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To The Frog I Had To Dissect In 8th Grade
First of all, I’d just like to say, “I’m sorry.” And I say that with a degree of sincerity that can only come from being a woman who traps spiders in cups and carries them outside to continue their hairy, horrifying, multi-legged lives.
I’m sorry, frog, that you were murdered in the furtherance of…what, exactly?
Looking back, I think the exercise was probably meant to nurture our pubescent curiosity and instill in us a love of science.
Or maybe it was just frog control. Somewhere there was a town with just an assload of frogs that needed to be “disappeared” and somebody knew a guy.
Or maybe there was a particularly sadistic school administrator who thought up a way to both kill an innocent animal and traumatize children at the same time in the name of “education.”
Whatever the genesis of the much-anticipated frog dissection (followed closely by its brethren in formaldehyde, the fetal pig), it didn’t make me more interested in science.
It actually had the opposite effect. It made me want to run away screaming from science.
Because I was really, really bad at it. I never saw what I was supposed to see through the microscope — corn rust? Nope. Paramecium? Also nope.
