PZ Myers. 2006 Jan 04. What was your high school biology like?. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/what_was_your_high_school_biology_like/>. Accessed 2006 Feb 13.

Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Wednesday, January 04, 2006

What was your high school biology like?

Tara mentions something while discussing a nice piece by Olivia Judson (oh, and that is an excellent op-ed) that had me saying, "Me, too!"

Alas, the experience of Judson is all too common:

When I was in school, I learned none of this. Biology was a subject that seemed as exciting as a clump of cotton wool. It was a dreary exercise in the memorization and regurgitation of apparently unconnected facts. Only later did I learn about evolution and how it transforms biology from that mass of cotton wool into a magnificent tapestry, a tapestry we can contemplate and begin to understand.

I think I've mentioned before that this my high school bio class was like this as well--lots of memorization, a good dose of anatomy, but no emphasis on evolution to tie it all together. In fact, I thought biology was boring before I took an intro course in college. I'm happy to admit I was totally wrong (something I don't do very often!).

I didn't think biology was boring, but I sure thought my biology class in high school was a waste of time. It was almost as bad as that mandatory health class taught by one of the coaches (who clearly hated being there) that was little more than a study hall with pamphlets. My biology teacher wasn't a bad guy—actually, he was likable and interesting as a person—but the class content was a dogawful bore. My daughter says similar things about her biology course right now.

That has me wondering: how many of you have had similar experiences with the public school teaching of biology? Could this be where the US is going wrong, treating biology as a subject that is drained of life by a stamp-collecting approach to reciting facts and details?

I'd also be interested to hear from any high school biology teachers. What do you do to bring the topic to life for your students? What constraints, if any, do you feel from parents and administrators to avoid evolution as a central theme?

1. My 7th grade biology class was boring. My 7th grade biology teacher wasn't. When my friends and I were done collecting organically grown stamps, we'd head back over to her and she'd teach us a few things that weren't on the curriculum. Like biology.
   #: Posted by BronzeDog  on  01/04  at  02:10 PM
2. I was assigned a great biology teacher in high school. Unfortunately, two weeks into the school year, he fractured his back and spent the next six months on disability leave. We had the awesome experience of being "taught" by the substitute, who basically read from the textbook because she had no experience teaching like this. None of us were actually prepared for the regents exam at the end of the year. Which was sad, because I was otherwise a total science-loving geek.
   #: Posted by Sam  on  01/04  at  02:14 PM
3. Not to be picky, but it is quite misleading to say, as the author does "...the single-celled parasite that causes malaria is descended from algae. We know this because it carries within itself the remnants of a chloroplast."
   
   As far as I know, *nobody* thinks malaria parasite evolved from algae -- instead, it is believed that it acquired an algal cell through endosymbiosis at one point and kept the chloroplast, which became the apicoplast. Saying that the malaria parasite evolved from algae is like saying we evolved from alphaproteobacteria because our mitochondria are related to that bacterial group.
   #: Posted by Jonathan Badger  on  01/04  at  02:22 PM
4. My junior high school biology teacher was insane. The school screwed up and let me take aquatic biology without my having taken basic bio. Since I learned everything in aquatic bio that I would have learned in basic bio, I was given a pass on basic bio. We went to the Chesapeake Bay Reserve several times a month to learn to take water samples, and we studied the local water life. It was a very interesting class, with a total kook as the teacher.
   
   My class later learned that the teacher had an identical twin. We wondered how earth could handle two of those guys.
   
   It's not biology, but I have to tell you about my chemistry teacher. He taught us how to blow things up. He was an American Indian. I learned more about Indians in that class than I did about chemistry. That teacher was another one who was certifiable.
   
   What is it with high school science teachers and those same teachers being totally insane? I loved science when I was in high school because the teachers were as crazy as me.
   
   It's still not biology, but I have to tell you about an astronomer I met while I was in high school. He worked at the Maryland Science Center, and I was a volunteer who ran the planetarium. That guy was also insane. I caught him standing behind the curator of the museum - an old relic - and this guy was screaming his head off at the relic, cussing him out. I just stood in the doorway, dumbfounded. He turned to me and said that the guy couldn't hear him because he was deaf. Then he went back to cussing him out. I used to see him cussing up a storm behind the guy's back all the time. That astronomer had a great influence on me.
   
   I think that's why I am the way I am today - all the scientists I had contact with when I was a kid were completely bonkers.
   #: Posted by The Countess  on  01/04  at  02:32 PM
5. My high school biology class (freshman year) was incredibly boring. I really disliked biology until my sophomore year of college; after taking some college bio classes (and especially the labs), I found it a lot more interesting.
   #: Posted by The Chemist  on  01/04  at  02:35 PM
6. Oh, I forgot to mention that the American Indian chemistry teacher was best friends with another science teacher who did taxidermy as a hobby. The chem teacher would find roadkill, and bring it home to put in his wife's freezer. He'd later take the dead animal to the taxidermist teacher, who would stuff and mount if for him. He brought these dead mounted animals to class to show us. It was really cool.
   
   His wife ended up buying him a separate freezer for the roadkill because she was tired of opening her freezer to get out a couple of steaks for dinner and seeing a dead raccoon or another dead animal sitting in there.
   
   I tell you, every science teacher I've ever had was certifiable.
   #: Posted by The Countess  on  01/04  at  02:37 PM
7. Grades 5th through 8th I had an old bald mean teacher. He actually had a PhD in biology but he spoke slowly and softly and was boring as hell. I kept up my interest and did well because I was already a biology freak (I read the Origin when I was 13 - one of the first books I read in English language).
   
   In high school I had a wonderful old lady throughout 9th through 12th grade. She LOVED evolution and spent a lot of time on it. It was great fun. She gave inspiring lectures and fostered classroom discussions. In addition, I had botany, zoology, ecology, and biology lab in 11th grade - the former two were pretty boring, as in going through the taxonomy phylum by phylum, class by class, order by orderm and the latter two were OK. I skipped the 12th grade while my classmates had biochemistry and molecular biology which, they say, was HARD.
   
   I had recent experience teaching students who had biology in high school recently versus adults who had it 10-20 years ago. The former knew their stuff and were eager to go. The latter were scared of biology, thought it was boring and difficult. When asked, they confirmed my suspicions that they primarily memorized Latin names for body parts, flower parts, worm phyla and intermediates of Krebs cycle. The younger students had a much better high school experience and (mostly) undertood and appreciated evolution. This is Triangle Area, after all. I am assuming that it is much worse in the countryside.
   #: Posted by coturnix  on  01/04  at  02:39 PM
8. Bronze dog wrote:
   My 7th grade biology class was boring. My 7th grade biology teacher wasn't. When my friends and I were done collecting organically grown stamps, we'd head back over to her and she'd teach us a few things that weren't on the curriculum. Like biology.
   
   My 7th grade bio class was awesome--that's when we first did dissections and stuff. Great for a 7th grader. Then we had earth science in 8th grade, physical science in 9th grade, and biological science not again until 10th grade--when we did those same dissections again, basically not learning anything we didn't already get from the 7th grade curriculum. We could then take yet *another* anatomy course as a junior or senior, but why bother to do it again? That's what made it boring to me. I liked (and still like) the anatomy portion of it, but there are only so many frogs you can cut up before you just aren't learning anything new.
   #: Posted by Tara  on  01/04  at  02:39 PM
9. I know all my classes at Columbia were like this, up through my third year Neurobiology class, long after I'd mentally checked out. The problem I found with these classes was that they were so heavily geared towards people interested in getting into medical school, which does, in fact, seem to be mostly anatomy and stamp collecting as far as biology goes, albeit on a very high level. I remember distinctly marking down that evolution in my first year biology class was discussed for exactly 10 minutes on the last lecture, right after the review for the final. Needless to say, that made a huge impact.
   #: Posted by Andrew Ti  on  01/04  at  02:40 PM
10. I enjoyed my HS Bio class, but mostly because of the teacher. We spent the whole year getting ready for the NY Regents Exam, so without an exciting teacher, other kids at my school had less enjoyable times. Also, my teacher (A students could call him "Bio Bill") gave us detailed instructions for making moonshine at home (yeah yeast!) which I actually did.
    
    My wife, who grew up in South Jersey, had a less inspiring experience. Her HS bio teacher used the 'Virgin' Mary as an example of asexual reproduction. No foolin.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  02:43 PM
11. I like anatomy, too, and I think it's good basic stuff that's useful to teach to kids. What's even more awesome, though, is comparative anatomy: sit 'em down and have them find the differences and similarities between species. I think that what makes for a course that requires you to think rather than memorize is that extra level of synthesis.
    
    OK, Countess, the formula for improving the teaching of science is to slip a few drugs into the teachers' coffee. I can see it. I agree that a certain level of crazy skewed perspective is also what makes a class interesting -- one of my favorite teachers was also nuts, and he taught math. I learned that geometry and trigonometry are pretty cool subjects from him.
    #: Posted by PZ Myers  on  01/04  at  02:47 PM
12. High school was mostly godawful. I graduated in 1958, just about the time when the country was beginning to tool up for dealing with the threat that we assumed was posed by the Russkies and their Sputnik.
    
    My biology teacher was an idiot; but we were at least taught Mendelian genetics. Back then, of course, humans had 24 pairs of chromosomes and DNA wasn't part of the curriculum, although as a kid who bought his copy of Scientific American the minute it hit the newsstand, I of course knew about it.
    
