In my past life as a teacher I used to hear graduating 8th graders talk about how they wanted to change the world. The terms they used were very general, and I wasn’t in the business of saying, “Don’t be ridiculous,” to earnest students who were leaving for high school. But these were teenagers who didn’t know anything about why water came out of faucets, let alone why they still had water when I didn’t, during power outages. Some of them couldn’t imagine a world without electricity. Many of them had never used a tool until I taught them to use drills and PVC pipe cutters. They wanted to change something they didn’t begin to understand.

If they did an experiment once, they believed that the result was the TRUTH. Forever! Except when it didn’t work out according to the lessons they had learned, and then they just wrote down anything that occurred to them. 

I’m going to give an example. We did an experiment where we stretched balloons over the mouths of Erlenmeyer flasks. The flasks had different amounts of gas-producing ingredients, and the general tenor of the lab book suggested that more of a given ingredient should produce more inflation in the balloons. The first few years we did this experiment, I could see that we were not getting the ‘correct’ result but I insisted that the students put down what actually happened, and then did my best to impart the lesson anyway. 

One day as I puzzled over this I began to wonder if the color of the balloon made a difference in its expansion. Next time we did the experiment, each lab group got five balloons of a single color, even as every group had a different color. All the individual graphs straightened out. Each group had consistent results within itself. More ingredient, bigger balloon. Each group had a different result from the other groups. White balloons, for example, were absolutely terrible at expansion, which is slightly odd. 

Over time I discovered that different brands of balloons expanded slightly differently, and if they were mixed, would once again mess up the experiment. Since restocking the lab equipment was done by other people to whom I gave a list, I had to be careful getting out the balloons for this experiment. 

The point I’m after in general is a a bit subtle. I didn’t need a new experiment. I needed to work on the old one till I got it right. This is much less exciting than doing new things. Upkeep and refinement of technique is not as alluring as the latest and newest thing. 

I thought about this concept years ago when the subway in DC was quite new. It was expanding constantly and that was dramatic, but inevitably after years of expansion we started getting news about breakdowns. There comes a point, I thought, when the money that you’ve spent for years on building something new, now has to be switched to maintaining what you already have. This is complicated by the fact that building and maintaining might be different skill sets so they might need different employees…

Recently I went to see a lovely, old-fashioned plantation near Leesburg, Virginia. Oatlands was placed on the National Historic Register in 1965 when the Eustis family who acquired it around 1900, gave it up. Mrs. Eustis had spent time and money rebuilding it after it had fallen into disrepair in the late 1800’s. The War Between the States took its toll first. Then the inability of the Curtis family to adjust to paying for labor done on their behalf, finished the place off.  Mrs. Eustis spent a great deal of time restoring the English terraced garden. You can visit the grounds, the garden, or the mansion, and the header picture on my blog today is part of that terraced garden.** 

But I also took this picture. 

A wooden parapet separates the garden terrace from the lawn around the mansion. It is a bit rotten here and there. I didn’t tour the house on this visit, and anyway, there’s a lot of scaffolding around it, so I’m hoping there will be a little more to see at another time. But I’m also hoping that the scaffolding means that the property is being taken care of, and the caretakers will get to the rotten wood at the top of the garden. It was a reminder that constant vigilance is the only way this beautiful landmark will be preserved. 

There’s a balance between change and necessary upkeep. 

** https://www.visitloudoun.org/listing/oatlands-historic-house-and-gardens/57/