"Mrs.Raphael" news and stories

When I was in high school, I had a love-hate relationship with science classes. Geology was fine, biology was okay, and chemistry...well, chemistry was hell. Mrs. Olech, the troll who taught the class, regularly flunked half her students and had a teaching manner that made Alan Greenspan seem bouncy and exciting.

Ironically, while I flunked chem, I aced my cooking classes. Even at the time, I thought that this was a little weird; after all, what is cooking if not a chemical process? The subtle adjustment of flavors, the cultivation of certain bacteria, the measured combination of leavening chemicals are all, basically, a mix of applied chemistry and biology. However, cooking class captured my imagination and attention in a way that chemistry didn't.

Reading a recent profile of Alton Brown, I realize that the problem lay with Mrs. Olech and her ilk. The simple fact is that science can be a lot of fun, if it is applied in a way that is relevant and exciting. I was surprised to learn that, like me, Brown found his science classes "boring beyond words." Even now, as he has built his own store of scientific knowledge, he admits to having discarded academic journals and scholarly papers because of their inability to engage his interest.