It was high school, laboratory of chemistry. It was a bit of a magical place, full or strange materials guarded in glass vessels that might be long and narrow or flat and broad, or triangular. There even was a distillation unit, a wonderfully looking spiral of glass tubing. There were bunsen burners, locked cabinets, marble tables and promising illustrations in the walls, with drawings of complex molecules and explanations of more complex reactions. A place to dream.
And then again, there was the chemistry professor.
A laboratory is a place of danger, so it is the task of a professor to educate and warn his students. So, in one of the first classes we had, he made the point. He was talking on how easy was to identify materials with our senses. Also, a day or two before, he told us to read about this. In the lab, he opened some of those weird pots and containers and let us smell them. To one of us, probably one of the most noisy boys, he let smell an amine.
If my fellow classmate would have made his homework, he would have known that amines are amoniacal compounds so they have a smell that can make you puke like Linda Blair acting in The Exorcist. He would also have known that in a lab, you smell by wafting your hand above the product, and making a very delicate inhalation of whatever is wafted towards your nose. But he did not made his homework, so our proud professor could tell us, with a direct example that a) you do need to do homework and b) there are indeed dangers in the lab.
The years have passed, and still today I despise this professor. The sad thing is that I am fully convinced that he had our best interests in mind. He could not conceive that we would learn through gentleness, but he was convinced that a harsh hand was what adolescent males needed, in order to learn. My father, a teacher his whole life, told me once that his own teachers use to repeat the saying “la letra con sangre entra”, which freely translated is something like “words enter with blood”, to justify the physical abuse that they enacted on their pupils. When my father said this, was to sadly reflect about teachers that did not get that this was a barbaric, and wrong, way to teach.
Nowadays I am still in awe of my teachers. Just think about it. You have acquired knowledge, the most precious commodity there is. And your purpose is to pass that knowledge to others. You will be badly paid (or not at all), your hours will be endless and you know that you will have uncountable thankless pupils. And yet you decide to teach, to pass on that piece of meaningful truth you have got. What is there more to admire in a person?
Interestingly, ever since that chemistry lab session and up to the last seminar of japanese fencing I attended, the most knowledgeable a teacher is, the kindest he is when teaching.