An Ode to BIO

I got news today that my favorite teacher from the 20 years I spent in K-graduate school passed away. He taught me three years of high school biology, and oh, so much more than that. His death saddens me. He was one of those people you internally assumed would just live forever. As if the world would not continue spinning if he were no longer on it. However, I do find it kind of fitting in a few different ways.

First, he was so dedicated to his science that he planned on giving every moment of his life and his afterlife to the never-ending crusade to stamp out ignorance. I don't know all the details of his death, but I do know that he had brain cancer. And instead of using conventional treatments, he was volunteering to be a guinea pig for different experimental ones. I assume he was of the mindset that the experiments might work and they might not, but we will never move forward unless we test them out. What courage it takes to be willing to sacrifice for the betterment of humanity.

Secondly, in my most recent post I mentioned that I wanted to be a writer some day. And one idea I always toyed with came to me one day in AP Biology, while we were learning about ears. It would be a memoir chronicling all the life lessons that are unknowingly learned in high school. I specifically remember this day...even down to what I was wearing. A long gray skirt and white polo (oh, how I loved that dress code!). The lesson was about the little hairs inside our ears that are lined up shortest to tallest, each picking up a different frequency. In order to help us visualize the subject matter, he had us climb up on a row of desks in the back of the room and line up shortest to tallest. The life lesson here wasn't necessarily about ears, but about helping people remember things...by making them memorable. Lining up in order of height on the floor along the side of the room would have been like any other day. And sitting here today, I wouldn't remember that the hairs inside our ears are organized in such a way.

And third, over his long teaching career, he influenced countless students. So many, I'm sure, that there is no way to measure his true impact. Some students loved him, others loathed him, but I think it's safe to say that we all respected him. And we all most likely have at least one great story to tell. But I'd like to share a few of my favorites...

Before high school began, I had heard horror stories about this man. I had heard that his classes were so hard people begged to be transferred out. I was told he made students come to school at 5AM to study and prepare for his classes. So needless to say I was less than impressed when I got to school for the first day of freshman year and found myself in his homeroom class. He handed out our schedules and I was relieved to find that I had been assigned to another teacher for Biology I. There was a God. And he loved me. Then it was time to find our lockers and practice our combinations. It took a few tries, but I finally figured out the whole combination lock thing. And inside was a Tootsie Pop. We slowly realized that everyone in our homeroom had the same treat, but no other homerooms did. So maybe this guy wasn't so bad after all.

Sixth period rolled around on that first day and I walked into an over-crowded biology class. The teacher came in and said that this period had obviously been double-booked and that half of us were being moved next door. I did the math and realized that my homeroom was on one side and the chemistry lab was on the other. The teacher literally went down the attendance list and called every other name and sent us next door to the lion's den.

I. Was. Terrified.

Homeroom I could handle. But I didn't want to spend the next nine months going in to school at 5AM. I quickly learned, though, that the whole 5AM thing was just an open invitation. He was there because he covered morning detentions. And he allowed any of his students to come in and get extra help whenever they felt they needed it. But you had to know the trick. And that was that you had to climb the embankment outside his classroom window and knock on the glass so he could meet you at the end of the hall and let you in the door. I did this on several occasions over the three years I spent in his classroom and every time I felt kind of like a super stealthy spy.

One of my favorite memories is of him standing in the hallway during class-change times with a lifeguard whistle, telling the misbehaving students to kindly remove themselves from the gene pool. And the funny way he would always clarify that he called his wife Kay, because that was, in fact, her name. I loved playing his neck-tie game. This man had a tie collection to rival my collection of colored flats from Aldo. If you caught him on a day that he repeated a tie and could tell him the date he last wore it, you got bonus points on your next test. He was old-school; he had his first period class stand up and say the Pledge of Allegiance every day. But he was current too; when a student asked a question, he didn't directly give an answer. Rather, he led the whole class to find the answer on their own by asking more questions.

This post can't go on forever, although I'm sure I could write for days. So I'll leave you with perhaps the most important lesson I learned from him. Junior year, our AP Biology class consisted of 10 girls. He liked to call us his sorority. And then we gave ourselves the name Beta Iota Omicron. Had shirts made and everything. Dubbed ourselves the cream of the crop. Ironic, since it was in that class that I truly failed for the first time. (I failed one quiz in the fourth grade, but that was because my teacher hated me and gave me incorrect instructions, so it doesn't really count. I don't like to talk about it.) My failure came in the form of a 46% on a test about the endocrine system. I was distraught. When I went to talk to him about my disappointment and failure, he was unfazed. He said it so shortly and sweetly, that I didn't even realize that I had just been given the biggest piece of wisdom I would ever need in life. He told me that failing is just a part of learning. And it only makes you want to learn more.