Gabriel Woods Lamanuzzi - Mystery Goop

 

Okay. So, I'm the type of person with assigned pegs for each specific coat that I own and very much assigned slots for each utensil in my kitchen drawers. This pillow in my world goes with this pillowcase only. Every time my girlfriend leaves her keys in my key spot, I have to just pray for patience. Left to my own devices, all of the spice bottles in my cabinets would be label facing forward, because I'm not a barbarian. [audience laughter] When it's down halfway, I take the soap dispenser in the bathroom and switch it with the one in the kitchen, which is used up more slowly, so that they can deplete at the same time and be filled up simultaneously, [audience laughter] I consider this peak brilliance. So, you get the picture. 

 

For as long as I can remember, I have been a lover of and at times a refugee in order. Predictability, organization, these are things that help me maintain sanity in an otherwise chaotic and overwhelming world. So, make a plan, have a routine, everything's just safer and better that way. Well, when I went off to college, settle on a major in cognitive science, partly because the research is awesome, and partly so I could just be tucked away in a neat, orderly little lab somewhere. 

 

Well, my junior year of college, I ended up stumbling my way into an education course. And the professor was an amazing human being. I had great classmates. I was having a good time. But part of the requirement for this class was going to a local classroom a couple times a week. And the final project was I had to teach a lesson about states of matter using mystery goop. Okay, what is mystery goop? 

 

So, mystery goop is this mixture of cornstarch and water that when you get the perfect ratio, it's liquidy when you move it slowly but solidy if you squeeze it really suddenly or punch it or something. It's pretty cool stuff. So, I decide I'm going to plan the shit out of this lesson, right? I'm going to do warm up discussion with my students, and we're going to list different liquids and solids and gases, and we're going to have a worksheet for them to write down their observations while they explore the mystery goop in a calm, orderly, civilized fashion. [audience laughter] This is second grade, by the way. [audience laughter] I was new. All right. 

 

So, the night before I have everything laid out and the morning of I wake up early and I excitedly start mixing the concoction, my mind's wandering as I'm mixing one cup of cornstarch, two cups of water, one cup of cornstarch, another two cups of water, and I realize that I have no mystery goop developing below me in the Tupperware. Instead, I just have white water, totally liquid. So, I add a bit more cornstarch and then more and then all of my cornstarch, and it's still just white water. That's when I realized that I got the ratio backwards, and I halved the cornstarch and doubled the water. So, my orderly world just crumbles. In this moment. 

 

The scientist in me decides the best option is to evaporate the extra water as rapidly as possible. So, I put it in the microwave. [audience laughter] All this does is cook it into some weird, fluffy mass, right? So, it's got all of the mystery and none of the goop. [audience laughter] That's okay. It's okay, I have time. So, I get my car and I go to the grocery store to get some backup cornstarch. When I get back to my car, the battery is dead. Okay. By the time, I get to school, I'm running way late and I have no goop. I am officially goop-less, which is not a place you want to be in if you want to win over a classroom full of second graders. 

 

So, I rush to the back of the room and the head teacher's run and things. I'm frantically but carefully mixing the cornstarch and water in my backup Tupperware with my spoon. And it's working. I've got this muck in front of me, right? It's great. I turn around to get the work sheets out of my backpack, and I turn back around and the spoon is gone. I look for a culprit nearby, and there's no students and I realize I lift the Tupperware up, and there at the bottom of the goop through the see through bottom, is my spoon. So, with a sigh, I reach in and take out my spoon. I'm standing there, hand dripping goop, frantic, frenzied eyes, you know, looking around the room. And you know what? The kids freaking loved it, right? 

 

When we got the lesson rolling, there were squeals of delight and kids were shouting for their friends, “Hey, look at this.” There was dried goop dust on hands and pens and desks and my soul. [audience laughter] Students were arguing if it was a liquid or a solid. There was that one kid who was debating that it was a gas, because if you're lucky, there's always that one kid. [audience laughter] Only if you're lucky. I looked around the room and realized that it was full of curiosity and laughter. I realized that I was laughing too. I had actually laughed every time something went wrong that morning with the floofy mass with the spoon spelunking. Maybe I didn't laugh with the car battery, but my point is that even though things went spectacularly awry in ways I hadn't even imagined, I was having a darn good time. I did not feel safe, and I was not in my comfort zones and I was most assuredly also frantic and anxious, but it was working. I felt alive. 

 

Anyway, that graduation requirement turned into an education minor. And instead of doing brain research, the past five years, I've been teaching all around the world. And for every piece of organization and predictability that I've given up in my classrooms, I've welcomed in equal parts, adventure and joy. And that's a ratio I've worked really hard to get right. I got to say, my students have really taught me a lot about living a better life. Thank you.