A role in the community

Saturday morning I discovered a new way I can serve the community. Someone at school was looking for volunteers to judge a science fair at the Harmony Science Academy. I was a little apprehensive because I haven't had that experience on the jugding side of things. And when I was in junior high and high school, I always tried to get out of doing science fair projects because I was NOT going to be a scientist. HA! Look at me now...

Anyway, I found myself doing the inward chuckle many times during last weekend's fair. I kept laughing at myself. It was SO obvious that I am in science. There was one student who was trying to test people's responses to different smells. Her objective was to see what types of emotions could be stirred when people smelled things such as dishwashing soap, cinnamon, rose petals, etc. I asked her to tell me exactly what she told her subjects when asking them to smell things. She said, "I told them I wanted to see what kind of emotions they felt when they smelled different scents." She proceeded to tell them, "For instance, when I smell dishwashing soap or cinnamon, I think of happy memories of my mom in the kitchen washing dishes or baking muffins." So much for not biasing her subjects.

Another student was testing heartbeats and blood pressure of people before during and after playing violent video games. The problem with his assessment is that he used seven different people of seven different ages. And yet another was wanting to compare which of two plants grew faster. I asked how she determined which one grew the fastest. She measured how tall they were. But she was using two different plants which grow to different heights in the end. (Where are your controls guys?)

I think what made me laugh at myself the most was that I so easily fell into this "jugding" role. The problem was trying to remember that they were only 6th graders.

This weekend I might volunteer to build home wheelchair ramps. There is an organization here called The Dallas Ramp Project. This would satisfy my craze to use drills and build things out of wood and to do good at the same time.