Fandom High School

There was a platter of Christmas cookies with coffee, hot chocolate, and milk on the side on a table at the back of the lab. The lab tables were covered with less savory supplies.

"Welcome to your final," Tyler said. "I am sure those of you who have taken a class with me before will be astounded to hear that our last lab is making soap. Technically" -- he grinned -- "we are creating the alkali salt of a fatty acid." He went through a thumbnail lecture on the science of that. "If you've done it before, try to do it better, or add scents or herbs this time."

"Before you start on the soap process, please write 150 words or so on what you learned from this class. Thanks. You guys were a good group."

Class met in the Danger Shop today, and there was an array of logs stripped of their bark, gunpowder, and woodworking equipment set up at one end, with blast shields lined up near the middle of the room. Tyler glanced up from his notes as the class assembled.

"Morning," he said. "This is a things-that-go-boom week. There's an old Hungarian legend that a city called Paks defended itself during a siege by chopping down a cherry tree and making a cannon overnight. The cannon worked until it blew up and took the town with it. Now, I'm not a carpenter, but I see a couple problems with that story." A beat. "Which is why we're retesting it. We did this over the summer; a couple of people got working cannons out of it."

"You should just have time to make and test a cannon in class if you work in small groups; the wood and woodworking tools are over there. I'm handing out a sheet of specific directions, but basically you want to drill a hole through the log, add a metal tube with gunpowder in it and a fuse, load a cannonball, light the rope, stand back behind the blast shields, and -- in theory -- boom." He spread his fingers to demonstrate the "boom."

"Please wear safety gear, please don't be stupid. This is Danger Shop so you can't get hurt, but that doesn't make it playtime."

"Questions?"

It was probably best not to ask why there was a pony observing class today. Actually, the pony had been around for a while; the ribbons braided into his mane and tail, however ... well, therein lay a story about Tyler and Steve Rogers both being that combination of bored and worried a long animal transformation can bring, and Tony being annoyingly cranky, and the pink and purple ribbons all but literally falling into their lap.

Tyler had pony bites on his hands, but it was worth it.

"Gunpowder," he announced, glancing to the horse a final time before talking. "We're making it. We aren't in the Danger Shop today, so put your lab coats, goggles and gloves on, and, ladies, pull your hair back." He waited for his instructions to be followed before talking again.

"What you're going to do is combine sulfur, saltpeter and carbon. You're going to grind them all up, then mix them, four parts saltpeter to one of carbon -- your carbon is in charcoal briquettes -- and one of sulfur." He turned to scrawl 2 KNO3 + S + 3 C → K2S + N2 + 3 CO2 on the board. "That is the reaction behind it," he said, going on to explain the equation,, and ignored the pony's reaction to any flaws in the formula. "Once you've got the powder fine enough, show me and, if it looks okay, we can go outside and set off model rockets with it."

"This is the real stuff. People get hurt doing this, so go slowly and be careful. Any questions, comments, anything looks funny, please talk to me before you blow your hand off."

Tyler was late this morning, and looked a little scruffy.

... someone might have been a little hungover from some birthday drinking.

The fantastic role model tossed directions and boxes of popsicle sticks down on the lab tables.

"We're building catapults," he announced, and gave the world's shortest and sketchiest lecture on what a catapult was. "It's teaching .. engineering. And physics."

"Work together," he added, then looked at the student he had reason to assume was the despoiler of poor Smoochy "Miss Yamanaka, I'd like a second of your time after class."

"Morning," Tyler said from his perch atop his desk. "Hope you all had a good break week. We're switching it up this week with a little critical thinking exercise."

He moved down in one fluid motion and started handing out printouts of an article (with the lovely comments section removed). "There is some very weird stuff in this world. You live in Fandom; you know that. But there's also weird stuff in the completely normal everyday world most -- well, at least half of us -- call reality. That is an article about things that exist in my world that no one can explain yet. it's modern technology that looks thousands of years older than it should be; it's a manuscript no one can decode; it's giant stone balls that no one can explain."

That stack distributed, he was back with more paper. "They left off Roswell, Stonehenge and the Moai statues on Easter Island, probably because they're too well-known and Stonehenge has turned out to be a graveyard anyhow." Spoilsport scientists.

