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LJI Week 15: Chekov's Gun
Jul. 28th, 2014 07:21 pmHave you ever tried Miracle Fruit (Synsepalum dulcificum)? I ordered some for our teen summer reading group a few weeks back.
When you let the tablet dissove in your mouth, it tastes kind of gross. After about a minute, though, something incredible happens. You stop tasting sour and taste sweet instead. Suddenly grapefruit tastes like candy. Sucking on a lemon wedge is like eating old Lemonheads candy -- the original stuff, not the modern version. Apple cider vinegar tastes like tart apple juice. It's amazing.
So when I had a room full of teenagers are handed this stuff, of course the boys get to challenging each other. They ate some pretty disgusting things, and loved all of it! The best part was the vinegar chugging contest. That's when they learned that gulping vinegar means it bypasses the portion of the taste buds altered by the fruit, and on hitting the back of the throat the full vinegar reaction kicks in. There were some mad dashes to the bathroom after that.
Summer reading is always a busy time for libraries. Here, anywhere from 40 to 120 kids will show up out of the blue one day a week. Sad thing is, most of those kids don't set foot in the library any other time of year. They get dropped off by their parents for the free babysitting service for the morning. The rest of the year we require parents to actually stay with their young children. When it's not convenient for the parents any more, the kids don't come.
Then the kids turn into teens, and they can come to the library on their own. Since the only exposure they've had to the library previously was in summer reading, they have no clue how to behave, If fun and games aren't presented to them, they go to talk loudly, running, playing hide-and-seek, destroying the library's plants, writing on the walls, generally disruptive behavior. Yes, I've seen teenagers do all these things in the last two months.
I'm all for having teens in the library. They desperately need a place to go where they can be safe, socialize and just be teens. There's also the small thing of every teen who comes in the door is a potential future donor for the library -- not a small thing for a non-profit who gets no tax funding from the communities we serve. I do wish they were slightly better behaved, though. I wish their parents had made sure they knew how to behave in a library.
Still, seeing their faces when I introduce them to a bit of small science magic -- like turning lemons sweet -- that makes up for a lot of bad behavior. Now I just need to find something else to keep them occupied.
When you let the tablet dissove in your mouth, it tastes kind of gross. After about a minute, though, something incredible happens. You stop tasting sour and taste sweet instead. Suddenly grapefruit tastes like candy. Sucking on a lemon wedge is like eating old Lemonheads candy -- the original stuff, not the modern version. Apple cider vinegar tastes like tart apple juice. It's amazing.
So when I had a room full of teenagers are handed this stuff, of course the boys get to challenging each other. They ate some pretty disgusting things, and loved all of it! The best part was the vinegar chugging contest. That's when they learned that gulping vinegar means it bypasses the portion of the taste buds altered by the fruit, and on hitting the back of the throat the full vinegar reaction kicks in. There were some mad dashes to the bathroom after that.
Summer reading is always a busy time for libraries. Here, anywhere from 40 to 120 kids will show up out of the blue one day a week. Sad thing is, most of those kids don't set foot in the library any other time of year. They get dropped off by their parents for the free babysitting service for the morning. The rest of the year we require parents to actually stay with their young children. When it's not convenient for the parents any more, the kids don't come.
Then the kids turn into teens, and they can come to the library on their own. Since the only exposure they've had to the library previously was in summer reading, they have no clue how to behave, If fun and games aren't presented to them, they go to talk loudly, running, playing hide-and-seek, destroying the library's plants, writing on the walls, generally disruptive behavior. Yes, I've seen teenagers do all these things in the last two months.
I'm all for having teens in the library. They desperately need a place to go where they can be safe, socialize and just be teens. There's also the small thing of every teen who comes in the door is a potential future donor for the library -- not a small thing for a non-profit who gets no tax funding from the communities we serve. I do wish they were slightly better behaved, though. I wish their parents had made sure they knew how to behave in a library.
Still, seeing their faces when I introduce them to a bit of small science magic -- like turning lemons sweet -- that makes up for a lot of bad behavior. Now I just need to find something else to keep them occupied.
