The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2507 by Angharad Copyright© 2014 Angharad

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It appeared I hadn’t. “I suppose most of you are only here because the refectory’s closed and it’s raining too hard to go to the union. Oh well listen up, you might learn something. If anyone has brought their knitting, please keep your balls under control—of wool, obviously. Perhaps I should have brought my sewing, could have been doing something useful instead of talking to you lot—but I didn’t, so I suppose I’d better do something.

“Can everyone see the screen?” The answer came back that they could. “Okay, let’s rock and roll, people.” I played a minute of Led Zepplin. “Enough of that.”

“Pity,” quipped someone near the front.

“If you wanted to listen to rock music, join a geology class—now, ecology—anyone know what that’s all about?”

“I thought you were supposed to be the teacher,” quipped the same wag.

“Can I sign you up for my dissection class? I need someone with a brain small enough to get into a test tube.” He shut up after that.

My lectures were renowned for audience participation—I once dropped bat poo everywhere to make them think. I also make people get up and move around—no one sleeps in my lectures—except dormice.

Over the next two hours I had them building an environment with strips of paper rolls and flipcharts. Between us we described the environment in its physical sense, then the types of habitat it created, finally the sort of things that lived there, animals, plants, birds, insects, bacteria and so forth.

It was woodland, so we had various types to describe finally deciding to go for mixed deciduous or broadleaf. We described the trees and hung strips of paper roll from the wall to make our trees, then bushes, finally birds, mammals and insects, and other plants. I’m the dormouse queen, so the first mammal on everybody’s lips was dormouse. I handed them a picture of one in hibernation mode.

I got them to describe how things interrelated, blue tits and caterpillars—the blue tits lay eggs to hatch when the caterpillars are most numerous. How do they know? Daylight length and temperatures fire off different activities—all very clever, but then they’ve had a hundred million years to practice, since their ancestors, the dinosaurs, became extinct.

At the end of the lecture, they’d all loosened up and I asked for quiet. I nodded to Heather the technician and she walked up onto the stage and handed me a box. “Those who want to see a live dormouse please file past the desk.” I held one of our hibernators on the flat of my hand. “Please don’t touch him, and no flash photographs.”

It took about fifteen minutes for everyone to see and photograph the poor creature, which stayed torpid. I shoved it back into its box and Heather took it back to its nest hole. The room was buzzing. Once they’d all settled back down again, I explained why I was an ecologist. I think they all knew why I studied dormice.

At exactly three twenty five, five minutes short of two hours, I stopped and thanked them for their attendance and indulgence. Delia started to clap and in seconds they were all applauding. I bowed to them and they clapped even louder.

They’d enjoyed themselves and I knew they’d also retain some of what I’d said. Okay, so I adapted techniques they used for six year olds, but it works. The surprise of what is going to happen next keeps them on their toes as it does me, which has got to be good for everyone. Who wants to listen to someone who drones on and on while doing a power-point presentation, which is how most of us are taught. I want my lectures to be an event so they remember something.

“That was brilliant, Professor. I can see why your classes are bigger than anyone else’s. You’re a performer, a mistress of her craft.”

I thanked her and also thanked Heather who had to take down my woodland by herself as I had to dash to collect the girls. Parking near to the school, because most other parents had departed with offspring in tow, I trotted into the building wondering where mine might be. I eventually found them in with Sister Maria and Trish was holding forth about something to do with the rings of Saturn. Oh no, it was orbital resonance again and the tiger stripes near the moon Enceladus.

The headmistress was sitting very patiently as Trish expounded her explanation, as to why there were various bands in the rings and they were each named after a famous astronomer. Brian Cox and his tv programmes have a lot to answer for, mind you I suspect Trish would love to study astrophysics or particle physics or whatever. It all goes over my head somewhat.

Next she was on about solar flares and how they affected satellites orbiting the earth, and how this energised plasma had caused a meltdown in the Canadian electricity grid. I stood and listened how she explained the auroras borealis and australis in terms of this energy interacting with the earth’s atmosphere.

In the couple of minutes as I stood and listened she practically explained the solar system. Quite why the others were sitting quietly and listening could only be explained by the presence of the headmistress, who finally looked towards the door and spotted me.

“Ah, Lady Cameron, you’ve come to rescue your girls from their incarceration.”

I thought it was her I was rescuing from the ramblings of a mini-genius, aided and abetted by her sisters. Once it was known I was there, they all turned and made a fuss of me, except Trish who was still on about Enceladus and smoky plumes, and who finally turned and said, “I was keeping them entertained until you came to get us, they said you’d be late.”

“Thanks for looking after them, we have some staff off sick and I had to teach this afternoon.”

“It’s a pleasure, Lady Cameron, I’ve just had me science boost for the next week or two.”

As the children went off to get their coats the headmistress and I strolled after them. “She means well but can be a little intense, she’s acquired so much in the way of data and hasn’t yet found a way of organising it. So talking about it helps her to do that.”

“Yes, I notice that she gets a little more systematic in her analyses. She is one smart cookie.”

“I know, quite how we’ll keep her intellectually stimulated when she’s a teenager, worries me.”

“If it worries you, then it terrifies me, Lady Cameron. We have staff who are frightened of her because she knows more than they do—though she doesn’t upset them as much as she used to.”

“I’ve been trying to tone down her arrogance.”

“I don’t know if it is arrogance, I think it’s more impatience, sort of, keep up with me. But we can’t, her mind is so quick.”

“Quite.”

“Are you coming, Mummy, my tummy is rumbling,” called Trish.

“Orbital resonance I expect,” I said quietly and Sister Maria nearly wet herself.