    I had a few decent teachers: My 3rd year Latin teacher, two math teachers, and one decent English teacher. Otherwise, high school was pretty much a dead loss.
    
    From what I read, it hasn't improved much since then.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  02:47 PM
13. Am I the only one who had a great experience in high school biology? I went to the North Hollywood Zoo Magnet, a biological science magnet located in the LA Zoo parking lot.
    
    In addition to regular biology, chemistry, health and inter-coordinated science courses, my school offered a wide variety of science electives. One of them was genetics, which focused on the population and evolutionary aspects of the subject -- I ended up reading Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation in tenth grade. There was also animal studies (a required zoology course taught by zoo staff), ecology, environmental science (with an AP course available on the main North Hollywood High School campus), invertebrate zoology, vertebrate physiology (actually more of a comparative anatomy class), a year-long course in physical oceanography. My biggest disappointment was not getting to take animal behavior. Evolution was woven into the curriculum.
    
    
    Yes, one of the science teachers was lousy, but overall, it was an amazing school. Most of my first-year bio at UCLA, including a course in animal social behavior, was review.
    #: Posted by Jane Shevtsov  on  01/04  at  02:56 PM
14. I go to a high school in a suburb of Minnesota currently and AP Biology is not that bad. Basically, we are required to read campbell(ch.25 now) and take tests on it once in a while. No one takes the labs seriously though. The class itself is not too inspiring(rather boring lectures) but I find campbell really interesting(as do some of my classmates).
    #: Posted by logicus  on  01/04  at  02:57 PM
15. I'll go ahead and echo theophylact above... I don't deny that lots of HS bio classes suck, but I'm not sure this is necessarily a problem unique to biology. Thinking back, it's hard to recall more than 2 or 3 HS classes that DIDN'T suck.
    #: Posted by dr. dave  on  01/04  at  03:00 PM
16. I didn't take high school biology. A friend of mine found out that if you were advanced enough in math, you could skip straight to chemistry and physics, and cutting up frogs and worms (which was all anybody talked about from biology class) was pretty unappealing. When I got to college I kind of regretted it, since I didn't end up taking any bio classes there. However, looking back now from a longer view, I've read a lot and I probably know about as much as I would remember by now anyway. (And I had enough other fields in college where I jumped straight into a high-level intro class with inadequate preparation.)
    #: Posted by Redshift  on  01/04  at  03:04 PM
17. My high school biology courses were so boring I remember them only as a blur being desperate to get onto chemistry and physics classes later in the day. In fact, my University biology classes bored me to tears untill I took neuroscience. Neuroscience 101 changed my life foreover, I quickly switched majors from physics to neuroscience and now I'm a card carrying neuroscientist.
    
    I think part of the problem with teaching biology is that if the anatomy and comparative-anatomy geared stuff doesn't get you hooked (still puts me to sleep -- although I certainly can appreciate the importance now) you need a fairly firm grasp of organic chemistry to really appreciate what is going on at the molecular level and its nearly impossible to expect that of a high schooler. Its certainly worth the effort though.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  03:07 PM
18. "OK, Countess, the formula for improving the teaching of science is to slip a few drugs into the teachers' coffee. I can see it. I agree that a certain level of crazy skewed perspective is also what makes a class interesting -- one of my favorite teachers was also nuts, and he taught math. I learned that geometry and trigonometry are pretty cool subjects from him."
    
    I'm sure my science teachers didn't take drugs. I'm convinced their bodies naturally manufactured them. They really were crazy. I had lots of fun dissecting grasshoppers in high school. One teacher dissected a cow's heart for the class. I guess there weren't enough cow's hearts to go around. All the girls got icky-gooey over it, but I loved it.
    
    I had one good math teacher, but I could never adequately grasp math. Algebra was confusing for me. Geometry was worse. It didn't help that the geometry teacher was a mean guy who didn't like me. He didn't make the math experience a pleasant one. For some reason, I couldn't handle math in math classes, but I did just fine with math in science classes. I think the teachers made all the difference for me.
    #: Posted by The Countess  on  01/04  at  03:09 PM
19. Forgot to mention one thing. I missed part of the first semester of tenth grade because my family was traveling, so the animal studies teacher gave me an alternative assignment. He lent me a Norton anthology on Darwin and told me to write three essays comparing different authors. I got to read Darwin, Huxley, Leakey, Medawar and much else. Not a bad way to learn!
    #: Posted by Jane Shevtsov  on  01/04  at  03:13 PM
20. My HS bio experience exactly paralleled that of Olivia Judson. Mandatory dissection drills that revealed nothing to my untrained eye, and memorizing all of the parts of a cell. Memorization, without any systematic overview, and no mention of the E-word that I recall.
    
    I actually have a creationist to thank for my present interest in evolution. He started spouting off about the evils of evolution (Piltdown etc) over lunch one day. I had a strong gut sense that he was dead wrong, but didn't know enough real science to respond. That really ticked me off, so I started on a passionate campaign of reading. I found the subject to be utterly fascinating, much to my surprise. Forty books and ten years later, I find the subject as engrossing as ever. I'm now reading Sean Carroll's Evo Devo book (thanks PZ for putting it on your book list) and loving it.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  03:13 PM
21. I went to a large high school just a mile or less from NASA's Johnson Space Center. Consquently, the area employed many highly educated people who demanded quality science and math education for their children. Biology was no exception. Evolution played an appropriately large role, and creationism was never even mentioned.
    
    We also had a poli-sci teacher who introduced me to critical thinking, and an English teacher who taught me the value of expressing myself clearly. I will be forever grateful.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  03:14 PM
22. My HS Biology teacher was a man who appeared to be about a week away from mandatory retirement. I remember nothing about the class except his name and the frog dissection. Chemistry the following year was more interesting (Things fizz! Things blow up!), but what really got me in HS was languages. I had the same instructor for three years of French and two of Russian, and those classes were dynamite.
    
    It's the teachers who make the classes, in my experience.
    #: Posted by Linkmeister  on  01/04  at  03:15 PM
23. At school, I initially studied human biology, then went on to "normal" biology, getting the chance to cut up frogs, pigeons and dogfish in the process. Throughout, the whole subject was fascinating, with good teachers who made the subject come to life by stressing the evolutionary interrelationships of organisms.
    
    Mind you, I'm a Brit...
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  03:25 PM
24. I did have one very good high school chemistry class. (AP, plus a "Lab Sciences" class that was just an extension) Especially liked some of the small revelations that I picked up from studying the material:
    
    "Oh, so that's why two gases like hydrogen and oxygen combine to form a liquid!"
    
    "Oh, so that's why oil and water don't mix!"
    
    "Oh, that's why crystals shatter, and metal bends!"
    
    Thanks to my teacher, I CLEPed out of 8 hours of college chemistry.
    #: Posted by BronzeDog  on  01/04  at  03:32 PM
25. I loved my AP biology class last year. The most fun I've had in school so far. Great teacher. We didn't really learn (although all of us had had 9th grade biology) about evolution until April because she wanted it to be fresh on our minds, but she did talk about evolution a lot throughout the year so it was tied together. I would easily take it again if I had the chance. My teacher is one of the reasons why I'm so interested in biology right now. So, in short, I think we were taught well and the class was fine. :D
    #: Posted by Kele  on  01/04  at  03:34 PM
26. My high school biology was wonderful (Toronto suburb in the mid 1970s). In addition to the core curriculum bio (which was ok, but nothing special) we had the option of taking 2 additional courses each year: microbiology and an associated chemistry course. We did fun stuff with growing, killing, sorting, counting, identifying various bacteria. Oddly, I found the university bio courses I took to be rather less appealing, and ended up changing my career direction from bio/med to electrical engineering, partway through my first year.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  03:34 PM
27. Not just the US, man, it's India too.. I studied at a relatively well-to-do school, and I have to say, I *hated* biology. Memorise this, memorise that, and vomit it all out at the end, in a green viscous, anatomically-correct pile at the end of the year: That was biology.
    
    Now, on the other hand, I feel towards evolution and biology much as a jew would feel towards G-d. I exaggerate, but evolution has tied my entire experience of biology together in a way that has changed my attitude towards biology. I really wish they had used evolution as a framework for biology at school.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  03:40 PM
28. HS biology was excellent! I got a solid grounding in evolutionary theory from the get-go from a very sharp Jesuit scholastic. This after eighth grade - Sister Paula getting red in the face and nearly stroking out at any mention of the possibility of having primate ancestors.
    
    This was 35 years ago, and I remain impressed at the quality of the scientific education I received. I know for a fact that people of faith (which I do not share) are still capable of thinking deeply and rigorously about the natural world. They understood that no belief could force them to deny those things they could see, touch and measure.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  03:40 PM
29. I would say mine was about 50:50 ratio between boring memorization and interesting biological stuff. The catch was the biology teacher was also the football coach. He was allowed to grade on "class participation" and so ALL the football team got 'A's, of which I was one.
    
    We disected a lot of different animals. Worms, frogs, grasshoppers, star fish all went under the knife, that was cool stuff!
    
    So, the teacher knew his stuff, but the automatic 'A' was a bit of a drain on the whole motivation thing. There was also an advanced biology course that I didn't take (same teacher.) It would have been another 'A', but I was (am) more into mathematics...
    #: Posted by DouglasG  on  01/04  at  03:40 PM
30. Count me as someone who had a horrible experience with biology class. It was my freshman year of high school, and the whole class seemed to be memorization. That, and we had these huge 20 page packets of multiple choice and fill in the blank questions, where you would go though the book and hunt for words written in bold and fill that in on your paper.
    
