Season 2, Episode 5 - Weird Science

Original Airdate - October 20th, 2022

It’s time for the Degrassi Junior Science Fair and Emma is putting a lot of effort into it. She’s seeking to prove her hypothesis that healthy food increases student performance, and has just about every main character participating in her study. Mr. Simpson asks about the project while he’s over for dinner, and tells Emma that, outside of school, she should call him Archie. Emma declines to do so.

Liberty is also working hard on her science fair project and is determined to win. Emma’s really feeling the heat. Two of her project participants are having unexpected results, JT and Spinner. She confronts them both. JT says that Emma’s food tastes bad and gives him gas. Spinner runs away. He blames her food for other problems and we’ll get there in a second.

Mr. Simpson is over AGAIN that evening and gives Emma some good advice — get creative and look at the results from another angle. But she doesn’t want to hear it, especially not from him. The next day, as they’re setting up the fair, Manny is eating a chocolate bar. When she says it’s making her happy, Emma realizes what she has to do.

Weird sidebar time. JT’s science fair project is an invention. He’s created all-natural, silicon free breast implants. I don’t understand the rules of science fairs (there is no experiment here) but this gag is especially odd because there is an implication in the episode that he tricks Ms. Hatzilakos and spills goop on her to use her breasts as the mold for his experiment. Deeply weird.

Liberty’s experiment is effective, but her presentation is dry. Emma swoops in just in time to change the title of her experiment and present to the judges. She realized that what her experiment actually proves is eating food that puts you in a good mood is what affects student performance. She calls Spinner an aberration and her font of choice is Papyrus. All of the judges are impressed, and one of those judges is Mr. Simpson.

Emma wins the Science Fair. Liberty is very jealous. Later, in Media Immersion class, Manny accidentally pours fuel on the fire. She means to send Emma a snarky IM about Mr. Simpson and Christine’s relationship, but accidentally shares it with the class. Liberty feels vindicated. In the bathroom, she tells Emma that Simpson’s bias is obviously the reason that Emma won the science fair. Liberty knows Emma has enough integrity to surrender the award.

Emma storms into Simpson’s class to confront him about this, and won’t take no for an answer. It’s only when Simpson shows her the other judges scoresheet that Emma can accept he didn’t rig the results.That night, at home, Emma invites him to talk. She feels bad and apologizes. She overreacted. It’s just hard because everyone else at the school thinks there is favoritism.

Mr. Simpson offers to help her transfer classes or even to break up with Christine, but Emma says she doesn’t want that. She’s warming up to him, and Simpson does some quality stepdad encouragement about her project. She calls him Snake, but I still refuse to.

Okay, let’s talk about Spinner. Spinner keeps getting boners at inopportune times and he blames the health food. Jimmy, who is having a bit of a bad day after Ellie rejected him, has a good laugh about it. He assures Spinner that this is just hormones, but Spinner doesn’t buy it. Spinner takes down the pictures of swimsuit models in his locker and starts pounding junk food trying to stop the erection parade.

But then, he realizes that the health food is having another effect. Girls seem super interested in him all of a sudden. Even lunchlady Sheila gives him free fruit. Health food is back on the menu.

It’s kind of working. Spinner even gets Ellie’s number. But Jimmy sees Spinner succeeding where he failed and gets pissed. He uses Ms. Kwan’s improv exercise (already a punishment imo) to embarrass Spinner. He nominates Spinner and Paige to do a scene where Spinner is delivering a package to a lonely housewife, and Spinner ends up bricking up in front of the whole class.

Jimmy comes to rub it in and asks Sheila to settle once and for all whether the boners are coming from diet or hormones. She says it’s hormones, of course. But thinks Jimmy is the one with the boners. Funny!

Jimmy is such a bad friend. It’s not Spinner’s fault that Ellie doesn’t want to give Jimmy her number! I guess one day, Spinner will get his revenge when he gets Jimmy shot.

