Amoebae, Euglenas and Paramecium (Week-end Assignment #21)

    

My favorite class?  That's so easy: sixth grade science with Mr. Curran.  

I attended a small school in rural southwestern Ohio: about 200 students in grades one through six.  Most parents farmed or worked in ag-related businesses; few had attended college.  Our teachers focused on the basics, and there was little money for anything else.  Two field trips: the first-graders went to an apple orchard and the sixth graders went to the zoo. In my own sixth grade, year, three trips to the Cincinnati Symphony were added to the schedule, as well as a weekly gym class.   We presented an elaborate Christmas program every December and celebrated Arbor Day outside every spring with a reading of Joyce Kilmer's Trees.  

 In most grades, science was a pedestrian affair: one afternoon a week we read from an elementary text about topics like the weather.  I'm sure the weather can be an exciting topic -- witness the success of movies like Twister -- but it wasn't exciting the way we learned it.  Most of us heard about the weather endlessly anyway -- soy beans standing in wet fields in November seemed to be a disaster repeated annually.  Science just wasn't a subject likely to galvanize our interest.  

But in sixth grade, our young and first male teacher ever brought incredible energy to our little enclave when he introduced to us the phylum Protozoa.  We still had science only once a week, but the boring textbooks were gone.  In their place appeared microscopes, slides, and tiny one-celled creatures.  We moved up through the animal kingdom and, by the end of the year, a female frog had offered herself up for dissection, her eggs glistening in the slanted sunlight of the afternoon classroom.  I started reading biographies of famous scientists and began to plan my medical career (one of several that never materialized).  I loved everything about sixth grade, but science was the highlight, week after week.  

I went to well-regarded private schools after that year, to excellent colleges, and to professional and graduate schools.  I never had a better teacher or a more exciting class.  Mr. Curran, if you're out there somewhere: you were an extraordinary teacher from the very beginning.