    To this day, exactly one thing has stuck with me from that class: The words "endoplasmic reticulum." That's it. I don't remember what they mean.
    
    My dad, a physicist, kept telling me "Wait until you get to the chapter on evolution. Evolution is the unifying principle of biology. Everything will make more sense when you get there."
    
    So we got to evolution and guess what? The teacher skipped it.
    
    I didn't touch biology again until I took a college class entirely about evolution. The funny thing is, my dad was right. If my high school class had been more like that college class, I might have leaned toward a different career.
    #: Posted by Kazim  on  01/04  at  03:47 PM
31. I had two years of bio in hs (regular and ap) in Indiana in '89 and '92. We had very few labs due to budget issues in the district. I still wish there had been more attention paid to the value of labs in teaching. I honestly have no recollection of how evolution was presented at all. I suspect it was presented without mention of any conflict with religion. I certainly did not feel that memorization was stressed or I likely wouldn't be sitting where I am today. I had a kneejerk reflex against memorization as a student and those classes tend to be what I regard as my least favorite. I tend to agree with theophylact that the classes and teachers that were good were few and far between without regard to subject. I had an excellent Latin teacher who taught me much more than Latin, a solid biology teacher, and a dynamite chem teacher (who I only grew to appreciate after college Chem).
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  03:49 PM
32. My Highschool biology teacher, although not horrible when actually teaching, was also the track and cross-country coach, and made it obvious what his first priority was. I can remember literally spending several days (!) coloring, with crayons and everything, photocopies of birds, while he discussed strategies for the season with his team captains. Oh well, no one minded since we had the #1 cross country team in the nation, and that was sure to bring in lots of... money... or whatever winning athletic teams are supposed to bring in for a public school. Rah.
    
    I also took an elective, new for that year course in biotechnology, but it was run by the agriculture/Future Farmers of America guy. Other than the one time we got to electrophoresis, the remainder of the year was very... corn-oriented, and failed to fire my imagination much.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  03:49 PM
33. The PE teacher phenomenon is common, I think. They took a little anatomy and physiology in college, so they get roped into double-duty coaching and teaching biology/health. It's a real shame that makes biology a second-rate class taught with the same emphases the teacher got in his old sports medicine course.
    #: Posted by PZ Myers  on  01/04  at  03:59 PM
34. I was unfortunate enough to have been taught biology at a baptist high school (only one year there). I learned a lot about how complex cells were (I don't remember them being called machines though). Evolution was briefly covered, under the topic of "how to argue with an evolutionist." I don't remember the details of that one either.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  04:00 PM
35. My biology experience was limited to AP biology in tenth grade. I had different teachers for the micro (fall) and macro (spring). Overall, it was a great experience.
    
    For the most part, I was prepped for biology because of the Boy Scouts and my interest in backpacking. Much of it was memorization, but when we got to genetics, the world took off for me--it was the first experience I had thinking in an 'if-then' mode rather than rote memorization. I don't know if others had the same instruction, but we essentially ran the gamut from Mendel to Monad, nailing down every significant discovery in the field along with Miller's work.
    
    I missed much of the spring semester (which was macro) because of being hospitalized, and had to catch up on the on a lot in the last two months.
    
    Mike
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  04:08 PM
36. I had such an ideal experience in high school bio. Same teacher for both regular and AP, he's the reason I'm going for my PhD in cell/dev bio now. We did all sorts of experiments, and he was just so excited about it all, he really made us see how cool all this stuff was...but among my grad student peers, I'm very much in the minority as far as having loved high school science. However, I should mention I grew up 5 miles from Lawrence Livermore National and Sandia Labs, which probably influenced the quality of our science education considering many of my classmates' parents worked at the lab.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  04:12 PM
37. Biology was one of my favorite courses in high school, and covered pretty well in junior high too. I went to public school in Ohio, and biology was ~20 years ago for me. I took the equivalent of honors biology in HS, which used a BSCS textbook and curriculum. Evolution was talked about as a fact, and things like our eyes having their evolutionary roots in the light sensitive features of central nervous systems (not quite complex enough to be called brains according to the teacher) of primitive invertrabates are some of the unifying ideas that still stick with me 20 years later.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  04:16 PM
38. I cannot recall any biology covered in Elementary School, other than a short lesson on plants. In fact, I remember little science AT ALL. Mostly English, French and Math.
    
    Sec I I had ecology. The teacher was really an English teacher; I should know, I was in her English class twice. She treated us like we were in Kindergarten, expect giving homework load appropriate for Sec V. Nice lady, thought, and she really liked us (she invited us to her wedding). Needless to say, I don't think anybody learned much ecology. There was a section on human evolution in Ancient History (again, thought by same English teacher), but I think nobody learned much history, either. I remember looking over a biography of Charles Darwin in her class.
    
    Sec III, I had (human) biology. Now that was great; the teacher was an actually biology teacher and the material covered wasn't too hard and uninteresting.
    
    I don't take any biology until last semester in college, where I took General Biology I. Again, I got surprised when the teacher was changed, at the last minute. She was nice teacher as well, but has an annoying affinity for PowerPoint. I got a 70, although I faired poorly on my second class test and lab exam. The genetics and the evolution parts were the easiest part, but the part where you just memorized where just murder.
    
    Oh, BTW, my teacher did cover creationism. It took five minutes:
    
    *Theory: God dunnit, garden of Eden, etc.
    *Succeeded by evolutionary theories.
    *Only thought in the more backwards portions of the Earth, like Kansas.
    
    She should get an award from the Discover Institute.
    #: Posted by Babbler  on  01/04  at  04:21 PM
39. I had an *awesome* high school biology teacher. Brendan Herlichy would sometimes play different characters while explaining concepts or important "stories". This included the Frenchman talking of the virtues of microbial processes that turn grape juice into wine, though if you wait too long, then (pretending to take a swig) it turns into vinegar (grimacing and uttering a French-sounding expletive (I took Spanish, so I wasn't sure)). Another was the fisherman with a Bostonian accent singing a brief song about marine life, then telling us that sea anemones look like (hushed, conspiratorial tone) anuses. He loved whales, and took the class on a whale-watching trip at Cape Cod, far away from the smoggy confines of Yonkers, NY.
    
    I think I would have loved biology regardless, because though my AP biology teacher was not particularly engaging (okay, I was pretty damn disappointed with his class), I steered towards the sciences in colleges (where I met many other less-inspiring teachers) and am a PhD graduate student in the biological sciences today.
    
    Now that I think of it, I remember the concepts of evolution taught in my high school class, not from AP bio.
    
    I have had other exemplary science teachers in elementary and junior high, so perhaps my earlier experiences were strong enough to fuel my interest in science (though, to this day, I still absolutely HATE inorganic chemistry).
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  04:21 PM
40. Boring! And I truly was sick the day that we dissected the fetal pig--my lab partner got back at me for that by being "sick" the day we dissected the frog. That was fun, actually, so I didn't mind doing it all myself. I think my teacher was bordering on senility (this was not a prestigious high school, but one in which 8x10 color photos of jocks decorated the walls), and was hoping to retire before his body did. My lab partner had the longest fingernails in the world. She was always pristine, hair perfectly styled, no zits, filthy rich...and she got stuck with me. Well, hell, I didn't see her at the class reunion! Ah, high school memories. (I actually first learned about evolution in sixth grade.)
    #: Posted by Kristine Harley  on  01/04  at  04:25 PM
41. Gene Davis at Albany High School in Albany California is a great biology teacher. I had his class in the late 80's. Excellent coverage of all aspects of basic biology: evolution, anatomy, cellular structures, taxonomy, genetics, metabolism, etc.. He really made it fun, but also rigorous. Damn good teacher. He really tied it all together into a coherent whole.
    
    Funny thing is, there was one other biology teacher at the same high school, and EVERYBODY who took her class hated biology afterwards. This post made me think how glad I am that I never got her.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  04:36 PM
42. Olivia Judson wrote:
    
    "Biology was a subject that seemed as exciting as a clump of cotton wool. It was a dreary exercise in the memorization and regurgitation of apparently unconnected facts. Only later did I learn about evolution and how it transforms biology from that mass of cotton wool into a magnificent tapestry, a tapestry we can contemplate and begin to understand."
    
