Finding+Humor

Finding Humor
I know I've written a lot about our battery cell lab, and this last post seems excessive, but this habit of mind is finding humor, and this story was just too good to leave out. I've explained the long and winding, tedious process we had to endure in this experiment in two other habits of mind. Basically, we had to make ten of our own solutions of five different concentrations.

Anyways, we had finished mixing our solutions and we were ready to conduct and measure some electricity. Unfortunately, we had run out of time. We went through two concentrations before we had to pack and save it for next class. Except, due to AP exams, next class was more than a week later.

But it was no problem, we had our materials and we had all three of us together, everything was good to go. It was our first class back together and we went on to finish our experiment. Except, when we measured our first solution, the number was completely wrong. It didn't make any sense. This is not because it was a number we didn't expect to see, but because it was a number that didn't make sense at all. We asked Tait once and En Ping twice to help us understand what we did wrong, and we finally asked, with reluctancy, Mrs. Knowles for help.

She came over, looked at our set up, and in an instant, we regretted asking for her help. She pointed out that we had attached our wires to our electrodes incorrectly, and that the way we had done it did not form a complete circuit at all. It formed nothing, and that explained a lot. Although embarrassing, we found this pretty humorous, and we were able to look past our blunder and continue on our experimenting. I learned the importance of humility, as we will always make stupid mistakes.