"Anyhow, your assignment for the day is to read over this stuff and discuss your own, non-supernatural explanation for at least one of the things in your handouts." A beat. "'Aliens did it' could be true, but it still counts as supernatural."

[OOC: If your workplace filters the bastion of taste and sense that is Cracked.com, here are alternate links: Voynich manuscript - antikytheria mechanism - Baigong pipes - stone balls of Costa Rica - Baghdad battery - The Bloop.]

As the students entered the classroom, Tyler tossed a weird-shaped plush .... thing at each one. He hadn't planned on covering bio this semester, but he found himself with a few stray weeks and everyone was obsessed with H1N1 anyhow.

"Hi. Congratulations. Now you have swine flu, syphilis, mad cow disease, and a couple other diseases," he said, an odd gleeful note to his tone. "Hope you don't mind. Take them home, introduce them to your other roommates, give them cute names. You're getting them today because they fit in with what we're going to talk about, which is bacteria and viruses -- germs."

He went on to lecture about the differences between bacteria and viruses, how they were spread, and the diseases they could cause, then gestured to two glittery markers set on a table in the front of the class.

(Glitter and stuffed animals. Apparently Tyler was going through his own little gender swap today.)

"I want you to pass the marker around and take turns writing something on the posterboard. Touch the marker and the paper as you usually would. Watch where the glitter gets on your body and now it gets there, and think about how germs might be similar. Once you've seen it, you'll never want to touch anything again without rubber gloves and anti-bacterial soap."

"That's actually a bad thing. Antibacterials kill the normal germs, but it means the strong ones live. Natural selection is leading to giant superstrong bacterium that will probably take over the world and cause a plague and kill everyone. Avoid plague. Use regular soap. And if anybody wants to start making out, don't blame the glitter"

He held out the marker to the first student, holding it by the less glittery end. "Go to it."

"Welcome back," Tyler greeted his class, once they were all in their seats. Each lab table held a box about the size of a shoebox. "Today we're talking about the thought experiment called Schrodinger's Cat as an introduction to quantum mechanics. You have a handout on it and, since I'm apparently too lazy to read Wikipedia out loud today, we're also going to watch a short video on the whole shebang."

Once the video played, he briefly went over the meaning of the whole thing, pausing at the end for questions.

"Your mission now," he said, when he was done, "is to replicate the experiment. Some of those boxes have Beanie Baby cats in them; some don't. Pick one and try to decide if you have a cat or not, without touching the box."

Oh, hey, a new semester! That meant Tyler was on time, actually put on a tie, and -- in honor of the early hour -- had a huge tank of coffee and stack of cups on a back table.

"Hi," he said as the class filed in, gesturing a little with the coffee mug that probably would not leave his hand in the next 15 classes. "Welcome to applied science. I'm Tyler Durden. Tyler works, Mr. Durden works ... not a big fan of 'hey you' in the classroom."

"Usually I make soap the first week, but this doesn't feel like a day for it." By which he meant he wasn't quite ready to repeat the class yet, and was saving it. "So today, we're talking about one of the most basic concepts in physics -- simple machines."

"Basically, a simple machine is a mechanical device that changes the direction or magnitude of a force -- the simplest mechanisms that use leverage to multiply force. A simple machine uses a single applied force to do work against a single load force. Ignoring friction losses, the work done on the load is equal to the work done by the applied force. They can be used to increase the amount of the output force, at the cost of a proportional decrease in the distance moved by the load. The ratio of the output to the input force is called the mechanical advantage."

"Six things are classically considered simple machines." He moved over to stand in front of a counter of such, holding each up as he talked. "The lever, like this hammer. The wheel and axle. The inclined plane, or ramp. The screw. The wedge. The pulley."

The lecture continued for a while, then: "Today we're going to introduce ourselves -- name, grade, and who you would fight if you could fight anyone, living, dead or imaginary -- then try to see how each of these simple machines are useful by trying to build something." He nodded to a student in the first row. "You first. And I need a TA or two." Not looking at Ino if she was there, there. "Talk to me during the introductions or after class if you're interested."

[OOC: TAs have been chosen OOCly.]