    Sorry Olivia, but it wasn't evolution that rang your chimes. The "magnificent tapestry" that you refer to is the unity of life. Similar genes, similar processes and similar structures are used over and over again across a wide range of different forms. We're all part of the same "web of life" and we're all cut from the same cloth. This is the profound truth of biology and it's this relatedness that binds us all together and gives meaning to the study of life science. It leads us to the conclusion that we probably all came from a common origin. And it is an understanding that has great significance.
    It also has nothing at all to do with "evolution".
    #: Posted by charlie wagner  on  01/04  at  04:41 PM
43. My bio class was really good, at least in my opinion. It was very diffifult and there was a lot of memorization, but we also did enough labs to keep it interesting, including labs that we designed ourselves. I don't think that's typical of current high school courses though. That one was supposed to be like a semester of college level intro to bio. Still, I really liked it.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  04:42 PM
44. ooh - I forgot to mention - the fetal pig that I dissected had a vagina and testes. Weird!
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  04:44 PM
45. As a former biology teacher (and current Assistant Principal of Instruction) I can tell you high school biology wasn't the reason I majored in Biology. The teacher was a nice man, but it was as most everyone else has described-dull.Evolution was not really taught at the high school level where I went to high school. My college intro biology class was a good class-taught using evolution and genetics as the pivotal concepts. I got an evolution double whammy as a freshmen because I took a physical anthropology class from a Dr. V. Sarich, who went into evolution quite a bit and was quite eloquent. As a bio teacher I tried to go away from rote memorization and focused on genetics and focused on the evolution of specialization in plants and animals. Students did a lot of writing both in labs and on tests. I believe we need to change how bio is taught at the high school level. In some areas, it is the first class students take and they lack the physics and chemistry background to deeply understand the material. Physics and chemistry should be taken before and/or concurrently with bio (like in college)to enable the teacher and the student to get to some of the really interesting and fun things that can be studied. This would give high school students a glimpse of the complexity of biology and perhaps motivate them to explore that as an area of study in college.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  04:46 PM
46. My high school biology teacher inadvertantly taught us a little about deep time by virtue of his advanced age, but never mentioned evolution - or much of anything interesting, unless you're inordinately fond of anatomical memorization. Worse yet, my first biology class in college was also duller than dirt in just the ways described here - dull memorization, no coherence, passing mention of natural selection but no solid grounding in the theory and structure of evolutionary biology. That one class alone was enough to dissuade me from my original intent to double major in physics and zoology. A graduate philosophy seminar titled "History and Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology," taught by Ernst Mayr's student Michael Ghiselin, was the first genuinely interesting biology class I ever had. I've been hooked ever since.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  04:59 PM
47. My high school biology course (it may have been subsumed into General Science, but it was at least a unit of that) was OK. The teacher was genuinely curious and pretty cool (despite a maddening twitch of one eye) and he provided very thorough and accurate sex ed info, along with having us cut up the usual frog, pig embryo, and cow heart.
    
    Someone has already mentioned the great job that Scientific American has long performed in the area of popular science education. I want to give a shout out to Random House's "All About ..." book series of the '50s (I may be misremebering the publisher, but I think that's right). I didn't need to learn about the deeps of geological time or the coolness of ancient humans and other living critters, or about evolution in general, from high school biology, because I had alreadyread good popularizations by the scientists and museum curators themselves in grade school.
    
    And thanks to the 'rents for signing me up for the All About book club. That cool new book every month or so was really something to anticipate and treasure!
    
    So, along with the science classes, let's all support good science writing, literacy, and libraries, beacons against the darkness.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  05:03 PM
48. I wasn't going to read ALL of the comments, but I did, and I noticed a distinct lack of non-USA responses. American Exceptionalism strikes again, perhaps.
    
    I graduated high school in 1996, in Calgary. A school full of surprises. Calgary has a high proportion of Mormons, and my HS AP bio courses were about 1/2 raging creationists, but there was little overlap - most of the creationists were not Mormon, and the Mormons were mostly OK with evolution (at least, as far as the earth being really old, and organisms evolving gradually into new species over millions of years).
    
    My bio teacher was pretty good - not great, but certainly not bad. When we got to the provincially-mandated section on Evolutionary Biology (came right after cell bio and just before neurology, I recall), she knew 1/2 the class was just waiting to denounce her as a godless heathen, so she started with a 30-second announcement to the effect that you can believe anything you like, but if you're going to argue against something, you'll do better if you understand that thing. This kept the IDiots quiet for the rest of the week.
    
    The bizarro part of my HS was the AP chemistry teacher. I learned more about chemistry from Rob Ledderer than about any other subject from any other teacher. Molecular structure, covalent and ionic bonds, organic chemistry, thermodynamics, kinetics, all were covered lucidly, in detail and with real skill. But every so often he'd remind us that "this proves evolution can't happen", generally by citing the 2nd Law. Naturally I ignored that part of his lectures.
    
    When I got to university, every one of his "arguments" was demolished in the first 5 minutes of day 1 of 1st year biology. The name of the course was "Diversity of Life on Earth". Now I'm finishing my M.Sc. in Evolutionary Genetics, but I knew I wanted a PhD in (marine) biology since I was about 8 years old - high school had very little impact on that desire.
    
    Sorry this comment is so long. Also, cephalopods are cool.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  05:16 PM
49. I loved biology in high school. In fact, both my math teacher and my biology teacher thought I should become a genetic engineer. Instead, I wanted to be a poet. So I put science in my poetry. Go figure. Of course, I dissected animals on my own in junior high. My favorite thing--PZ, you'll appreciate this--was dissecting a squid and getting the backbone (such as it is) out whole. I was so proud of that! I remember talking about evolution in high school, and I was in the bible belt. I'm not sure how much I retained, but it seemed we mostly directly applied it in the lab.
    #: Posted by Laura  on  01/04  at  05:24 PM
50. My goal in high school was to get through it as quickly as possible, so I took biology during summer school around 1977-78. There was about a quarter acre of undeveloped wetland on the school's property, so every summer they offered a class called "field biology." It was something like six weeks and two hours a day. At least one hour a day was spent observing and collecting in the field. There was quite a bit of ecology, some botany, lots of rotifers and paramecium. I remember hunting fruitlessly for galls on the shrubby trees there.
    
    We might have done a lecture on Darwin's fieldwork in the Galapagos, but there wasn't much discussion of evolutionary mechanisms, etc. Neither was there any sense that evolution was in any way controversial. I remember dissecting a preserved grasshopper that was well past its expiration date. Mostly, however, I remember this tall blonde girl with very long legs who wore very short shorts to class, because it was summer.
    
    It was not a bad class, but not exactly an AP course either. I remember much more about my AP physics and chemistry classes.
    #: Posted by HP  on  01/04  at  05:33 PM
51. I have no specific memory of my high school biology class, other than the unpleasant task of dissecting fetal pigs (yuck).
    
    I did, however, have the privilege of taking a bio-for-nonscientists class with E.O. Wilson as an undergrad, and it rocked, even if he was constantly jetting off to foreign countries to accept awards for being so freakin' awesome.
    
    One of my roommates took Stephen J. Gould's class, and it was also excellent, though he was a holy terror.
    #: Posted by Mrs. Coulter  on  01/04  at  05:54 PM
52. It sounds like I am one of the few that actually enjoyed high school biology. I was fortunate enough to take AP biology with a great teacher. We did the typical dissections, but also also did lots of other experiments, which it sounds like others may have lacked. I even got extra credit for managing to slice a planaria in half and watch each side regenerate.
    But the other AP teacher was a terrible bore, and I know the students in his class didn't have anywhere near the passion for biology that my teacher inspired in our class. God only knows how boring the normal biology classes must have been.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  06:03 PM
53. Please forgive me for mentioning this again, but it's such a good idea that this is the perfect place to repeat it.
    
    About 10-12 years ago, in an article in Technology Review, Leon Lederman (Nobel physicist) suggested that American high schools teach science upside down, introducing the most complex and difficult subject, biology, first.
    
    He proposed to start with physics (concepts, light on math), following with chemistry and ending with biology.
    
    I would think that EvoDevo folks would be whooping up this idea for all they're worth, inasmuch as they (or at least Sean Carroll) make so much of the necessity of understanding the molecular structure in order to understand phylogeny.
    
    I cannot imagine the best teacher in the world transmitting EvoDevo if the class is a bunch of 14-year-olds who have not yet heard of the periodic table.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  06:35 PM
54. My children's bio classes were inane and some had teachers teaching intelligent design (I am in San Diego of all places too!). Luckily those teachers ore often "let go due to contract experasion". So I went back to school and am getting my MA in teaching. California requires you to have a BA/BS in the subject you are teaching and an MA to teach high school. BTW I finish my Student teaching gig and get my sheepskin in 3 weeks! (Any one need a published biochhemist and hockey coach to teach high school bio?)
    
    I have found that teachers are over worked and underpaid, under appreciated, and are threatened with lawsuits in my school. Science needs to go back to the BSCS standards with the kids learning the subject through experiments and inquiry, not being taught by a teacher. They will get it if they are led to find the subject. Teachers are now more than ever afraid of standardized tests, so they force more "facts" down at the kids hoping they can regurge some of it on the tests. But if you teach the kids to love the subject, let them get their hands dirty and discover the facts, they will get it done on the test too.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  06:46 PM
55. I took biology in a yeshiva (jewish extremely religious school) in Brooklyn in the 1950s. The teacher and class were orthodox jews.
    
    I remember how the teacher introduced evolution. He said, "You must learn evolution to pass biology. You don't have to believe it, but you have to know it." Then he presented the subject without further apology.
    #: Posted by Hexatron  on  01/04  at  07:05 PM
56. In Britain, the three sciences are intertwined until you hit 14. Then, depending on your school, they are split in to separate two hour per week classes. I did reasonably well in biology for most of the time in school, though I crapped out at 16 and failed it completely.
    
    You know that "nothing makes sense in biology without evolution"? Well, nothing made sense in biology class without evolution, a topic that was covered about as much as Page 3 Girls' chests are. Kazim's comment about evolution tying it all together is absolutely smack on. Everything I've read since understanding (to some degree) evolution and natural selection now seems to make sense.
    
