Gabriel Woods-Lamanuzzi

It's pretty cool stuff.

So I decide I'm going to plan the shit out of this lesson.

I'm going to do warm-up discussion with my students, and we're going to list different liquids and solids and gases.

And we're going to have a worksheet for them to write down their observations while they explore the mystery goop in a calm, orderly, civilized fashion.

This is second grade, by the way.

I was new.

All right.

So the night before, I have everything laid out.

And the morning of, I wake up early.

And I excitedly start mixing the concoction.

And I'm kind of, you know, my mind's wandering as I'm mixing one cup of cornstarch, two cups of water, one cup of cornstarch, another two cups of water.

And I realized that I have no mystery goop developing below me in the Tupperware.

Instead, I just have white water, totally liquid.

So I add a bit more cornstarch, and then more, and then all of my cornstarch, and it's still just white water.

And that's when I realized that I got the ratio backwards, and I halved the cornstarch and doubled the water.

So my orderly world just crumbles in this moment.

The scientist in me decides the best option is to evaporate the extra water as rapidly as possible.

So I put it in the microwave.

All this does is cook it into some weird, fluffy mass, right?

So it's got all of the mystery and none of the goop.