I simply do not understand science fairs. And before you try and tell me that the point is to encourage students to engage with the scientific method, I want you to think about it. How, exactly, is the scientific method highlighted by paper mâché volcanos and trifold poster boards?

I think science is very cool and good. I think the scientific method is broadly misunderstood and I wish it was something people knew more about, particularly the parts about repetition and peer review. I love the idea of encouraging a student to engage with the method and design an experiment themselves.

But when it’s put into practice in a science fair, so many different elements enter the mix that I think it often stops being about the scientific method. You need something that a high schooler can reasonably put together with supplies they can access. You need something that looks good on a poster board. You need the time and skills to put together a good presentation on the poster board. And for some reason, there’s a winner.

Let’s look at the two experiments highlighted in this episode. At first, Emma is doing science pretty well. She has a hypothesis. It’s an interesting hypothesis, and one that she has the resources to test. She designs an experiment to test the hypothesis. Then she thinks everything breaks down. Except it doesn’t. Sometimes, in an experiment, you get unexpected results. Emma’s experiment has not failed because of her results, she’s simply proved her hypothesis incorrect.

But it is presented as a huge problem that Emma has not come to the absolute right answer to her question. Ms. Hatzilakos is not using this moment to teach Emma about science, and ask great questions like “what would be the next steps of your research to explore this inconsistent data?” Emma is simply left in crisis to figure out how to win this contest.

And then she does so by doing bad science! She looks at her data and concludes a different hypothesis must be true, but that is not a hypothesis she tested! The correct conclusion of her experiment should have been “it seems my hypothesis was incorrect and I have follow up questions.”

Now let’s look at her competitor, Liberty. Liberty’s experiment focuses on plants and what happens to them when there isn’t enough light. This hypothesis will almost certainly get proven correct, because it’s pretty settled science. Liberty could just as easily find her answer in a book or the Media Immersion Lab. It’s as much of an experiment as a baking soda and vinegar volcano. We know what happens when plants don’t get light.

And why should we be expecting any better from her? She’s 13! She probably doesn’t have the resources to answer the great questions of science. She’d be better off either A. targeting a much simpler hypothesis or B. researching how scientists made these discoveries in the first place. The former doesn’t make a very flashy presentation and the latter isn’t doing your own science.

These Degrassi experiments highlight the two aspects of science fair that work together to ruin it all for me. For Emma, it’s the competition. “Conclusion: inconclusive” simply isn’t an impressive way to end a presentation and excite a bunch of judges. Why is this a competition? Science is, at a basic and extremely important level, non-competitive. Competition is often the source of a lot of mistakes and misinformation!

For Liberty, it’s the fact that this must be a presentation. Not everything done is science is visual, or explained easily in poster board. A good science fair experiment needs pictures, charts, and something to put on a table. That limits a student in the type of hypothesis they can test.

Learning how to communicate and explain an experiment is an important, but largely distinct aspect of science than designing the experiment in the first place. One that many actual adult scientists are not great at, especially when they’re not talking to others in their field. By looping of this this together into one project, a student is going to prioritize something they can present over something they’re genuinely curious about.

Maybe I’m caught up in the TV of all of this, and scarred by my own Science Fair experiences. My one mandatory science fair happened squarely in my “let me not do homework” phase. I scrambled together the stupidest project about household cleaning projects. I got a C, and I felt embarrassed. I know that’s all my fault!

But I think it goes beyond that. I think of debate clubs. We all know that being good at debate club does not make you any better at having a disagreement, it makes you good at generating a professional argument in a controlled setting, regardless of your personal beliefs. That’s an honest skill, but not one that is actually going to change hearts and minds.

Doing well in a science fair does not make a student good at designing or executing experiments. It does not make them a good scientist. It makes them a good science fair participant. I would love to see a science fair-esque assignment that takes the pressure off. Less poster board, less pomp and circumstance, and definitely less competition. More kids doing science.