In Defense of a Redneck Education

[Listen to an audio version of this blog HERE.]

Once, when I was a small child, I pulled a sink from a trash pile behind my parent’s barn and drug it onto the yard. I fashioned a shoddy sign that said, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,”and planted it next to the sink, like a modern day Pablo Picaso. I meant to plant a flower in the sink too, but never got around to it. So, after an appropriate amount of time passed, my mother instructed me to bring the sink back to the trash pile “where it belonged.” I took my sorry little butt outside to the sink, only to find the drain clogged with dirt, the bowl full of rainwater, and the world’s most gigantic toad blinking up at me from his new home. I was not a fan of egregiously fat toads, and to be sure, I’m still not. In 8th grade science class, we deconstructed first a large worm, then a large frog. My disdain for toad-frogs grew exponentially after that, though I enjoyed the visual and physical aspects of taking apart an animal.

Enjoying the process of dissection (I think) isn’t that weird. There is likely some level of of natural human curiosity about how our bodies are assembled, and this translates well to animals. As a Junior in high school, our biology teacher had us pair up, find or kill an animal, skin it, disassemble it, and put the bones back together. This seems horrendous to some, but to us, it was…