0 It's the world, not the microscope, that matters.

Do you need to know what a solenoid is in order to drive?
Didn't think so....

The point of a microscope is not learning how to use a microscope, no more than the point of a car is learning how to drive it.

Yet that's what we do in school.

We fetishize the process. We ask students to label the parts. We admonish them for starting with the highest power. We make a ritual out of preparing wet mounts.

Some of my happiest moments are when an über-cool, barely-can-be-bothered student shouts "Holy shit!" as an errant protist bumbles its way across his filed of view.

Hard to get mad at well-placed enthusiasm, and the response it, well, almost as appropriate as it is real.

The name of the critter hardly matters, though students usually ask. I shrug as if I don't know, because, in fact, I usually don't, one of the perils of using pond water instead of specimens bought at Carolina Science Supply.

Getting a kid to learn how to use a microscope  is easy once he knows there's something worth looking for--but by then the real purpose of the lab has been accomplished. The child's living universe has just become unimaginably more immense from a single drop of water.

(In my class, a child may grab a scope and some pond water pretty much anytime except during exams--if they're interested, they get pretty adept, and if they're not interested, what's the point?)

***

I can develop worksheets so the child can "prove" to me he gets this, and I can analyze the squiggles he draws to make sure he did not copy them from his lab partner, and in the past I have done just that.

This year? For some struggling students, a spontaneous, heartfelt "Holy shit!" will go down in the book as an A, as 100%, as whatever symbols we care to use for when a child accomplishes what we set out to do.

A kid engrossed in the life and death struggles seen in a drop of pond water doesn't care about grades.
And neither, dear science teacher, should you.

Microscope photo from Adafruit Industries