XplanaZine

Oklahoma History, freshman year, I sat trying to listen. The teacher had a loud voice, probably from coaching boys track for several years, and in our small portable class his voice filled the room. Despite his decibel level, however, I found it impossible to hear what he was saying. Instead, I chose to stare at the boy sitting in front of me. While the teacher droned on about Indians and land run jumpers, I was thinking about my schedule for the day. While he talked about oil wells, I thought about the Snowball Dance my school has every year. There was no entertainment, no stimulus from the teacher. The most exciting thing that ever happened in that class was when one of the kids got kicked out, and even that was boring because everyone knew it was bound to happen.

In most high school classes, all you get is a lecturing teacher. You listen to the teacher drone on and on for an hour and you only learn if you have a great capacity for listening to a teacher babble. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an entertaining teacher, one who can crack jokes or who can draw people into a discussion. But if you’re really lucky, you’ll get a teacher who doesn’t just drone on for an hour and who gets his or her hands messy.

I have a class this year in which I count myself among the really lucky. Entering my AP (Advanced Placement) chemistry class the first day of school, there was an unusual smell in the air. You could tell that something had been burned fairly recently in the classroom. I thought nothing of it at first because it was a chemistry classroom and just waited for my teacher to start class. Many of the students in class had taken regular chemistry with Mr. Dortch before and knew exactly what to expect from our teacher. I, on the other hand, was clueless and I watched Mr. Dortch with eager anticipation.

He began class talking about how we were going to actually learn chemistry and not just the paper-and-pencil stuff. We would learn how chemistry actually applied in real life. We were going to do at least one experiment per week, and sometimes we would just get to play around in the lab. Then, he got out a sack of gummi bears.

"C’mon back here to the lab, this is a really fun experiment," Mr. Dortch said. We followed him back to one of the fume hoods, and after dipping the gummi bear into a chemical, he lit it on fire. There was absolutely no point to this experiment, but we thought it was pretty cool. We were burning things in class and not breaking any school rules. Then Mr. Dortch called a boy up to the front. He told the boy to hold out his hands, and proceeded to pour suds on them.

"Do you trust me?" Mr. Dortch asked as he pulled out a match. The boy said no and obviously didn’t really want to be participating. The devilish grin on the teacher’s face was enough to make the entire class uneasy. Then Mr. Dortch lit the match and dropped it in the boy’s hands. A huge flame erupted but the boy’s hands were unscathed.

We were frequently on edge in that class because no one ever knew when Mr. Dortch was going to pull out an experiment or randomly make one of us recite some law of chemistry. The week before Christmas, we had to rewrite "The Twelve Days of Christmas" with our experiences of chemistry. So far I’ve maintained a semester-long headache from this class, but because it is so hard, we get occasional recreational breaks that generally were for the amusement of all.

The list of anecdotes from the class is staggering, yet when the AP test comes along, ninety percent of us will earn college credit from taking that class. It is the single hardest AP exam there is so far, and because of Mr. Dortch ’s quirky personality and incredible knowledge on his subject, almost every student will pass. It’s quite a difference between tuning out and actually learning something, and it’s nice to remember what you learned in class for more than a week after hearing it. Hands-on or hands-off teachers make or break a classroom, and I am just thankful to be in a classroom where I don’t fall asleep every day.