government bat project

Monday was a doozle of a day as far as classroom antics goes, so get comfortable and ready to laugh. It was my penultimate day teaching at the high school, which meant that the barely-there filter that I try to keep intact was slowly being eaten away by the delightful stories spewing out of my mouth. I pulled out the story about convincing my sister Erica I was dead, how we used to shock her on the electric fence surrounding our house, and then we got to the science of the day: heterogeous and homogeneous mixtures. I asked them what “homo” meant and they said “same,” and what “hetero” meant and they said “different.” Very good. I then said “It’s like homosexual. If you are a homosexual boy you hang out with other boys, if you are a homosexual girl you hang out with girls. If you are a heterosexual girl, you hang out with boys…. until you get to college and do some experimentation.” Gasps, gasps, gasps. Someone muttered "this is a Catholic school" and I responded "yep, and I only have one more day teaching here." THEN, we get talking about atomic energy and fission and fusion and Hiroshima. A science-type boy in the back who likes to show me how much he knows raises his hand and asks me if I know what the US government was working on before the bomb. I tell him I don’t, and he proceeds to go on about…. get ready….. bats. Bats that the government would equip with little detonating devices that would explode when they got into Japanese houses. Bats. My face looked relatively skeptical and I made a flapping motion with my arms and asked “bats?” and he kept going on about how they had had actually implanted the detonating devices into the bats but that didn’t work. At this point the psychopath student in the front yells back that they made the bats explode and I am guffaw laughing like a maniac. Bats. I say “OK… so you’re telling me the government was weighing these two options: (lift left hand up) bats with backpacks on…… or (lift right hand up) the atomic bomb? Hmmm….. ” I assured him that I did not NOT believe him.. that it was crazy enough to be true. Bats.

Then my college class. This is the class where the students show ZERO excitement about anything and the lectures can get relatively painful. So I was giving a lecture on reproductive biology, my FAVORITE SUBJECT IN THE WHOLE WORLD. I’m all excited talking about ovulation and birth control and in vitro fertilization and all that super sexy stuff, but of course I’m getting zippo interest from the class. So I decide to have fun with it.

Fun time #1: my description of how birth control works. “The pill works by preventing ovulation, meaning no egg is released so there’s no egg to fertilize. It also thickens the cervical mucus. It’s basically like your vagina got slimed. Like if a Ghostbuster had a proton pack that shot out slime instead.”

Fun time #2: talking about why it is harder for older women to conceive. I’m looking at the class as I discuss how the older a woman is, the older her eggs are, and I’m knowing that they are completely zoning out and so I say “And the reason that older women have such a harder time conceiving is because they are so unattractive.” Tick. Tick. Tick. Nothing. “Wow, I didn’t think you were listening, but wow. They have a harder time conceiving because their eggs are older.” Couple of uncomfortable laughs, then I continued with my lecture on the most interesting stuff EVER. And tried to say “ejaculation”, “semen”, “vaginal discharge”, “pulling out,” and anything else that made them shift uncomfortably in their seats. Mission accomplished.