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With a start, I open my eyes. “Must’ve dozed off,” I think, and sheepishly glance around the room. Everything is in a haze.

“Where am I?”

The room is vaguely familiar; it’s a lecture room, and I am sitting near the front. A rotund graying man is at the blackboard droning on and on, although to me he sounds like an adult in a “Peanuts” cartoon; Blah, Blah, Blah. He steps aside, and I see that he has drawn a grade distribution curve, but it’s oddly skewed toward the lower scores. Then he turns around.

“Dr. Hoffsomer?” I exclaim. Things are very curious now: It’s been forty years since he was my Calculus Professor, with an accent so thick that I could never understand him.

“Herr Dahl,” I hear him clear as a bell now.

“Yes, Professor?”

“Sleeping, Ja? Vell dat’s gut, your score is vunderbar, Ja?” He waddles over and hands me a paper. “Es gut, maybe do better dann in Calculus? Ja.”

“Thanks, sir,” I murmur. Confused, I study the unfamiliar report.

Final Lab Report

 

Equipment required:

• one clean, neat room with doors

Reactants required

• one toy box, full of toys
• three bowls of crackers, random mixture of Goldfish and Ritz
• four children ages 1, 3, 5, and 7, all supercharged, anticipating a ten day vacation

Procedure:

Place all reactants into the room and close the doors. Leave the apparatus undisturbed for exactly twenty minutes. Observe and record reaction.

Observations:

The reaction began as soon as the reactants were placed in the vessel. Within moments, the toy box appeared to explode. Toys were randomly distributed across the vessel.

Within fifteen minutes the reaction consumed all the crackers. A fine ash of crumbs settled on all horizontal surfaces. 

The rate of reaction increased as a function of time until the crackers were consumed; at that point, it appeared to decrease. 

Conclusions:

 This experiment is a brilliant example of Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states:

“In any closed system, the entropy (disorder) of the system will either remain constant or increase.”

In future experiments I suspect the reaction rate will vary as a function of the number of kids.

Rereading the report, I’m still confused. Then, in the upper corner, I notice that Dr. Hoffsomer has added a note:

Gut, you have proofed ein fundamental law of nature. Ja – “Kids ist Chaos!”

That’s when I woke up, vowing never again to eat sardines and guacamole before bed.

It was a crazy dream, but that fundamental law is understood by parents, grandparents, and teachers the world over.

Yes, Kids are chaos, but we love them, and wouldn’t have it any other way.

After all, adults are chaos too.

David L Dahl.

Read more about Olivia’s Story here or about my other books here.

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