Thank a Teacher

Apparently I missed Teacher Appreciation week.  I saw a couple posts on Facebook about it, and a couple of the marquee's outside the schools around town touted "Thank A Teacher" on them.  It didn't really hit me until today when I was on my way to WaterFest.  Today and tomorrow I get the chance to share with 5th graders (for the 12th year) what it is that I do everyday.

Growing up I had some great teachers and some awful teachers. Included in that group are some great school teachers and some terrible school teachers. Now that I am older some of the teachers I thought were great when I was younger...I now realize they were pretty weird. But, again, I digress. 

Anyway, when I was in 10th grade I had Mr. Larson for Biology.  I'll admit I was pretty confused the first week or two, because he didn't teach us biology. No, Mr. Larson spent the first couple weeks teaching us how to be in high school. He taught us how to take notes, how to write a proper outline, and the importance of re-writing notes.  It sounds pretty simple, until you realize that all the teachers I had previously had, believed that the process of taking notes was some how absorbed and known by all their students. Along those lines, he also taught us the value of organizing school work and using reminders, calenders, and three ring binders (I know pretty common sense...except that common isn't so very common). I don't know how I would have ever survived college biology (especially taxonomy classes) without those note taking skills.

After going over all that he got down to teaching us biology.  And boy did he teach it.  I remember him dividing the chalk board in half and going down one side with creationist views and the other with evolutionary theory. I remember during the chapter on reproduction he was honest and warned about keeping a condom in your wallet for years before using it! He showed me how to scramble a frogs' brain and dissect it while it was still alive (since I was the only one who brought in an actual leopard frog). And even though only half the brain got scrambled and the next day while I was getting it out of the refrigerator it jumped up and tried to jump off the table (with entrails falling out of it), I thought he was going to laugh so hard he would hurt himself. I can still name almost all the bones in the human body and I discovered that my blood type was B+ in his class.

When it came time to pick a major the only one that seemed even remotely interesting was biology, because of the great class I had in 10th grade. Now I graduated from high school over 25 years ago, and college almost 21 years ago, but I can still remember where I sat in Mr. Larson's biology class.  Pete Larson was killed a couple years after he retired in an ATV accident while working for the US Forest Service. But, once a year at WaterFest I get to stand in front of a classroom of students and show them some cool things that I get to do as a job.  Lot's of times I have a teacher come up and thank me, tell me I did a great job and "have you ever thought about being a teacher?", I just think to myself, "Thank you Mr. Larson, you made it fun".