Firstly, I’ll start with Cubs. We did some science experiments and games. One of the science experiments I had already done before, and the other barely even worked, and the very last was boring and nobody seemed to understand what was going on. The one I have done before has already been posted about 2015-ish, nearing back to 2014, but I have some quick notes. You had to get two sticks of celery, splitting one in half with a knife. Place the split stick half in a cup of blue food colouring, half in red. Place the non-split celery stick just in the red or blue. The next day (of course, we only had ten-minutes-later, so it wasn’t that good an experiment) you will see the stem, leaves and xylem tubes turning – well, I’ll leave you to find out! The leader wasn’t interested in how I knew about the xylem tubes, and transpiration, etc. She just kept on talking, glancing at me nervously! It was a bit odd. She named them the ‘little dots’.
“And see these little dots here? They’re going to -“
“I think they’re xylem tubes.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Xylem tubes. They are little tubes that go up the stem to feed the leaves with water-“
– “They’re going to turn different colours.” I could have told her all about the transpiration, phloem tissue and things, but she didn’t seem to want to hear about it, so I stuck my mouth together with imaginary glue so that I didn’t gurgle and goggle at her appawling interest. Also, who does an experiment without a hypothesis? Without a hypothesis, you can’t see whether you were correct at the end. That’s half the point of an experiment!
The experiment that barely worked was where you had a foil dish and some ice cubes. You then had to place the ice cubes in the dish and wait for the bottom to get cold. Boil a kettle and pour a small amount of hot water in a cup. Then, when the cup is quite warm and the dish is freezing cold, place it on the top of the cup. Wait five-ten seconds and then hover the dish about an inch in the air. If you very closely, you can see a thin, barely visible, mild cloud of steam warming in between the two objects.
As I have already said, nobody understood what the leaders were banging on about in the last experiment. It seemed to us just like a cup of vinegar and some rusty metals that went shiny when you took them out of the liquids. It was, as I say, all the very confusing. I tried making mental notes in my head about how on the soil of earth could they go so sparkly in vinegar, and decided that it may well be the acids. But the leaders didn’t really explain – not to offend them, I’m just saying – so we all had to try to gather up the information of formulas and ingredients and blah blah blah to try to work it out.
Then we played some games. I suppose it wasn’t the best Cubs meeting as the experiments were a little boring, and the games were insanely cruel to my liking 😉 We played Dodgeball, which, if you look at closely, is kind of only for boys, so I was kind of stuck…I just pretended that I was out on every round until the game ended, and then we did this other weird game that nobody in the whole world would have understood but the leaders. The instructions were:
“Get into the painted square here. Yes, good, now everybody into a square. Everyone, mind – no, don’t come out of the lines, in the square, I said. Sorry? That is a square that you were stepping into because the whole floor is made of squares? Well, I can prove you wrong, what about this circle? Anyway, into this particular square. Ok, good, now [something that nobody heard so they just shuffled into the square next to them], and [something else nobody heard] and then all you have to do is stand in that square. Alright with you? Brilliant. Now…”
And it really did keep on droning like that. Everyone were just crowding into one square, listening to utter nonsense for a couple of minutes, and then copying the one person who stands unsure in a different square, only to have people filing after them. It was, as you can guess, the most confusing, and the worst, game in the world.
…”That’s right. No no no! Not into there: quick, into this only square! How many times – sorry? – oh, for goodness sake! How many times do I have to tell you that the floor is made of tiles and that there is one square! This is just room, not squares! I beg your pardon? I didn’t hear you, sorry. Oh, so you wanted to tell me how bad I am at shapes? Well, I see the one square now, but really that’s it – rightiho, there’s another, but there’s only three – you mean to tell me that there are five squares on the floor? Ah, bother ‘n’ blast…”