I should have loved biology too

About a year ago, I came across James Somers’ blog post, I should have loved biology. I began reading it and every sentence struck a chord: “I should have loved biology but found it a lifeless recitation of names”; “In textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment”; “In biology class, biology wasn’t presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing.” In fact, the chord was so neatly stuck that I stopped reading about a quarter of the way through, and found myself falling into a memory. I was sitting in my 7th grade biology class, completely disinterested. Every time our teacher would turn her back to us to write on the blackboard, my friends and I would sling paper pellets at each other across the room, barely paying attention as she narrated wearily about cell walls or chloroplasts or mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell. I liked math and physics and economics and even chemistry, to some extent (much less pellet slinging), b ... Read full article.