State Science Fair Fraud

So I didn’t post my novel this weekend. I’m actually ambivalent about continuing to post it, as many folks are not interested, and those that are ought to be reading it all the way through, because this disjointed posting is leaving people more confused than they should be. So I’m going to focus on finishing a draft and giving copies to those who might be willing to read the sucker from start to finish. Is this a good idea, dear readers? Let me know.

Had a very fun Thanksgiving, and despite the presence of a multitude of people from all over the political spectrum, no blood was shed. No arguments ensued. And, coincidentally, my mother-in-law had laryngitis. Make of that what you will.

In the absence of political fireworks, my brother and I swapped Lee Shagin stories, which were pleasant, but they led to a number of Calabasas reminiscences that paint me in a less than favorable light.

Don’t get me wrong. By and large, I was a good student, and an honest one. Cheating wasn’t my thing, except in Driver’s Ed, where the teacher was too drunk to know or care that everyone had a photocopy of the answers to every test in advance. It was passed out by one of the teacher’s aides right before class started, and no one batted an eye. If you can cheat in full daylight on a meaningless test because your teacher’s sloshed, I don’t think that’s a black mark against your honor.

No, it is my Senior Science Fair project that still haunts my dreams.

See, my teacher on this occasion was the estimable Larry Walker, who would have been on the 1980 Olympic walking team if we hadn’t boycotted that year. Now, I know what you’re thinking – there’s an Olympic walking team?! Apparently, yes, - or at least there was. Or maybe Mr. Walker just confused his last name with his athletic prowess.

When he wasn’t walking, Mr. Walker taught AP Chemistry, which I took for part of my junior year before dropping out at mid-term as a result of my own scientific ineptness. I felt bad about letting Mr. Walker down, though – he’s a good guy, if slightly goofy – so the next year, I enrolled in Mr. Walker’s regular Chemistry class and sailed through the easier coursework. There were a number of differences between regular and AP Chemistry. Most of them centered on academic rigor – the regular course had less of it, which I liked. But those in regular Chemistry were also required to participate in a high school science fair. That was not a good thing.

I was supposed to pick a project and prove some scientific principle, and having absolutely no inspiration as to how to proceed, I turned to Mr. Walker for guidance. He came up with a suggestion that was both goofy and easy, so, naturally, I ran with it.

Mr. Walker proposed that I go to a boating dock and gather up a bunch of mussels encrusted along both sides. Then I would separate the meat from the shells and weigh them, measuring the meat against the weight of the shells. The goal was to determine if those mussels directly facing the waves developed larger shells as a result of their exposure to the tide, as opposed to those mussels who were more safely positioned away from the waves on the rear of the docks.

How hard could that be?

A few Saturdays later, I drove up to Oxnard and broke into a private dock filled with expensive-looking sea vessels, not realizing that I probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I scraped off a bunch of mussels and filled half of a black plastic trash bag with them, and then I drove home , insufferably proud of myself, despite the growing stench of rotting crustaceans in the back seat.

I’m not sure when the realization hit me that I had done nothing to separate the front-of-dock mussels from the rear-of-dock ones. Although I do remember getting home and dumping the mussels into a big, stinky pile in the center of our garage and realizing that there was no way in hell that I was going to learn anything of any value except how to make a garage smell like dead fish.

Not only didn’t I know which mussels were which, I also had no means of measuring them. We had this tiny little scale that measured in ounces, but it was nowhere near precise enough to give any semblance of accuracy. Even if I were to go back and get two bags of mussels instead of one, I wouldn’t have been able to get any reliable data without much nicer equipment.

So I made it all up.

Yes, you heard me. I falsified all my data. I measured a mussel or two and tried to guess at what a reasonable weight range and ratio would be, and then I – surprise! – “discovered “ that mussels facing the waves were “significantly” bulkier than their more sheltered counterparts.

I felt really lousy about it, so I mocked up a presentation that was lackluster at best. I taped a couple of mussel shells to some colored poster board and wrote up my finding s with a magic marker. It was the ugliest mock-up entered in the science fair, and I hoped it would get me just enough credit to squeak by and then the whole thing would just go away.

Naturally, Mr. Walker selected my project as one of three entries to go on to the state science fair.

I was aghast. I couldn’t refuse the chance to send the thing along, so I conveniently lost the entry forms. That bugged Mr. Walker, but I figured that someone at the state level would surely recognize me for the fraud that I was. (Although knowing what I know now, I’m betting the state would have been even more clueless than Mr. Walker, who was actually a good teacher, not a bureaucrat.)

I tell this story in the spirit of full disclosure, confessing my deepest, darkest sins in the hopes of absolution. But I also do so knowing that the statute of limitations has passed, and it’s probably too late to revoke my high school diploma. I also occasionally wonder if my findings were false-but-accurate. Do mussels that face the waves have bigger shells?

I could probably Google it, but what's the point?