Science is Stoopid

When we bought the Wii game, we thought we would hook it up to our tv and play the games that came with it, like tennis. My son had a different idea. Apparently, the Wii remote controller contains an accelerometer, which can measure pitch roll and yaw (yes I looked up yaw, no, I still don’t understand what it means.)
My son, about 10 years old at the time, taped the accelerometer to a swing in our yard and found he could graph the G-force (you can look up G-force) on a laptop computer.
And that’s why one Fall I drove him around and carried the equipment, like a roadie for Bill Nye, the Science guy, as he tested G-forces from swings, especially swings designed for babies, at public parks in our neighborhood. With this, I thought, we will win the science fair at his elementary school by such a wide margin, it will make me forget my science fair when my plan to run a gerbil through a maze was foiled when the gerbil escaped his cage the night before the fair and I had to display an empty maze. We never found the gerbil. But I still can’t forget my failure. Because it turned out that while the students in my son’s class did experiments and described them on poster boards like when I was 10, it was no longer a competition. No one came around and judged. Apparently this was science for the sake of discovering science and I would get nothing shiny for carrying the equipment rom playground to playground. During the fair when my son was looking at what the other kids had done and someone stopped by his display and asked me what he was graphing I was caught off guard and forget and said “roll and Yaw” but I pronounced it “Ya’ll” and some kids laughed and it was the escaped gerbil all over again. Stupid science.