:
Science Paper
1) Answer the question as well as you can.
2) Include experiments that test and demonstrate the validity of your answer. (Thought experiments are acceptable.)
3) Include diagrams that illustrate your experiments and explain concepts.
4) Turn the paper in at any time, whenever it is finished. There is no deadline.
I glanced to the right and left of me to see how the others were reacting and saw many of them glancing around in a similar manner. I think it’s accurate to say that none of this made any sense to any of us. We didn’t know what “the question” was, for one thing. Nor did we have any idea what validity meant or what a thought experiment was.
“All right,” she said. “Now you’re going to pick your questions.”
She was so delighted, so eager, that I felt relieved by this announcement. I should have been terrified. She brought out a spherical glass bowl of the kind that in those days was used to inflict a slow death on dime-store goldfish.
“The questions you will have to answer in your papers are in here,” she said. “There are four copies of each question. That means that three other people will have the same question you have, so when you pick a question you’ll also be joining a group. Everyone in the group is going to work together to reach an answer to the question that each person in the group picks.”
I think it was right about here that we all began getting the first of the headaches that would bother us off and on for weeks to come.
“All right,” she said, “let’s get started.” It was clear that she could hardly wait.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 582, Mark Dorset considers Thought Experiment and Infinity from this episode.
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🎧 582: Having caught . . .