    The biology teacher was good (at least, one of them was good - there was another teacher who spoke in a deathly monotone and told appalling jokes), and the chemistry teacher was pretty eccentric. The physics teacher was boring though, even when we were studying cool things like radiation. It was a mixed bag, basically.
    
    If you want to see what 16, 17 and 18 year olds are learning in Bio classes in Britain, check this website. It gives a list of topics, plus sample questions. Whether the teaching matches up to the questions is another matter entirely.
    #: Posted by Tom Morris  on  01/04  at  07:17 PM
57. I've taught high school general biology and AP biology. The key to both is to not be afraid of the subject matter. Tackle evolution head on. Some kids accept it straight away and are intrigued by it. Others immediately ask why there are still apes around. Both spark discussions that everyone benifits from. I had one AP student bring me some creationist material that she thought I should read, which I did. I then pointed out the flaws in the books (wish I could remember which books they were) and had a nice talk with her. At parent teacher conferences, her dad showed up and we had another civil discussion about the evidence supporting evolution. He was a creationist but wanted to have a real, non-hostile dialogue about our different ways of thinking. So, on the whole, it's been positive.
    
    Now I teach 5th and 6th grade math/science. I"m introducing evolution as part of the 6th grade science curriculum next year and think it will be great. You can do a lot more hands on work with that age group and I think they'll have many excellent questions and ideas. If any parents have concerns, you have another discussion, and if they still don't like it they can pull their kid.
    #: Posted by Cameron  on  01/04  at  07:51 PM
58. I only ever heard the word "evolution" in history classes. All stamp collecting. By contrast, the history classes were outstanding...with the notable exception of an AP European History class. Since then, the history classes have shifted extremely into the same stamp collecting mode, with heavy emphasis on historical fads.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  07:54 PM
59. I missed out on the boredom of high-school biology class. I had had a few run-ins with the teacher in 9th grade study hall (bored over achiever) so was not eager to attend anything he was teaching, so I petitioned to take the entry level anatomy and physiology course at the local college in lieu of 10th grade bio. The teacher was against it but the admins said if I could pass the regents in the spring, I could go.
    
    Pulled an 86 with little additional studying and found out college girls really do care how old you are!
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  08:04 PM
60. The only thing I remember about HS biology is that the teacher strongly emphasized that evolution is a theory full of holes; looking back, I think he was a creationist who would have taught Genesis if he thought he could get away with it. (The other science teachers and administration were a pretty good bunch and I'm sure wouldn't have let him.)
    
    I started reading about evolution on my own after that and remember how angry I got about being lied to. Evolution really is the string on which the pearls of biological fact are strung.
    
    On the other hand, my chemistry teacher was one of the greatest people I've ever met. He was writing his own chemistry textbook and used us to try out his ideas. And he told the most amazing non-chemistry stories.
    
    I ran into a quip recently to the effect that you don't take courses in college, you take professors. From the various comments it's evident that that applies to HS also - just replace "professors" with "teachers."
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  08:04 PM
61. Alas, what little I remember of high school biology is dreary memorization. Worse, it was during that contentious period when post-Sputnik modernization ran off the rails because of the evolution issue. (Does anyone remember that story?) I suppose that's one reason I became a physicist.
    #: Posted by Lee J Rickard  on  01/04  at  08:32 PM
62. What HS Biology class? The last Biology based class I took was in Junior High where there was much controversy over dissecting worms. Frogs were the subject the year before, but worms it was for us.
    
    I also taught Middle School biology for a semester. The text was harmless enough but unlikely to inspire anyone to become the next Dawking, Gould or Myers.
    
    While teaching at a high school in eastern Oregon a few years ago I had the pleasure of working with an excellent science teacher who did not blanch from the subject of evolution inside or outside the classroom. He was dedicated and his course was rigorous.
    
    Teaching is a tough job, and qualified science teachers are hard to come by so it is little wonder that students entering college are particularly unprepared for science classes of all stripes.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  08:41 PM
63. I didn't learn biology as a class on its own before I started university. In 7th and 8th grade it was all (thankfully non-mandatory) dissections, stamp collecting, and so on. At this stage there wasn't much biology in science classes - it was mostly physics, chemistry, and general stuff that's not really any of the three sciences but doesn't fit in any other class.
    
    My single university biology class was in microbiology and was mostly about stamp-collecting, again, but the parts about cellular structure and evolution fascinated me. I still contend that endosymbiotic theory was the most exciting thing I've learned about in university.
    #: Posted by Alon Levy  on  01/04  at  08:54 PM
64. An early junior high school biology class started with algae and field work in the swampy areas on the school's property. The teacher spent time showing us his fossils while he talked about evolution, and he taught us to sketch, to whatever talent we possessed, and he taught us to peek into clumps of moss to figure out what was living there.
    One day, early in, he showed us a little clump of moss, nothing very special at all, about two inches square, and then we got out the microscope and the tweezers, and he used the words "miniature forest" a couple of times.
    Then we learned about hydras and all of the things in pond water.
    It was taught in equal parts from the textbook, from other books, from just plain wading through grass and swamp and poking at stuff, and from stories about how he'd learned things and his collections. He loved the stuff. All of it. From the concepts underlying the subject, to the critters and plants and ecosystems all around us, down to the little squirmy things that live everywhere.
    I don't know that it was a course designed to genuinely teach us anything, as such, except maybe in some ways to just expose us to the basics and to get us to think about it all. He spent just as much time on plants as anything else, and he emphasized how things interconnect.
    But maybe it was designed to show us how much *fun* biology can all be, too. It was a wonderful experience, and I still have my notebooks somewhere.
    I'd coasted through school to that point, and was expecting this class to be just as boring, and it was like having someone set up fireworks on my desk.
    
    He had a particular love for aquatic life, which may be why we spent so much time in the wetlands, and for paleohistory, which may be why evolution crept into every discussion of everything. And looking back, I can see where just the way he talked about it really stoked my love for the same things, even if I hadn't already been inclined towards an obsession with all things fishy.
    He loved it, and I think he did an amazing job of passing that along to us, or at least those of us who were receptive.
    
    After that, it didn't matter in the slightest how boring any science teacher was. I was hooked.
    It's not my career, but biology is where I find my pleasure. I've seen it as the framework of enjoying nature ever since. You can look at a piece of coral and enjoy it for its beauty, but biology teaches you all that stuff behind the surface beauty, and that's what makes it really awe-inspiring.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  08:58 PM
65. Awful class, awful teacher. He was, I think, primarily hired as an athletic coach. I remember that at one point he claimed that the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen was "the working principle of the hydrogen bomb".
    
    At least the textbook had evolution in it, but the class didn't have much.
    #: Posted by Matt McIrvin  on  01/04  at  09:09 PM
66. ...On the other hand, I did have a pretty good biology/environmental science teacher in the seventh grade.
    #: Posted by Matt McIrvin  on  01/04  at  09:10 PM
67. I don't remember much about my high school biology class, but what I don remember is that it didn't excite me like biology does today. And my chem class was really badly taught.
    
    In college, I had a great chemistry class which brought me to science again. I was a chemistry major in collge before moving to biology in grad school.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  09:37 PM
68. When I did year 11-12 (~= 'senior high') in New South Wales, you could choose up to two of four available science electives (physics, chemistry, geology, and biology) for the Higher School Certificate. However, because of the way HSC results were scaled, it was much easier for a bright student to get a good TER (university admission score) from physics and chemistry than from biology.
    
    Further, university-level biology courses would commonly treat high-school level phys/chem (but not biology) as assumed knowledge - so taking biology in high school was actually a disadvantage if you wanted to pursue a higher degree in it.
    
    The result of this was that high-school biology was largely a dead-end subject (geology also, for the same reasons), and my school treated it that way. It was ostensibly part of the curriculum for everybody up to year 10, but it got pretty short shrift even there because none of the bright students were expected to continue in it. I think my natural leanings would've been towards physics and chemistry anyway, but I never saw enough of biology to make much of a choice.
    #: Posted by Geoffrey Brent  on  01/04  at  09:40 PM
69. Er, '~=' meaning 'roughly equivalent' rather than 'not equal to' there
    #: Posted by Geoffrey Brent  on  01/04  at  09:44 PM
70. My chemistry teacher told us a great story to fix Group I elements in to our minds forever. A failing chemistry student at university decides to kill himself. He decides to at least go out creatively. So he goes to the university swimming pool, and brings along some sodium. He changes in to his swimming trunks and puts the sodium in his trunks. He then jumps in, expecting the reaction between the sodium to be big enough to kill him. Unfortunately, it's not. It only blows his genitals off.
    
    Of course, this is total urban legend stuff, and she imprinted on (some of) us the importance of taking such a story with a pinch of sceptical salt.
    #: Posted by Tom Morris  on  01/04  at  09:58 PM
71. I graduated from HS in 2000 and my HS Biology class was similar to many. It was stamp collecting, with an uninterested basketball coach for a teacher, evolution was largely ignored (in Michigan of all places), etc.
    
    But poor education isn't limited to Biology. As my favorite teacher discovered when he came out of retirement, too many (most?) students don't really even know how to read a textbook and learn from it; and too many (most?) students--good God!--even only know mathematics as magic algorithms that can be applied to known kinds of problems.
    
    I would prefer it, if it came down to it, if schools completely gave up on trying to produce educated children and instead just tried to make effective thinkers. It seemed sometimes like the opposite compromise had been made systematically all throughout public school.
    
