By OpalCat

tags: personal

I attended a Christian school from second grade through the first semester of seventh grade. In science at my tiny religious school, we’d been learning about plants. We’d dissected a flower, examined onion skin under a microscope… cut open lima beans… pretty simple stuff. Over winter break my mom FINALLY decided to let me go to public school. So I landed in a new school and a new science class.

This new science class had been doing much different things before the break. They’d dissected a worm, some type of fish, a frog… they were old hands at dissecting things. So naturally, fresh from winter break, they were ready to do the ‘big one’. The fetal pig.

We were divided into teams of 4 or 5… well except for me. I was at the back of the room, the last area sorted out in the grouping process. My group only had 3 people. The other two kids in my group apparently didn’t like the idea of dissecting, because that day the pigs arrived, and we tied them down to these rubber coated trays and covered them in plastic wrap… and that was the last bit of help I got from them. The next day, neither of them showed up for class. In fact, they didn’t show up the rest of the week. Part of the time they were ditching class. The latter part, they were suspended. For ditching class.

So there I was, never having dissected anything in my life… and I was looking at a week-long pig dissection. All by myself.

It was horrible and disgusting and nasty. It was yucky and I flinched a lot. But I got through it. Some of the other groups were doing totally nasty things. One group accidentally punctured their pig’s stomach. When stuff started leaking out, they decided that it would be fun to pull the stomach out and start squirting people with it. Ugh. Other people were accidentally pulling off the gall bladder while removing the liver, or cutting the urethra by accident.

And I was the only group in the class to get a 100% on my dissection. And the only one to get a 100% on the test that followed.

The next time I had to dissect anything was my sophomore year of high school in biology. We did worms, clams, grasshoppers, fish and frogs. That was all pretty gross too. I’m so glad I will never have to take a class like that again.

— 02:37:01 AM
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