Inside A Kashmir Lab, I Saw What School Never Showed Me

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer)
Representational Photo

By Seerat Maqbool

For most of my school life, science was something I memorized. Not explored. Not questioned. Just memorized.

We were taught to define terms, draw neat diagrams, and score well in exams. The system rewarded speed and accuracy: how quickly you could recall the structure of a cell or write down Newton's laws.

There was no time to stop and ask why anything worked the way it did.

That began to change when I stepped into a lab at the University of Kashmir. I was studying clinical biochemistry, and my assignment placed me in the Structural Biology Lab at CIRI, where I worked on proteins involved in building ribosomes.

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Ribosomes are tiny structures inside our cells that produce proteins. But what struck me was this strange and beautiful cycle: the proteins I studied helped build the ribosomes, and the ribosomes, in turn, built every other protein in the body. It felt like a perfect loop, a factory assembling the very machines that built it.

That moment stayed with me. It was the first time I felt a genuine sense of awe about science. Not because it was complicated, but because it was elegant. I wasn't just reading facts, I was watching them unfold.

In school, we rarely had time for wonder. Science was broken down into digestible parts. You read a chapter, memorized key points, and answered questions exactly as they were framed. Deviating from the script meant risking marks. Most classrooms weren't built for asking difficult questions or exploring possible answers. They were built for performance.

Our schools proudly advertised board toppers on banners and billboards. Coaching centers promised to produce rank-holders. That kind of pressure makes you focus on results, not understanding.

In that race, critical thinking becomes a luxury, not a habit.

But science doesn't work like that. It depends on doubt. It moves forward through questions, failures, and new perspectives. If students don't feel free to be curious, to pause and ask“why,” they miss the whole point of science.

The disconnect runs deep. I've seen bright students lose interest in science because they couldn't connect it to anything they experienced in real life. They were taught that science lived in books, not in the world around them.

But it's everywhere. In the sky above us, in the way a wound heals, in the rising temperature of our planet. The basic forces we study in physics act on us every time we walk, fall, or throw a ball. The DNA we read about in textbooks carries the code for life in every cell of our bodies. But none of this sticks if we don't feel it.

I wish our classrooms allowed more space for those connections. I wish students were given time to wonder, to imagine, to play with ideas even if they were not on the syllabus.

I wish teachers were free to step away from the textbook and show how science lives around us-in the kitchen, on a rainy day, or through a microscope.

If you're a student, let science confuse you. Let it pull you in. Don't worry about not understanding everything right away. Ask questions. Build your own links between what you read and what you see.

And if you're a teacher, I hope we can move beyond measuring success only through marks. Let's teach science in ways that make it stick. Through stories, experiments, conversations. Through letting students imagine what atoms look like or why a tree grows toward light. The answers matter, but so do the questions.

That time in the lab taught me more than protein structure. It changed how I thought. It made me slow down, look closer, and trust my curiosity. I want more students to feel that, especially those who have only known science as a subject they're supposed to pass.

Science should be a way of seeing, not just studying. It should teach us how to think, not just what to know. If we can make that shift, we'll not only raise better students. We'll raise better thinkers.

• Seerat Maqbool is a student of Clinical Biochemistry at the University of Kashmir.

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