Teaching Moments

My regular job is teaching. I work through an agency and have the thrill and adventure of watching high school students grow, stretch, and become contributing members of society. This year I get to teach chemistry along with three different levels of math and a few other incidentals. But the story I am going to tell you ties into my world of NewEarth in a strange way.

My chemistry class is making cheese. Well not just cheese, but yogurt, sour cream, cottage cheese and cream cheese. We are doing these things by hand, observing the chemical reactions, experimenting with different acid sources. One of my students looked me dead in the eye and asked skeptically, “You just know how to make cheese?”

I wanted to tell him I invented a world that threw out technology. I learned how to do many things from scratch. But even before all that research, I learned to do things the hard way, studied the chemistry of cooking, so I could enjoy the art of cooking. As a writer I research and learn things all the time. As a teacher I get to help students learn things that broaden their understanding of the world. Science is all around us, understanding it can only make us stronger.

So read a story, enjoy the research, and read yourself to a happy place. 😃