Pathology

I was a science professor in one of my careers.

Yeah, the whole frog disection thing.  It still amazes me how when someone says "Science Class", that's the first thing that pops into people's heads- even mine.  I did teach General Biology for a couple of semesters.  We dissected rats, jellyfish, worms...

....no frogs.

I hate frogs.

In fact, growing up, I thought I hated dissection because I hated frogs.  Turns out, dissection is interesting for learning anatomy - just, why use frogs?  There's no homology (likeness) with humans.  Rats are so much closer- it's scary.  No, fetal pigs are less like humans than rats, I'm afraid.

Doesn't say much for humans, does it?

Well, anyway....

"Science" Class.

I have taken quite a few in my lifetime now.  Botany classes, Animal Biology classes (the kingdom, phylum, class... thing), Human biologies, Medical biologies, microbiologies (studies of germs), and lots of genetics.  Physics, Chemistry, Biochemistry...So, it's weird that the first thing that pops into my head is a frog dissection (which I never did- I refused on grounds it was against my religion- man, was I a handful).

But what I find sad is that I am probably not the only person who got turned off from science classes because it is associated with frogs.  I think we probably need to rethink how we're teaching science classes, particularly biology, to make it more meaningful to the students in the class.

How do we do that?

Stop teaching "biology" and start teaching "pathology" - the study of diseases.

Now, the high school I went to did have a mandatory "health" class - it was a semester long and focused on why you should wear a condom or abstain from sex.

That's NOT what I'm talking about when I talk about pathology.

I mean that we need to be teaching people how to take care of themselves.  Like "what do you do when you have a fever?"  "What does it mean to have a low neutrophil count?" "what does it mean to be taking a cytotoxin?"  These are things that people are usually very interested in because they have some relation somewhere that is dying of something.  They'd actually USE the information in their lifetimes.

I guess it's kind of the morbid side of biology, but, then, when have you known a teenager who wasn't focused on the morbid who wasn't on acid?