Scholarly

November - The Thing about Thanksgiving

ASA had two November traditions: the annual golf tournament fundraiser and a pre-Thanksgiving dissection.

"Butchering a turkey to cook it for Thanksgiving is basically the same as dissecting a frog," Mr. Olszewski explained.

Several students gagged. Maya looked like she was about to cry.

So dissect they did, never mind the fact that they wouldn't cover animal systems until the end of the year, thus making the dissection pretty much useless, but hey, Vivian wasn't about to complain. (It was easy, at least.)

That was, until Mr. Olszewski decided that this was the time for assigned lab groups.

She tuned out, crossing her fingers for Leah or Sydney. But fate (or, in this case, Mr. Olszewski) had other ideas.

"Vivian and Tristan," he dictated.

Seriously, Olszewski?

"So...hey." He sidled up to the lab table, trying too hard to look suave.

"No."

Vivian stared at the frog on the dissection tray, the posters on the walls, the luckier students around the room who hadn't paired with their mortal-enemies-turned-homecoming-dates – anywhere but at Tristan.

"This...smells horrible," Tristan continued awkwardly.

"Yes," Vivian deadpanned.

"Do you wanna...?" Tristan asked, gesturing at the upside-down frog on the dissection tray with a scalpel.

"No, you can handle the cutting. I'll answer the lab questions."

"Okay." Tristan gulped, but he began to slice the frog obediently. Vivian glanced occasionally over at the frog, poking it tentatively with the probe, searching for the answers in its innards. She made short work of the questions and they soon finished.

"Get started on your study questions, please," Mr. Olszewski instructed the groups who had finished. The three groups who'd finished grabbed textbooks from a shelf in the back and gathered in a cluster in the back of the room. Set up at a lab table in the back, the D.C.O's (Designated Class Overachievers), as Tristan had taken to calling them, called out questions and answers and tried to write quickly enough not to forget what they were writing as soon as someone asked a new question.

"Function of the mitochondria?" Jess asked.

"Powerhouse of the cell!" Shannon shrieked.

(Shannon's love of memes was true and devout.)

"The actual function of the mitochondria?"

"Provide energy to carry out cellular activities," Ana Sofia answered.

"What organelle is responsible for carrying out protein synthesis?"
"What regulates water intake in a cell?"

"Name three organelles of plant cells that are absent in animal cells?"

"Um, I think it's the golgi apparatus, but I'm not really sure."

"Cerebral cortex!"
"Wrong chapter."

"Did he even teach that?"

"If these were the leftover worksheets from AP bio, I swear, I'm going to defenestrate someone." That was Jana; no one else at ASA possessed as violent a temper as she did and few had vocabularies as extensive.

(Her rage, though, was at least a bit justified. He'd frequently give his students "relevant" assignments from the AP Biology course. It went much more in-depth than the honors bio course did, and the work he gave them was usually on material they'd never learned. Nobody ever knew how to do it, Google was consulted, and much complaining was done. This happened at least twice a week.)