The Ten Worst Things About Teaching Science Courses Under Water

by Mason A. Porter



10:  Classes are constantly disrupted as students continually go up to the 
surface for air.

9:  Environmentalists don't like it, and their protests are annoying and 
disruptive.  (I never did understand their problem with this.  The plants and 
animals in the ocean are _extremely_ useful for teaching biology and physics, 
not to mention arithmetic as we dispose of more and more of them.)

8: Those damned teachers at the dolphin schools are veritable cleptomaniacs.  
They steal chalk, desks, and anything else that's not bolted down.

7: It's hard to demonstrate the effects of gravity when the viscous effects 
are non-negligible.

6: SCUBA gear is really expensive, especially when coupled with the cost of 
textbooks.

5:  Students get electrocuted when they answer calls on their cellular 
phones during class.  (To tell the truth, this might not be all that bad...)

4:  The classroom equipment is substandard.  Chalk doesn't work.  Whiteboards 
don't work.  One usually has to resort to verbal explanations, although if one
 is lucky, one might garner occasional use of an overhead projector.

3:  It's really hard to get tenure.

2:  The quality of the local real estate leaves much to be desired.

1:  Shrinkage.