This morning I helped my son with dissections in his science class, Kermit met his fate with these 7th graders.
When I arrived with my son, his classmates chanted his name. They then asked if I was his mom and I said I was. I also waved to him from across the room. Apparently that is not a cool thing to do and I lost some points for that.
Even though Kermit had been dead for some time it still freaked some kids out, mostly the kids were making jokes about the frog. I don’t think it helped that I was amused by this, what do you expect with a mother of three boys and this was my first outing since school got out for me? My favorite was when the frog was leaking juice as the teacher was demonstrating the proper way to do the dissection. Some boy blurted out, ” It looks like someone isn’t potty trained.” The teacher looked up at the boy and said, “Hopefully you’re not speaking from experience.” I’m still laughing at this, this shouldn’t be that funny but it is. I guess you just had to be there.
The materials were all laid out and my job was handing out the frogs. I am not sure what I had envisioned however it wasn’t this. It was a bag of dead frogs that I had to reach in and grab and place on the students trays. I had to do this as if it were nothing, like grabbing a pickle out of a jar.
I was starting to feel hot and I had to talk myself down. As I placed the frogs on the trays I kept saying how lucky the kids were. One boy said, “You keep saying that” I smiled, “Because you are.” Then one girl didn’t like the frog she got so I had to dig in the bag of dead frogs and grab one that she was satisfied with, it starts early I guess.
The next thing I had to do was walk around and assist with pining the frogs on the trays for those who needed assistance. This is where the fun begins, this is the part I like. Since some of the frogs had a bad case of postmortem rigidity the kids needed to break the arms to be able to pin it. It was fun to help with this. This caused some upset with the kids, I almost said it was like eating a chicken and getting the bones out. Not wanting to cause anymore upset I caught myself, and used the analogy of pulling apart a wishbone.
Overall I can’t believe how well behaved this science class was and how professional they were with the dissection considering they were 12 – 13 years old. They did better than my anatomy class . Hoping this experience sparked a deeper interest in science for these kids.
