Step 1: turn on water (warm water is preferred)
Step 2: thoroughly wet hands (that means put your hands under the water)
Step 3: put soap on hands (one or two pumps of soap is fine)
Step 4: rub hands together for 30 seconds (you can sing the happy birthday song if you want to, but this is not recommended if it is actually your birthday) (If it IS your birthday, what song should one sing??? I think we're all a little too old for the ABCs)(What about twinkle twinkle little star twice?.)
Step 5: rinse hands (yes, the water has been running the entire time)
Step 6: dry hands using the paper towels provided for that purpose (make sure they are really dried unless you want chapped hands)
Step 7: turn off water using the paper towel (make sure your skin doesn't touch anything or you have wasted the entire experience)
Step 8: throw the paper towel away (unless you have a weird obsession and would like to keep it. that's fine too. we won't judge you)
Step 9: feel very proud that you have washed your hands
Not following this process precisely will result in a major deduction of points!!!
Wash your hands at the beginning and end of lab!
But I haven't been washing mine at the beginning! She never told us to do it at the beginning! Am I losing points for this?
I talked to her about that at the beginning of the semester, and she said it's only important to wash hands at the end of the lab.
DxRR: It is a good idea to wash your hands at the beginning of lab, so you run less risk of contaminating your experiment. Is is critical that you wash your hands before leaving lab (after we've worked with various nasties, keeping in mind that our positive control bacterial strain has both the pvl gene and the mecA gene, which are dangerous & stuff), so that you run less risk of contaminating the campus with your experiment.
So, you only lose points for not washing your hands at the end of lab because that's where you could really do some damage.
Hope this clarifies.