Cutting up pig hearts for fun!

Teaching is a funny business.  I had to cover for a colleague’s class for several weeks and ended up teaching biology – a subject I know hardly anything at all about.  The biology teacher at our school when I was a pupil had a habit of picking up dead animals (road kill) and boiling them in a huge vat at the back of the lab.  The smell was indescribable and is ever associated with biology in my mind.  Sitting wanting to retch is not a happy state.  The technician at my college, a nice chap, had a sense of humour.  He seemed to realise I was not designed to teach this subject and went out of his way to help.  I would come in to do a session on the structure of fish and find twenty huge catfish laid out on boards with scalpels and pins and stuff.  Absolutely terrified but willing to give it a go (I know a smarter person would have admitted defeat) I began demonstrating how to dissect the fish to an appalled class.  Since I did not have a clue this was a barbaric deed that seemed to go on and on and have no end.  At one point I remember cutting the eye out and dismembering the head, while one eager student kept coming too close to my elbow and whispering, “cut it harder” or “go deeper”.  Perhaps this could be a useful method to spot serial killers at a young age? 

It was not a pretty sight and several girls left the class gagging.  The cat fish ended up like mince meat and I was frankly exhausted.  Following my lead they all went to their boards and most proceeded to do a vicious post mortem on their own fish.  Learnt absolutely nothing about the biology of fish but honed their butchering skills considerably.  Anyway, the technician must have loved it because the following week I entered the lab tentatively to discover twenty fat pig hearts on boards.  It got so that I opened the door of the lab and tip toed in dreading what I would find.  I think he loved that first look on my face as I entered the room, sort of a “what the hell is it this week?”  In so many ways I was relieved when my colleague returned and I could retire bloodied from the biology field.