Life Science

Life Science. Oh how I adored Life Science. I was a seventh grader at T.W. Browne Jr. High and had Coach Rachel for my Life Science teacher. Now the mere fact that I can remember his name tells you something about him and his class. I loved nothing more than to study for his tests. I would spend hours in our front living room memorizing all the answers I would need to ace his tests. Then I would walk up and down the hilly streets of my neighborhood with my other best friend who coincidentally was named Susan, too. She was a year older and we both took our academics very seriously. Susan would faithfully quiz me time and time again over the material. I took great pride in always being the first one done and nine times out of ten making a perfect score. In fact, Mr. Rachel commented one time about how he had told his wife that he was going to make the test a little harder to see if he could beat me. He never was able to do it. I just took on the challenge. I was the Life Science champion. I also took great pleasure in putting together my insect collection. To this day I still remember that dragon flies belong to the Odonata family and grasshoppers to Othroptra. My other memory of this class was sitting next to Kathy Duff who was left handed and I was right handed. We were constantly bumping elbows. As smart as I was in test taking, it never occurred to me that Kathy and I should just switch places at our table to solve our problem. Two years later I would once again have Mr. Rachel for Honors Biology. It was here that the lyrics for "Put Your Hand in the Fin of the Shark From Biology" were crafted during our shark dissection.

Put your hand in the fin of the shark that swam the waters

Put your hand in the fin of the shark that swam the sea

Take a look at a shark and you can look at tuna differently

By putting your hand in the fin of the shark from Biology.

Every time I look at the gooey gook

I wanna tremble