We're at a funny stage of life, we teenagers, where it's against social etiquette to pretend that you care even remotely about something as uncool as school. Yet, you're expected to spend most of your time caught up in an endless whirlpool of assignments, revision and co-curriculars, especially as you get older - while leaving your Facebook account logged in so you can show everyone that you really spend your time chatting with people online.
Truth is, though, I've come to realise that I don't really despise all schoolwork - not the practical side of it, anyway. At the risk of sounding "nerdy" enough to be henceforth shunned from teenage society for the rest of my life, I like finding things out. And if you supplement your revision with plenty of homemade experiments - not just the sorts you get to do in the school lab - the bits of learning you have to get round to doing sometime or another stick in your brain a whole lot better.
Having spent a biology lesson making a beaker of yoghurt, and having escaped with only a burnt hand after I poured boiling water all over it - I should probably have been looking where I was pouring - I decided to try it at home, too. (My conscience always feels much better when I tell it that it's all part of revision, even though I'd be far better off getting some books out.)
Procuring some milk and a bit of yoghurt from the fridge, then, I set to work boiling the milk and spooning in lumps of yoghurt. I retrieved my bowl of milk a few days later from where I had left it in the garden for lack of an incubator, wielding a spoon, all set to present my delicious pot of yoghurt to my disbelieving family who consider me devoid of any culinary skill. I was presented with the most revoltingly smelly yellow goo my nasal passages have ever detected, radiating more of a soured-milk vibe than a yoghurty one. Also, there were lots of little dead bugs in it, and some live ants round the edges. I emptied it out in the petunia bed hastily.
For some unexplained reason when I try thinking out of the box like a proper (read: eccentric) scientist, I am usually rewarded with nothing but raised eyebrows. More than a year ago, when I was at my old school in Kent in the UK, they got us all designing environmentally friendly stadiums for the 2012 Olympic Games (to be held in London). Ours had pink tulips growing on the roof and our plan for a new airport terminal didn't have heaters in it. The building was supposed to act as a giant greenhouse and trap the body heat of the people inside it - the glass walls were all part of the funky modernist design. You know, to conserve energy and heat the place up at the same time.
Even more bizarrely, our swimming-pool filters didn't use up any electricity from a mains supply; the electricity was generated by transforming the kinetic energy of the swimmers into electrical energy. In English: somehow converting the movement of the swimmers' arms and legs into power to run the filters. I can't remember what we got for that project; I think it was an "F" with a comment along the lines of "Impractical, but original thinking, lovely artwork". (They always try to soften the blow).
That wasn't the only power/electricity-related project I've done that didn't go down too well with the school; I think it's something about the topic. We've had to build a miniature model of a house complete with rooms with bulbs, and switches to turn them on. As with anything that promises to turn the boring squiggles in the textbook into something even remotely interesting, we attacked the thing with zeal. A weekend and half of the week was spent roaming around hidden alleys in the Karama and Satwa areas of Dubai in search of bulbs, wires, switches and crocodile clips. Another few days were consumed as we meticulously drew diagrams of circuits in our book, fashioned a three-foot-high house out of Thermocol and taped in our circuit components. After several failed attempts to create furniture out of toothpicks, we finally had the brainwave of using the pink and purple furniture from a Barbie dollhouse I had - an old one, mind. Each lamp was switched on and off, tested and re-tested. All the circuits worked beautifully. On the day it was due, we precariously transported the wobbling house to school, and beaming at our awed teacher and classmates, switched on the mains with a flourish. And that was when our battery decided to fail. I have seldom kicked an electrical model of a house harder in my life.
That incident led me to the natural conclusion: that should probably be the last time I attempt anything too hands-on, in the spirit of science or not. I think I'll steer clear of experimenting on things for now.
The writer is a 15-year-old student in Dubai