    /starting to sound like a teenager again...
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  10:01 PM
72. I remember very little from high school biology. I'm pretty sure we watched movies sometimes, but it was 9th grade and I had family problems (so I slept a lot) Despite this, I still got an A because I am excellent at memorization. I clearly remember having to know 10-20 different pine cones just by the way they felt. How is that biology?
    
    One memory stands out for me: My teacher was off in his little alcove away from the class, having already set up different stations for us to work at. I was at the station closest to his alcove with my lab partner and I asked "Hey, why doesn't the ice float?" and my teacher popped his head out and said "See, that's what science is about!" and went back to whatever he was doing. I think he meant asking questions, maybe... he was a bit odd. I never learned much about density until 10th grade chemistry (it had been an icecube in alcohol rather than water).
    
    When we dissected the frogs (among other things) I remember the smell being disgusting... and I made a paper sumo wrestling cloth for it to wear, then danced it around with it's guts hanging out to gross out a squeamish girl I had a crush on. Ah, good times.
    
    As a college student with the main career goal of teaching high school science, I have always had the intention of making science fun. I plan to teach earth science, because as we all know, geology rocks. I never got a single scrap of earth science in high school, it was biology -> chemistry -> physics to prepare us for college. What a waste that was. Had my first geo class as a sophomore in college and completely fell in love with it. Not that it was without memorization and boring stuff... but the way everything tied together, and the way it incorporated chemistry, biology, and physics, made everything seem so perfect and wonderful that I knew I had to someday get kids to experience it as well.
    
    I remember being completely unprepared to read or write scientifically when it came to college material. I wish I had been given actual writing assignments in high school rather than "Look up a disease, give 5 minute presentation to the class" or "Build a model of an atom out of cookies/candy then eat it when you're done!"
    
    Some highschool projects that may seem tedious could actually pay off, while others are just so completely below high school level that I'm sure kids would be just as offended as I was.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  10:15 PM
73. I had a great highschool biology course -- meaning that I came out of it with the basics pretty much in place -- taught by an excellent teacher of the subject. This was in a Catholic highschool in, oh, 1964 - 65. She was an IHM nun; they had a reputation in that school for being fierce, and taught, IIRC, math and science classes, and one of them was the Prefect of Discipline. (Really.)
    
    But Sister Helen Louise was enough of an enthusiast that it made her rather jolly, and she was smart and engaging. (Her one IHM ferocity was that she hated to see anyone yawn. If she did, she'd have the windows opened wider -- in winter in Pennsylvania. It worked.) There was lots of memorization, but that's always easier when it's coupled with explanations of how the things you're memorizing work, and work together. I loved it. It probably helped that we all had some familiarity with Latin, as it was pre-Vatican II.
    
    I don't remember why I didn't take Bio II, but it was probably some mix of being convinced I was no good at math and having to keep my grades up, as I'd had it drummed into me from about sixth grade that I'd need a full scholarship for college and that was my only chance to escape. We weren't poor but there wasn't that kind of money. Money really does buy some freedom.
    #: Posted by Ron Sullivan  on  01/04  at  10:24 PM
74. My AP cell biology class was one of the most painful, boring experiences of my life. We had a senile octogenarian teaching what was probably her last year of school. She mumbled through the lectures and got confused with any questions. The book was impossible to read and the tests were so hard everyone failed the first time, so she would simply give the same tests over and over until you passed. This was in a public school in new orleans by the way.
    
    There was no evolution involved, nothing but generic facts about "the cell". Never any particular cell mind you, just "the cell". The way the subject was taught made it very hard to actually beleive that these cells could really do anything or could actually be part of your body.
    
    That is really what is missing from high school science I think. And often college science. THE POINT, is missing. Students memorize endless facts and terms, while never really thinking about what any of it means. Catch them off guard with a question after school, or an implicit test of their knowledge, and they fail miserably. As Allan Bloom puts it, these classes give students "intellectual adornments", not real education.
    
    Unfortunatly for biology the whole ID thing really makes this impossible I think. It is taboo to assume publicly that everyone "beleives in evolution", so the next steps, talking about evolution as an almost magical process that melds order and chaos, the enormous implications for life and artifical life, and all that, are all out of the question. The conversations remain at the most superficial level.
    
    Scientists, teachers, and textbook writers respond with a kind of intellectual hedging that results in making the subjec painfully boring. They go though and try to remove any sign of telos from the whole project. They insist no no its just these cold facts, see, just this evidence, look at this rough ER here, look at this ATP there, we're not actually SAYING anything here, its just some facts, isn't this just nifty on its own. They boringify the crap out of the subject to the point where it is no wonder that few non-pre-med/pharma track students go into biology. The few great biology teachers (like Dr. Myers) =) succeed despite these horrible textbooks they are often forced to use.
    
    This effect is most pronounced in biology because evolution is, as has been stated, the great unifying theory of the subject. And it is a teleological theory, it answers the most interesting questions of all, the why questions. Textbook writers and teachers remove this, and they in effect remove all interest from the subject. Hell most people today don't even know what telos or teleological even means, which shows us just how far education has come since Plato.
    
    Textbook writers also don't seem to understand that reading is not a sheer act of will. Many students, even if paid 100 dollars per page would have a hell of a time reading their textbooks at a real level of comprehesion. The things are just plain impossible to read. Why are they written this way? Often they aren't written at all so much as pieced together from databases of textbook-pulp, from what I've read of the industry.
    
    With so many real science books out there, the need for textbooks as anything other than reference manuals is becoming debatable. Real, readable books by people like E.O. Wilson, Carl Zimmer, Gould, Darwin, and many others, teach far more to students than textbooks. In all honestly I would rather have my own kid read Aristotle's tracts on biology rather than my high school text, simply because he is vastly more interesting.
    
    So, I think the textbooks are more to blame than the teachers, but they are all part of a system, an attitude toward education that emphasizes short-term exposure to de-personalized, de-contextualized, raw information (stamps), over higher, more teleological forms of knowledge. Some schools do attempt "active learning" approaches, but these are often no better. As another commentor mentioned, neither giving vaccuous presentations, nor making a model of a cell out of play-dough, nor running through a list of steps in some mysterious lab procedure neseccarily impart anything meaningful to the student. Education has nothing to do with this kind of rigamarole. Its like trying to build a house by dropping bricks off a cliff in a particular order. I'm not sure who to blame for the current state of things, but american anti-intellectualism, anti-elitism, anti-bookism and the nature of the teacher cetification and training programs are where I would start.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  11:17 PM
75. My high school biology (last year in tenth grade in a school in johnson county kansas) was magnificant. I had a great teacher with a good sense of humor who spoke straight about most sujbects, I only had him for one semester, yet I managed to set the curve on practically every test. To this day I consider the sciences a wonderous knowledge to have and I plan on taking more just to know about evolution and the like. I don't know my teacher's opinion on the kansas evolution legislation, but I'll be sure to comment his opinion as soon as I get it.
    
    I assure you, not everyone in kansas is completely mindless, just enough to make it scary to live here. Vive la Evolution!
    #: Posted by Leif  on  01/04  at  11:26 PM
76. i also attended a Catholic high school, an all-boys school. my recollection of HS biology was that it seemed too easy. we did genetics, which was fun, a lot of cell structure and on photosynthesis, did labs including some dissections and vivisections (frogs). i don't recall much of the content. that is to say, i'm sure there was a good deal, and i went on to learn much more bio and learned a bit on my own as well. but i don't recall specifically 10th grade bio material.
    
    i do recall a couple of classes spent addressing differences between Lamarckian evolution and non. i recall some dealings with the history of developmental ideas, like homonucleus. the only implication of Catholic ideology i recall was some mention of legitimate ways of dealing with population growth.
    
    we didn't do any fetal pigs.
    
    with regard to biology being more or less complicated, as much of it is taught and presented in HS, it is less complicated, even if the systems involved are vastly more. that is a kind of dumbing down but i don't know what else someone might propose. i'm just getting into it, but i find the Vogel Comparative Biomechanics book i just got a really interesting integration of biology with other sciences. of course, it might not cover all the curriculum considered minimal for an advanced HS or college course.
    #: Posted by ekzept  on  01/04  at  11:49 PM
77. I had a terrific ninth-grade biology teacher, Mr. Kern, who was a Vietnam vet who later left to work for National Geographic. I love every minute of the class and evolution featured prominently, despite the fact that this was a very conservative Christian private school (a hellhole in all other respects). This was in the very early seventies; I bet the same school doesn't teach evolution nowadays. I would have gone on to be a biologist, but math tripped me up, and I became an English professor. Oh, well.
    #: Posted by  on  01/04  at  11:50 PM
78. 7th grade, Robert H. Goddard Junior High, Midland, Texas. Taught by the baseball coach. He flunked me for one 6-week period, D for the semester. The only lesson of his I can remember is his attempt to illustrate one millimeter. He tried to draw it with chalk on the board, it kept ending up too long. Finally, he tapped the board with the tip of the chalk, said, "There. That's a millimeter."
    
    10th grade, Sunnyslope High, Phoenix, Arizona. Taught by the basketball coach. No memory of the class whatsoever. Except that the basketball coach taught it.
    
    Early seventies, Arizona State University, studied agriculture. Found I had a black thumb, which kept me from sinking a trust fund into jojoba cultivation. Dropped out, became a carpenter.
    
    Early eighties, University of Arkansas. Interest in plants aroused by living at the edge of the Ozarks and a curiosity about the name "Cannabis sativa". Studied plant systematics.
    
