Personal Narrative: The Balancenators

I walked into Organic Chemistry, laughing with my friend about an article we had read on how to levitate a frog with a magnet. We were hysterical just imagining what must have triggered an internationally respected scientist to turn the other and say “Dude, I bet we can’t levitate this frog with a magnet!”

As team leader for our balancing equations group, “The Balancenators”, I asked the team to take our seats at the lab tables and remembered that we had a substitute from Ohlone College coming in to give us a lecture. He was a tiny, British guy with rolled up sleeves, and a strange obsession with stroking his beard, almost like a younger, shorter Gandalf.
So, Mr. Young Gandalf with his rolled up sleeves, draws an “M” and a “W” on the board -- hydrocarbon chains -- that much I could recognize. He glares at the class for a few seconds before asking us who could tell the difference between the two. Crickets literally chirped as no one spoke up.

He finally chuckled and told us, “No difference exists. Both molecules are identical, if you think about them in a three dimensional space.” He pointed to two plastic models on the lab tables and proceeded to rotate them. He looked over the class and asked us the same question. They were both identical. It was eye-opening, the way I

Y.G. continued, and I realized that what I was beginning to comprehend was nothing like the debilitating equations I had crunched in honors chem, numbers that made me pity my calculator. There was no math to what Mr. Y.G. was explaining, but just theories that explained why reactions occurred the way in which they did. I felt as if my brain was suddenly capable of understanding the world with a broader scope of complexity, fully accepting that in this life, there was still so much for me to understand and learn. When my levitating-frog-friend approached me to talk about the equations worksheet, I was slightly perturbed at the disturbance of my Zen moment, but smiled and explained my