Question of the day for 6/12 - What was your favorite subject in school?
Hm, I do not have good memories of school at all. I was fat and smart and "weird" - a lethal combination in the 80s. Honestly, I found school boring, too. I did enjoy 6th grade history (I think it may still have been considered social studies at the time, though). We started with the Dawn of Humankind and got through the European Middle Ages. That's where I got my love of ancient history.
I got a little thrown off course in high school because I insisted on taking 2 foreign languages plus a business class, so I ended up a year behind in my science classes. 2 things stand out from those years, though - I finally took biology in my junior year (a sophomore class) and I really enjoyed the genetics section.
In my senior year, despite not having taken chemistry or trigonometry (I was stuck in algebra 2 - I really had trouble with math), I took physics and I REALLY liked it! I struggled with the math stuff, but my teacher made it "phun" (as he spelled it). He was a jovial man with a sense of humor who rarely lectured at us; we always had to do things and build stuff. Once we built a Gumby-ish character out of clay, put it on the floor, and Mr. DePino dropped a bowling ball on it (much to the chagrin of the art classes on the floor underneath us). Gumby literally went "splat" and someone got sent to the art classes to borrow a putty knife, to scrape the clay off the floor. We took over hallways playing with Slinkys. Mr. D. built a hovercraft and we had fun one day strapping each other to it to "float" down the hallway (and crash into walls, of course). At Christmas, we had to build musical instruments out of household items (NO actual musical instrument pieces allowed - for example, if you built a "guitar," you couldn't even use real guitar strings) and play Jingle Bells in front of the class. One of my friends forgot his instrument, so he played his stomach - and got an A. In the spring, our local amusement park had a dedicated "Physics Phun Day" when they closed to the public and let in school groups to ride the rides and do experiments while on them. On the way there, my friends and I discussed the worksheets and sort of figured out what would happen on the rides, so we filled out our worksheets right then and there. Mr. D. was sitting right in front of us; he heard us talking, turned around and just smiled...he allowed us to turn in the papers as we got off the bus, and we simply all enjoyed the day (and we all got A's as well). Throughout the year, he also allowed extra credit in the form of watching the daily syndicated episode of MacGyver (he was a big fan) and write a report on it, describing the physics concept that MacGyver faced and how he solved it, how it worked. Because I was struggling, I did a report every single day, and Mr. D. actually raised my grade one whole letter because, as he said, he saw that I liked the class, I was putting in the effort and he could see that I *understood* the concepts, even if I had difficulty explaining and proving them.
When I got to college, in my last year we finally got a forensics class, so I was part of the first group to take it (one of my majors was criminal justice). My favorite professor taught it as well. It was almost all completely lab work - we got to do fingerprints (apparently the custodian was peeved at all the powdery fingerprints he had to scrub off the surfaces in the room), we fired pistols over the ravine when we tested for gunpowder residue (which got the Longmeadow P.D. called on us...but as our professor was a retired police captain AND the current director of the police academy, it was the responding officer who ended up red-faced), we did blood types (which was how I learned what I am), etc.
D) . Sold off the collections when we moved.
I do have a memory of surprising a chemistry teacher in HS with drastically improving my grade. He was not the best teacher but a good guy and was so happy for me.