    Mid-eighties, back in Arizona. Back to ASU, majored in botany, studied geology, microbiology, economic botany, paleobotany - the lot; only missed one course, palynology. Michael Cichan, prof assigned to course (and of previous paleobotany course), died in Detroit on his way back from summer conferences and visiting family in 1987. Fuck. His daughter was only survivor of plane crash.
    
    Now I work with land trusts in the Phoenix area, leading field trips and teaching stewards and docents. No money in it; retained trust fund and living simply give me freedom not to grind away in an office.
    
    Damn, I'm happy.
    #: Posted by nima  on  01/04  at  11:55 PM
79. I attended Highland Regional High School in southern New Jersey in the late 90s. Biology was taught by Mr Zimmerman, who is likely the most devoted non-PhD-holder biology junkie I have ever met. The man loved the science - he loved talking about it, thinking about it, going to conferences, then coming back and sharing things with us - he was great.
    
    He taught Honors Biology, Advanced Placement Biology, and Anatomy & Physiology, among other subjects (the three I have mentioned were the ones I took with him). He taught biology as a set of historical progressions, using landmark experiments to illustrate the shifts in scientific thought. The courses were very hands-on; every other week we did a new experiment - I can remember running gels, measuring water absorption rates of plants, doing paper chromatography, measuring enzyme kinetics, and raising fruit flies a la Thomas Hunt Morgan. Fantastic stuff, even if I did bungle about half of it. We spent two solid weeks talking just about evolution - I can remember going over the Equidae lineage and discussing punctuated equilibrium (and maybe orthogenesis, I can't remember). And evolution was always hovering over what we did, though I didn't fully recognize its explanatory power and scope until college. I don't know how much fighting he had to do politically - this is New Jersey, a blue state, in one of the better-funded school districts in the late 90s, so I don't know if any anti-evolutionists kicked up a fuss over it.
    
    Truth to tell, I was a pretty lackluster student (as well as a fatalistic and cynical young man), and he still managed to get me interested enough in genetics to major in it at college. Now I'm going for my PhD in genomics and computational biology at UPenn, and it's largely thanks to his efforts.
    #: Posted by  on  01/05  at  01:36 AM
80. I had a great biology teacher back in '66-67 in southern California, Mr. Robertson, who also taught summer science courses, which were 10 weeks of various biological subjects, generally with an ecological focus, with 2-3 camping trips in Joshua Tree, Pismo Beach, San Bernardino National Forest, Sequoia National Park, among others.
    
    The 11th-grade biology class used the BSCS materials, and I certainly wouldn't describe it as stamp-collecting. Our teacher took it upon himself to do a week on sex education, which wasn't otherwise being covered. He also ran the Medical Explorers, which I joined only because of him.
    
    I mostly liked my classes in high school. Perhaps my worst teachers taught math, but math came so easily to me that I made it my college major and drifted into software as a career.
    #: Posted by  on  01/05  at  02:04 AM
81. I remember one of my school Biology teachers as being especially enthusiastic. He would bring in roadkill for examination. One day, he came in with a dead badger, and the class (17 yr olds) gathered round for the autopsy dissection.
    
    First was a subcutaneous examination. The teacher was perplexed and fascinated by a fatty growth. There was speculation on what it might be and whether it was connected with the fatality.
    I remarked hesitantly "You don't think it might be a testicle?"
    #: Posted by  on  01/05  at  02:17 AM
82. My 10th grade biology teacher (Mrs. C_) in Millington, TN was a nice enough person but the absolutely worst choice for a biology teacher that you can imagine. There was obviously no coverage of evolution in the class and the chapter on evolution in our text books was stapled shut to boot (great incentive: the only time I remember being eager to read a chapter from a school book). I removed the staples immediately in front of her of course
    
    I remember one day she took a "time out" on biology, passed out a list of everything that the Bible considered a sin (her sect was of the no drinking, no smoking, no dancing, no kissing (unless you are engaged), and no looking at anyone beside your spouse variety) and had a "discussion" about how we felt about the list.
    
    No damage done to me of course, but I wonder how many more impressionable high schoolers never even got a chance to try out their critical thinking skills because of teachers like her in MCHS.
    #: Posted by  on  01/05  at  02:51 AM
83. I have taught Bio to 9th graders for the past 10 years at a private school in South Florida. However, I have a colleague/former department chair who pretty much sets the curriculum (she's been doing this for thirty years, so I can take no credit/blame there. Anyway, there are times it feels like I am simply forcing unrelated facts onto the students. The field is so broad, and the students have so little previous knowledge that I think this is a necessary evil. However, even with the amassing of seemingly unconnected minutia, there can be joy--for instance, when we study Photosynthesis, most of the students really do appreciate how amazing it is that atoms that were once part of the air surrounding us are now part of our food, and that these same atoms have been doing these same sorts of thing on Earth for billions of years! (Yes, you too are made of ancient matter!)
    And there are the great days when everything comes together, like when we complete the study of protein synthesis, and all the agonizing facts we had to slog through about rough Endoplasmic Reticulum, amino acids, nucleotides and enzymes all meet and they can finally see why their eye color is a direct result of their DNA code. The beauty and grandeur of such a tiny system having such remarkable results, and the triumph of humankind to have understanding of how it works can really impress these kids, once you get to that point.
    
    The "cotton wool" problem that is referred to in the original post is, I think, more a matter of teachers being forced to cover absolutely every detail in the field (because it would just be a travesty if we didn't learn the sliding-filament theory of muscle contraction, now wouldn't it?), than it is a matter of being restricted from teaching the subject from an evolutionary standpoint.
    Fortunately, I really wouldn't know about being restricted from teaching evolution--our school is not supported by/affiliated with any religeous institution, and thus has no such dogmatic limitations.
    But the point is that, in high school at least, there simply isn't time to survey, detail, and unite it all. Hell, I have students that come to me and don't know that all food comes from living things--starting from that, you can imagine how much it takes to present everything adequately and then try to bring it all together. (not to mention testing, and "teaching the whole child" and "using technology", and all the other parts of modern education that stand in the way of the joy of learning).
    #: Posted by  on  01/05  at  04:42 AM
84. I wonder what percentage of biologists start out self taught in biology? My 10th grade biology course was O.K., I suppose, but it was almost entirely a review of things I'd learned in elementary school by spending endless hours outside turning over rocks, catching the things underneath, and then reading about them in the library. Consequently, I can't really say if high school biology would have been a good introduction to someone with no prior interest in biology. It wasn't until college that I was challenged. Sophomore year Evolutionary Biology was an eye opener to a kid raised in conservative baptist churches.
    
    My suggestion for biology eduction: As soon as a kid can toddle, start showing her what lives under the flat rocks in the backyard (if there aren't any flat rocks, put some there). When she is a little older, read her some Gerald Durrell before bed. Then, turn her loose outside. If all goes well, high school biology will be superfluous
    #: Posted by  on  01/05  at  08:10 AM
85. I had a very similar experience to Judson, and I attended a (very good) British public (ie very private) school, where we were taught evolution. But it wasn't by any means the foundation of the course, foolishly. Like Judson I found the rote learning of arbitrarily compartmentalised bits of biology to be tedious and apparently pointless, while I now find biology absolutely fascinating, even though I am equipped to understand it the least of the major sciences. But I don't know how much this reversal is due to a more general pattern in my pscyhology - at about the time I was getting bored with biology I sort of lost faith in phsyics and chemistry for reasons I can't be bothered to go deeply into here. I still found the former really interesting (again, too much rote learning in GCSE chemistry for me), but I just got fed up with being taught models that turned out to be false. Towards the end of my English degree, however, I rekindled my earlier love of science, and now I probably read more science books than novels.
    #: Posted by  on  01/05  at  08:14 AM
86. When I took biology in Cegep (freshman level courses) -- I had to choose between bio and calculus before -- I had phenomenal profs, some of the best professors I have ever had.
    
    Both of them told me not to go into biology or biochemistry in university, because it's mostly memorisation. (I do not know if they were telling me about the school in particular, though I assume so. Bio courses there are med school wannabe weeder courses.)
    #: Posted by wolfangel  on  01/05  at  08:31 AM
87. I went to a public school in New Hampshire, and my Biology teacher was truly incredible; in fact, despite my affinity for the Humanities, I seriously considered becoming a biologist, which was almost entirely due to his influence.
    #: Posted by Greg Nog  on  01/05  at  10:09 AM
88. Like two or so of the folks above, I was educated in Quebec. However, I was at a school with a very special biology course available to (what would be called elsewhere) grade 10 and 11 students. I took physics in 10, so did bio related things in my odd years of high school (7,9,11). 7 was the required ecology course and was largely memorization about ecosystems and that sort of thing. I can't say I remember anything specifically taught in it that was new. In 9 I had the same teacher for a required human biology course. This was reallytedious, though I did almost as well and certainly well above average. Why should I memorize the bones and the muscle types with no context? Well, I did then, even doing an oral exam on the circulatory system.
    
