No, it's not the slugs we needed to "caress" today in order to get them to produce slime so we could run an experiment (which is stickier, slug slime or glue from a glue stick?)
No, it's not the fact that we went to the herb garden and collected bugs irregardless of the impact it might have on insect biodiversity...
And no, it's not the obnoxious man who sits across from me and always interrupts the professors to tell his "interesting" story about his days as a wheat farmer, or about the Japanese man who ate crickets, or how his son, now a fisheries biologist, gave him a book on scientific Greek roots that the class might find helpful (sorry, no picture of said obnoxious guy).
Jeanne said it was their analytical nature, which is close, but more it's their "dry" view of the world. It's all about data and observation and collecting things and asking questions. I find myself, halfway through the day, asking again and again, "Now what do you want us to do with...?"...and you can fill in the blank with all sorts of topics...like today: "What do you want us to do with the crickets we just captured and smooshed under a petri dish?" Or "What do you want me to do with this large grasshopper lying dead and smelly on the paper towel in front of me?"
And they really have no answer. They just keep plopping larvae and pupa and crayfish in front of us and then wonder around the room saying, "Isn't science fun?"
At one point, one of the professors walked by where I started to draw the dead grasshopper in my notebook out of boredom and she said, "Oh, drawing them, that's a good idea?"
Ya think?
The class is interesting in that, as primarily a teacher who focuses on the humanities, it's nice to be exposed to bugs and slugs and the world of science, but on the other hand, I find myself far more interested in the names of the herbs we walked through at the Univeristy herb garden and the history behind those names than the actually capturing of bugs that will die, get skewered with a pin, and sit in a pretty box the professors have provided for us so we can have a insect box in our classrooms.
And another odd thing about science teachers is that they don't really talk...well, except for the obnoxious guy across from me who won't shut up. Actually, they talk, but it didn't seem to go beyond the deeper meanings of observation or edification.
Professor: A good friend of mine goes down to the rainforests in the Amazon and collects bugs.
Student: How does he collect them?
Professor: Oh, it's fascinating work. He spreads out huge mesh nets along the bottom of this enormous tree, sprays the tree with DDT and the bugs fall into his net by the thousands. And most of them have never been catalogued.
Class: Ohhhh, ahhhh, wow.
Me (thinking quietly to myself): DDT? What else falls out of the tree? What if that was the last colony of a particular bug that no one's every seen before? What about the birds?
Me (not so quietly to my neighbor): Why do we need to catalogue them all?
Neighbor: Oh, it's so important...we make such amazing medical discoveries. A cure for cancer might be in those trees.
Me (quietly to myself): Why is it all about us? What if we, humanity, are the key to finding a cure for the end of destruction for all rare and exotic bugs? What if the cure for eliminating invasive species is eliminating the worst invasive species on the planet, us?
And to think...there's a big old picture of Rachel Carson stapled to the wall of the classroom.
So, on our mini-field trip to the herb garden, I snapped photos of the herbs,didn't write down a single name of the plants, captured three insects and then released them when class got out.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, slug slime, in our clinical trials, was stronger than glue stick glue.
Thank god nature won that contest!
2 comments:
You have tripped over a truth there. It is not all about us. We are not nearly a big enough blip on Time's radar for much of anything to be all about us. Words like 'catastrophic flooding in Pennsylvania' would have little meaning in this world were it devoid of man's encampments. A hurricane is a hurricane is a hurricane ... a city in its path is not within the hurricane's natural frame of reference.
YEah - what he said.
bs
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