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[aquietgirl]

Assuming that you took at least one high school biology course, and possible a basic bio course at the college level: as a post-grad adult, is there anything you wish you'd learned when you took basic biology?

Is there anything you did learn that you're glad was taught?

Is there anything your instructors tried to teach you that was not worth it

Comments

[sydzg]

Okay, I'm trying to remember back to ninth grade here, since I'm not going to count paleo and earth history classes (though they covered a lot of basic bio)...

They actually barely taught us evolution. I think the teacher was scared. We watched one video, and at that point it was the first time I had even heard that people thought the earth was billions of years old. I lived in a pretty liberal town, so I think some of that was oversight by individual teachers over the years, not a concerted effort to avoid teaching it. It just surprises me now.

They really pushed dissections, at an age where I honestly just wasn't emotionally prepared for it. So I have mixed feelings about dissections for kids, even though I know they have value. I didn't do any until college, when it was easier to deal with my conscience (though some teachers made me just watch if I wouldn't do it myself). And they really didn't have good alternatives to the dissection lessons, which meant that either I was too distracted/unhappy to learn well if I had to watch the dissection, or the assignments weren't very informative if I did the alternative.

I firmly have a problem with the cat dissections they did in Anatomy in my high school. That stuff is fully valid for training biologists and doctors. It is not necessary for high school students and it still upsets me. So there's that.

Stuff that worked: I do remember the chromatography lesson really clearly (though not how it related to bio), and also drawing cell stages. Microbes under the microscope I remember clearly and really liked. I liked some of the logic-problem-ness of genetics, though it was too basic at that level to hold my attention well. I also got a little bored with matching up pairs of photocopied chromosomes.

[sydzg]

Oh, I also remember lookin at plant cells under the microscope, using onion skins. That exercise worked well.

And although I guess a lot of people hate it, I loved memorizing the chemical reactions for photosynthesis and respiration. I made a beautiful colored-pen version of them to study from. It was very pretty!