    Matters were much more exciting in 11. I had known the teacher for this fascinating (homegrown) course since grade 8, when I was allowed to accompany him and some science fair winners as an observer to the regional fair and quite liked the fellow. He certainly had much more enthusiasm than the earlier instructor and obviously took his craft of creating this senior bio course seriously. (I can see from talking to others who took it the year before or the years after that it go tweaked every year.) The subject was basically organismal biology, unified by evolutionary thought and many representative dissections and other demonstrations (e.g. growing microorganisms on agar). Despite the heavy memorization there was always 20% or so of the grade on each test with a more interpretative focus. This balance seemed about right for the level of difficulty of the course. I still have my notebook for the course, somewhere (which is unique of all my high school courses). Students also did projects and reports of many interesting life science-y topics; I worked with a classmate on understanding overpopulation.
    
    Unfortunately, I do not know what is up with the course currently - the instructor recently died relatively young. I understand that he tried in his last years to "sell" the course to others, but do not know what happened.
    
    Later I was to take general bio, physiological psychology and other bio-y subjects, but in retrospect the grade 11 course had the most influence on me, as a running current in it was sort of a proto-philosophy of science ...
    #: Posted by Keith Douglas  on  01/05  at  10:09 AM
89. I remember my high school biology teacher going on a rant about how vaccines were just a big scam, there's no such thing as a "dead" virus, all they do is make people more sick, etc. The class overall was okay but the teacher was a bit loopy. Looking back he might've been a Scientologist or a friend of Bill Maher. That was one of my first wakeup calls to wacky radical POVs, along with a friend of my dad's who attended the same "faith healer" as Dad while I was in high school. They tried to make me "accept" Christ by making me close my eyes and babbling some religious nonsense. Next thing I know I feel a pressure on my forehead and I'm falling backward. He claimed it was the just the holy spirit entering me, but I know he was just applying enough force to unbalance me (after all, my eyes <b>were<b> closed). That one experience pretty much undid any good memories I had of Sunday school growing up (normal Protestant church) and seeded my disgust for religious extremism.
    #: Posted by  on  01/05  at  11:21 AM
90. My 1st biology class was freakish. It was taught by a guy who (supposedly) had an MS in Biology but hadn't actually taught the subject in a good 20 years. He'd be teaching shop (which he was VERY good at) but they needed someone to fill a slot and forced him back to bio. I still had a pretty good time, especially since he often let me get up and teach entire sections of the class (Mendelian genetics was my favorite) since he'd pretty much forgotten it all. I organized an independant study AP Biology class my senior year and was mentored by a really nice guy who was very sharp, a good biologist and a strict creationist. Actually weirder than the first guy, but a lot more fun. He spent one day on the evolution/creation debate in his regular class and I got to sit in the back of the room and loudly snort at the lovely DI-style newspaper clippings and such he brought to class. I remember thinking of him as a really nice, harmless old coot. And his knowledge of vertebrate anatomy was top notch. Both of them, whatever their flaws, still managed to get me excited enough to get an advanced degree in bio. Goes to show ya -- in a teacher personality really counts, even if it's a strange one. Oddly, neither one held a candle to my physical teacher who had recently gone through a messy divorce and had totally lost touch with sanity. Also still a great teacher!
    #: Posted by  on  01/05  at  11:55 AM
91. I went to a secular private school in Dallas for HS. My HS biology classes were great. We studied the Kreb cycle, DNA, and had an entire trimester devoted to evolution. And we had labs that were interesting. I particularly liked the one where the teacher messed with the conditions so that if we did the experiment correctly and reported the data honestly, we got the "wrong" answer (ie not the one the text books told us we should have.) It was an excellent object lesson in how to do science.
    
    My sister, on the other hand, went to a public school and had an absolutely terrible biology teacher. Not only was he a creationist, he was a foaming at the mouth, dumb as rocks sexist as well. In fact, he was the single most important factor in my parents' and my decision to send me to a private school: avoiding having a class with this idiot seemed worth the money and putting up with the snobs one frequently has for classmates in private schools.
    #: Posted by  on  01/05  at  12:20 PM

92. I particularly liked the one where the teacher messed with the conditions so that if we did the experiment correctly and reported the data honestly, we got the "wrong" answer (ie not the one the text books told us we should have.)

    
    
    In my first year of high school we had to do the classic "grow a bean in a tube and confirm that the shoots go up and the roots go down" experiment. Our bean, for reasons unknown, grew roots-up, shoots-down.
    
    There were so many lessons a good science teacher could have drawn from that, but ours just grumbled and said "Write it up as if it had grown the right way". Even at that age I was appalled by the idea. (I did it, but under protest.)
    #: Posted by Geoffrey Brent  on  01/05  at  03:39 PM
93. Biology in my high school was a menagerie rather than a system: "this is a fish, and this is a frog, and this is a bird..." but I never noticed because at home I was reading my grandfather's horribly outdated book about human evolution plus books from the library by Ashley Montague on "The Myth of Race" and "The Natural Superiority of Women" and Isaac Asimov's science books and "The Dawn of Life" by J. H. Rush from the lower left-hand corner of the book racks at our department store. (There was no bookstore.)
    #: Posted by  on  01/05  at  08:25 PM
94. I had perhaps the worst teacher of my life for HS biology. Hated us, hated the subject, God knows why he did it, except that it was the early '60s and being a Christian Brother got him out of the draft, and his grad school paid for. He also was full of crap; for example, he preached that there was no such thing as instinct, right after showing us films of Konrad Lorenz (I think)leading the little ducklings around.
    
    He was also the teacher who did the most to encourage me to get into science. He figured out how to decrease the amount of teaching he actually had to do. Quite brilliant actually, he brought in a whole pile of Scientific American offprints and left the room. The first one I picked up was by Francis Crick on the structure of DNA. End of story. Or better, the beginning.
    #: Posted by  on  01/05  at  09:55 PM
95. I went to a small Catholic high school in Milwaukee Wisconsin and my biology classes were GREAT! They were interesting, challenging, interactive, and taught by a crazy old man who really knew his stuff.
    
    We learned evolution no problem, no questions asked. We studied model skulls and Darwin and the whole shebang.
    During the chapter about the human body and development, we also learned about contraceptives and abortion, but the teacher did not steer it in a political or religious direction...we got the facts. Biology classes provided a better sex ed course than years of health classes, much less the religion classes also required at my high school.
    
    I wish that every biology class could be taught with the same straight-forwardness and obvious interest with which mine were taught.
    #: Posted by  on  01/05  at  10:25 PM
96. I had a sweet teacher for HS biology, who was enthusiastic about helping students outside class but had been teaching students who didn't care for so long that she couldn't bring up the same enthusiasm in class. I heard rave reviews of the AP Bio class, but I was insufficiently interested to take it and didn't want to dissect a cat (a requirement). I remember very little of it, other than a "free dissection" period during which I learned about latex allergies, and that formaldehyde gives me migraines. I did enjoy my biochemistry course, though I would have liked a bit more bio context for the molecular aspects. Fortunately I found chemistry my senior year of high school and fell in love with science there!
    #: Posted by  on  01/06  at  12:12 AM
97. Here at the end of the thread....
    
    I find it interesting that, so far as I could see, there were only 2 biology teachers who commented. I'm certain there are more that two reading this blog. Are you just looking for new ideas?
    
    My experiance in HS Biology, 20 years ago, is immemorable from the perspective of it's subject matter. Oddly enough, with a subject which is highly unified, like biology or physics, I've been reading about the subject for so long that I can no longer distinguish where I first was exposed to the topic. So, while I know we covered genetics in HS Biology, I couldn't tell you a single specific detail of what we learned.
    
    This is very different from my memory of literature where I can usually tell you exactly which author wrote what. It's not that literature is more important to me, but that the a novel or short story is sufficiently different from other writings to remain distinct.
    
    As for improvements in HS education. I would start teaching statistics at the same time as algebra, or sooner. I think that basic statistical concepts are probably easier to understand than unknowns, and are of far greater use. So much of biology, not to mention engineering (my field), medicine, economics, etc., is dependant on statistical information (and the proper understanding of it's use and pitfalls) that I am continually amazed at my co-workers (engineers) who have no understanding of statistics. So much so, that I've actually arranged a couple of lectures on basic statistical principles for them.
    
    Understanding natural selection is a lot harder for someone who doesn't have a grasp of the elementary statistics of population variation.
    
    -Flex
    #: Posted by  on  01/06  at  06:46 AM
98. Although my science education in grade school was mostly hit-or-miss by (Catholic) High School education was excellent. Our biology teacher was a publishing professor (part of his job perks including have a lab for experiements he did in conjunction with Rutgers U).
    I dont specificly recall ever learning about evolution but I remember genetic studies because we had so much interest in it that he created an elective for genetics which included a lot of lab work and was especially fascinating.
    I do think it depends on the teacher, subject matter and student - his passion and knowledge was inspiring (I took all his electives and majored in biology in high school).
    I never understood a word that man said about chemistry tho. I transferred to another teacher and "got it" right away.
    In college I skipped right to Bio 201 and it was the most boring thing on Earth. Making yourgut consumed such an inordinate amount of lab time I wondered if the school was a subsidiary of Yoplait.
    #: Posted by That Girl  on  01/06  at  08:14 AM
99. Oh, and my brother (one year older) was walking to the variety store every month to buy Scientific American, and we went to the library every week, mostly to clear out the science fiction shelves.
    #: Posted by  on  01/06  at  12:26 PM
100. PZ, I mentioned this on Tara's blog, but ironically, I learned about evolution and got excited about it at a small private Christian university, while in my public high school, they didn't talk about it much about it all.
     #: Posted by Ocellated  on  01/06  at  05:43 PM