November 24, 1964
Music class was great today! We did more on intervals and that stuff and played the recorders. Y’know? We’re getting pretty good! In English we had a Shakespeare test and a book report -neither was very hard though. We had to list the 8 conspirators and I forgot Cinna - how could I? We got inside froggy-woggy today. Urp! Tomorrow - out of school for 4 1/2 GLORIOUS days. I’m going to help at the hospital on Thanksgiving and meet all those nice people.
November 24, 2022
I did not enjoy biology class. The teacher was not the problem. Mr. Pelletier, a heavy-set French Canadian, was funny and fair and enthusiastic about his subject. He even sponsored a weekend entomology club that I might have enjoyed if I had cared to sign up. But I had an uneasy relationship with biological science. To begin with, there was too much memorization, and too many terms that sounded alike. There was a human skeleton hanging in a glass cabinet next to my seat, and I was still afraid of skeletons. Third, there was dissection: a worm, and then a frog, both reeking of formaldehyde and truly disgusting. At least I was not the lucky student whose frog was full of little frog eggs.
But the deep reason I disliked biology class was because biology scared the bejesus out of me. There was disease and death involved, and - worst of all - reproduction. My most vivid memory is not the skeleton, or the worm, or the frog. It was the time Mr. Peletier asked the class to name the male reproductive organ in a plant and, seeing no volunteer, called on me. “HOW SHOULD I KNOW?” I wailed.
It still makes me blush. (And, for what it’s worth, it’s the stamen.)
That’s my note added to his picture in the 1964 yearbook. A “pickaroon” is wood- handled metal-topped log handling tool. Mr. P enjoyed regaling us with a story about the time he had a painful run-in with one while working as a logger in Maine.