There are a lot of teachers in my extended family. I was raised to think of teaching as one of the most noble professions, and teachers themselves as gifts from God.
Yet, I'm persistently surprised by my uncanny ability to shoot myself in the foot when it comes to teaching. Today, for example, I took part in a community outreach workshop for high school students from around Washington state. I was part of a team teaching and demonstrating an easy, do-it-yourself-from-home protocol to extract genomic DNA from a strawberry.
Perhaps it was the point where my carefully-worded instructions ("Place your strawberry in the ziploc bag and seal it securely...") led one delinquent to eat his strawberry. Maybe it was at the point where I proudly announced to one set of students "I study evolution and genetics...", only to discover that these kids were from a conservative Christian academy. Or, perhaps it was at the moment where a visiting teacher sternly admonished me for needing to kill the strawberry in order to extract its DNA. Instead, it could have been the moment where one of the high school students corrected me, as the DNA model I was holding was twisted in a left-handed helix instead of the (correct) right-handed helix. Perhaps it was the moment where I mispronounced "Ephrata," and offended the students from that hamlet. Or, maybe it was the time where I told a group of surfer girls that I was raised far from the ocean, all the way in the midwest, and they looked at me like I was from Pluto.
But, at some moment during that three-hour ordeal, I came to the inevitable conclusion that the family line was broken with me: I have no innate talent for teaching. If I'm a gift from God, she likely sent me here to give others hope.
Me: "It could've been worse, actually. I could also let it slip out to those kids from the Christian academy that I'm also a raging homosexual with a boyfriend of four years."
Friend: "Wow. Zach's really put up with you for that long?"
It's mostly because he knows of my talents for using dish soap, salt, water, and ethanol to extract DNA from strawberries. Plus, sometimes I fall off exercise bikes.
Posted by James at November 15, 2007 03:02 PM