Science Makes Life Exciting

For a junior high school custodian, I'm pretty lucky. My route of thirteen classrooms covers a wide variety of subjects. I have an English classroom, three history classrooms, two computer labs, and three math classrooms. But the classrooms that always manage to throw me off my game are the final four: the science classrooms.

Now, that's not to say that I don't like the science classrooms. They're big beautiful rooms, and they're tiled - meaning I never have to vacuum them, so that's a plus. But if learning is messy, then learning science is just disgusting. And while that usually makes it raucous fun for the students, well . . .

I've learned that what's fun for students is usually miserable for custodians.

There was the day they made ice cream in plastic baggies. Rock salt must be very difficult to pour. It created sticky streams, decorating the tables, the counters, the floor, and sneaking into crevices so out-of-the-way that I kept discovering new dried riverbeds over the next ten days.

There was the week they spent learning to make fossils. Bits of plaster - in both liquid and solid form - repainted the sinks, making them look ceramic rather than metallic. Plaster doesn't just come off when you ask it politely, and once removed, it gets a bunch of its buddies together and they clog the drain in protest. Oh, and while you're on your knees scraping spots of clay off of the floor, keep an eye out for gum - junior high kids spit it out on the floor convulsively.

And you always need to be wary about the teachers' garbage cans. Science teachers are special, so they get to have two or three industrial-sized trash cans in their rooms to hold the offshoots of their awesomeness. Such by-products of scientific discovery may include shattered beakers, mostly-dead insects, or the organs of farm animals. (At least, I hope those hearts came from farm animals. They did look pretty human-sized.) You'll want to keep your gloves on.

Bio-hazardous surprises aside, there's one thing about the science rooms that I love: they're all connected. They all share a back room (which, therefore, is more of a center room) where they can store large, science-y equipment. I love this room because it's the only room on my route with no doors that connect immediately to the hallway. It's isolated and private, a place where I don't have to worry that a teacher is about to burst in on me. When I've had a few extra minutes, I've often spent them in there. It's dimly lit, and I can enjoy a ponderous moment or even a mid-work snack in peace.

I was in there today. I had my broom, and was walking between science classrooms sweeping up at the end of my shift. I paused in my little sanctuary, just looking around and enjoying the moment. I walked around the perimeter of the room, running my hand across counters, until I came to a dark corner I'd rarely even glanced at before. And I saw something. A tank full of gravel, and . . .

A tarantula.

I didn't run or scream. Not in real life. But while my body froze and my eyes locked fully open, on the inside I was flailing and fleeing and panicking and puking and crying and climbing the walls and performing exorcisms, trying not to think about how long the tank had been occupied, and trying not to swear of science rooms forever.

WHY?!?!?!?!?!