Chemistwy Wesults

I am doing a translation at the moment which is part of a book on the basics of chemistry for engineers. All these expressions like chemical compounds, hydrocarbons, periodic tables, acids, bases, alkalis are bringing back all sorts of memories of school: double-lesson on Friday afternoons (zzzzzzzzz) in the Chemistry Lab (zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz) with Mr Stark (ZZZZZZZZZZZZ).

Bleedin' hell, he was a useless teacher. Ok, there were deficiencies he couldn't do anything about like his penetrant whiny voice and his pwoblem with pwonouncing 'Rs'. But he also had the ability to make any and every aspect of chemistwy TOTALLY BORING.

He was a disaster, a dwag, a sleeping tablet of a teacher.

So much so that as a survival tactic we developed the 'Fwiday Chemistwy Footy Game'.

Mr Stark's favoured words - and the words we mimicked most - were 'pwecisely' and 'valency' and so, before each Friday lesson, we would split the class up into two 'teams' and the one team would get a 'goal' every time Mr Stark said, 'pwecisely' and the other team would score with each 'valency' he uttered.

This was great except that you would have Mr Stark at the front writing some gobbledeegook on the board and he would say, "...and this is pwecisely what we would expect..." and half the class would whisper "YES!" and punch the air... which made Starky look round and give us a puzzled beady look. Then he would say '...and the valency is..." and there would be an exhaled "GERRIN' THERE!" from the other half of the class.

And whenever he said, "...the pwecise result..." there would be a hit-the-post-I-don't-believe-it "OOooooh!"

No wonder our chemistwy wesults were so cwap.