Mole Day in Review

One mole of unpopped popcorn kernels, spread across the United States, would cover it to a depth of over nine miles. One mole of your standard soda can would cover the surface of the earth to a depth of over 200 miles. If you could count one million numbers per second, it would take 20 billion years to count to a mole.

Aside from being the name of a furry creature found burrowing underground, a mole is an important unit that chemists use to measure ‘how many.’ In the same way that a dozen of an item is 12, a mole of an item is 6.02 x 10^23.

The mole is in fact so important to chemists that there is an unofficial holiday honoring it. Since 1991, chemists and chemistry students across the nation have been celebrating Mole Day on Oct. 23, between 6:02 a.m. and 6:02 p.m. In 1995, students began celebrating it at East at 6:02 a.m.

In 15 years Mole Day has transformed from a spur-of-the-moment party to a school tradition. What was once an undertaking of two AP chemistry students is now a graded assignment of  chemistry teacher Steven Appier’s entire Chemistry 2 IB class.

“It really wasn’t that big a thing for the first four or five years that we did it,” Appier said. “That was more of a twentieth century explosion.”

Over the years, the celebration of the mole has seen the addition of a countdown, the mole salute and the occasional bagpiper or mole costume, but Appier and fellow chemistry teacher Cole Ogdon have been constants. The two became members of the National Mole Day Foundation (NMDF) in 1995 and received a cassette tape in the mail containing the song to go with that year’s national theme: Moledi Gras.

Click image to view a Mole Day photo gallery

Upon receiving the song, Appier and Ogdon played it for their classes. One of Ogdon’s AP chemistry students, Malcolm Sturgis, was immediately inspired to plan a celebration, and together with fellow chemistry student Kyle Kassias, planned the first of a long series of Mole Days at East.

Kassias’s t-shirt design for the modified theme of Moleapalooza still hangs in the back of Ogdon’s classroom, and Sturgis left East forever remembered by Appier as ‘Molecolm.’

For six years, AP students planned Mole Day, but in 2001 Appier’s Chemistry 2 IB class took over, and the students now plan and oversee every last detail. Each incoming class is reminded that Mole Day is their responsibility.

“[Appier] mentioned it the first week of school,” junior Andrew Beasley, the t-shirt and publicity coordinator, said. “But we started officially doing stuff around the third week.”

Students are self-assigned to certain areas, ranging from media relations to food. This year’s mole chair was junior Sophie Poppie. Poppie’s job centered around overseeing every committee. If a deadline is missed or Appier is unhappy about the decorations, it all falls back to her.

“The highlight was that I knew what’s going on,” Poppie said. “I knew how everything was working and that everything was going to come together.”

The celebration requires an ample amount of planning by those involved. Each Chemistry 2 IB student puts at least 10 hours into the preparation for the one-hour event, which includes waking up at 3:30 a.m. on the big day. Though getting up early is hard, Appier would never let that get in the way of doing Mole Day.

“It’s about a memory for these kids that will last the rest of their lives,” Appier said. “When it’s a good memory about chemistry that lasts the rest of their lives, you bet it’s worth the trouble.”

Making Mole Day the most fun it can be seems to be the goal of each Chem 2 IB class. Every year holds the same mole day must-haves: the popular games of Mole-sical Chairs and Whack-a-Mole, donuts and bagels galore and the popping of a hydrogen and oxygen balloon. Any changes come with the theme.

At East’s first Mole Day, no more than 100 students gathered in the Little Theater for ‘mole’nut holes and orange juice.

“Me and the drama teacher did a mini-skit at the beginning,” Appier said. “Then we watched the World of Chemistry videos.”

Fast forward 15 years to this year’s “Moles of the Caribbean” themed party. The cafeteria was filled with students clad in dark purple t-shirts, inflatable swords, and pirate hats. The skit had long ago been replaced with the mole countdown, the 10 co’mole’ments, and various jokes (What does a pirate eat during the summer? Water-mole-n.). Junior Kristen Shedor, part of the media relations and activities committees, added three new games: Peg Leg Races, Walk the Plank, and Pin the Eyepatch on Avogadro.

“Usually in past years it’s just Molesical Chairs that seems like the only decent game,” Shedor said. “But the games were pretty evenly distributed this year.”

Mole Day isn’t just for hard-core chemistry lovers. Sophomore chemistry student Mason Pashia attended Mole Day, though he has no interest in pursuing the subject past high school. Seeing over a hundred students cheering on a game of Mole-sical Chairs was a first for him.

“I thought it was different,” Pashia said. “It was cool that so many people showed up for a science-related event.”

According to Appier, no Mole Days have experienced complete failure. In 2004, the students never got their bagels, and another year the coordinators forgot the mole salute.

However, in the second year of honoring the mole at East, a snowstorm hit Kansas City the night of Oct. 22. While Appier, Ogdon, and the four AP kids planning it were setting up, they got the word that school had been canceled.

“It was late enough that there were actually ten or fifteen kids that showed up for Mole Day,” Appier said. “We ate some doughnuts and then had the actual celebration a month later.”

This year, the actual date of Mole Day, Oct. 23, fell on a Saturday. Instead of asking students to wake up at 5:30 a.m. on a weekend, Appier and Ogdon changed the party to Friday.

“Our concern with Saturday was that people are going to have various commitments that they wouldn’t have on a weekday,” Appier said. “We just thought there might be too many conflicts.”

The fact that it wasn’t actually Mole Day wasn’t apparent on Oct. 22. About 300 students joined in counting down the seconds until 6:02 a.m. Attendance has greatly increased since the day of Mole-apalooza.

“A lot of it has to do with the fact that the chemistry enrollment has gone up,” Ogden said. “And the enrollment of the school has gone up.”

Mole Day attracts kids of all grade levels and all science classes. Though chemistry teachers give their students extra credit for being at Mole Day by 6:02 a.m., Appier believes that’s not the only reason kids go.

“It’s something to talk about,” Appier said. “Even if you’re there for the enrichment points, it’s more than that. It’s an event.”