Tag #129510 - Interview #84078 (Roseanu Oscar)

Can you imagine the face of the principal [from the ‘Spiru Haret’ High School] when she saw me? She was shaking like a leaf because I had been the head of the education section. I told her: ‘Relax! I’m just your colleague now!’ She showed me all the classrooms and introduced me to everyone; she was making efforts to please me. I stayed there as a chemistry teacher until the day of my retirement, in 1986. I shot two full-length school films there: ‘The Chemical Compounds’ and ‘How to Solve Chemistry Problems’, which reviewed 14 types of problems. The films featured pupils of the high school. The furniture I designed and made for the chemistry lab became a prototype that was used by several schools in the Capital and in Ilfov County. We had a special chemistry lab with front works; each pupil had his own chemical substances. We had 90 photos from all the branches of the chemical industry in Romania; I put them on a rack that I placed on the teacher’s desk and the whole class could see what the machinery in the chemical industry looked like. We had 3D maps built by the students in evening school that featured the ‘14 branches of the chemical industry’ using small light bulbs. A push of a button displayed the oil industry; another push displayed the salt industry and so on and so forth. But there came a time when we had to send the entire lab to Cuba, because Misses Ceausescu [the wife of Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu] [15] had promised to equip a chemistry lab in Havana. I have three patents for teaching equipment. They all refer to modeling chemical phenomena. Today everything is computer-based. But back then, it meant something.