Friday, March 23, 2007

Maybe sometimes old men die with little boy faces

We are now at the point in the semester when my students get to start dissecting animals. They're usually quite excited about this as animals are infinitely more exciting to learn about than plants (sorry all you botanists out there, but it's a scientific fact).

Yesterday one of my students made a comment about how it was fun to finally be able to cut something open. A guy sitting a row behind that student said, "Yeah, this is fun and all, but when do we get to dissect a homeless guy?"

Scary as it may seem, his was not the first comment along those lines. Earlier in the day, one of my students asked if he could dissect an earthworm without anesthetizing* it first. His two lab partners looked at him like he was crazy, and started telling him that he was sadistic. He maintained that he just wanted to see how the hearts pumped. His partners kept on with the comments, so I decided to join in.

Me: "You had to go to the park over spring break and strangle a homeless guy just to get you by until you could come back to class, didn't you?"

He just looked at me as if I was the most disturbed person he'd ever met**.

Hey, at least I didn't say what I initially thought, which was "you had to strangle a homeless guy in order to get an erection."




*drowning it in ethanol

**he may be right

4 comments:

Lauren said...

It's okay, I thought it was cool to watch the earthworms squirm in the ethanol. There's a mad scientist in all of us.

Anonymous said...

Watching the earthworm squirm made it hard for me to believe they weren't in massive amounts of pain.. It made me feel guilty when I sliced it open and it jumped.. I felt like I was Lynndie England torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Ryan said...

I think I would never make it in Vegas.

deputymomof6 said...

Yeah, that sounds MUCH more compassionate... drowning them first rather that just cutting them open.

And homeless guys, like earthworms, are low on the food chain.