hands

One of our admin staff has become the social media liaison officer SMLO. I'm not sure if she owned this task out of aptitude and interest or if it was visited upon her from on high. But she is maintaining an active presence on Friendface and Instah which apparently is what potential and actual students and their families like to see. To be honest, there are few enough prizes and sporting triumphs at The Institute, so any sort of event will get some column inches. Like when we edutained 15 teenagers with science for a day last month. I was asked to take pictures but to make sure that none of the yoofs could be identified by the GDPR police. I therefore snapped a few sciencey objects framed by the backs of teen-heads. The SMLO was pulling on my coat again last week because of a perceived bias towards the Sporty side of our faculty. It is true that the teaching staff  in that section are younger, fitter and hipper than the crumblies on the Science [my] side. Okay, I said, we're doing some plating in Cell Biology tomorrow morning and that can be made to look sciencey.

plating in Cell Biology means asking questions like:

• Can the fridge protect you against a dose of coliform-induced vomitting bugs?
• Probably; but what about Pseudomonas aeruginosa? [prev]
• Will Clostridium not-botulinum grow in the presence of oxygen?
• will E. coli?
• What can we capture from a student's finger-prints?
• More or less after handwashing?

This year's cohort of students is awaker about hand-washing than last year's ! I wonder what will happen in a Post-CoViD world? Will most of us revert to washing hands occasionally and leave obsession to<Judi Dench alert>  Lady Macbeth. It is my belief that the training in The Institute can / shd turn a young person into a good pair of hands: not a rocket scientist, not a walking genius; but solid, dependable, competent and reliable.