It’s a new school year and some of it seems the same and some of it doesn’t. Like it might be sitting at the same lunch table and hanging out with people it seems like you’ve known forever.  You might feel all these different feelings, like you might be excited, you might be a little scared. There are definitely some different things like you have a locker with a combination lock that your trying to get the hang of, your changing classes, your going to the armory from a much further location and in the next few weeks you’ll try to milk that excuse when your late.  You’re in seventh grade and there seem to be so many expectations, doesn’t anyone realize that a few years back you were only in fifth grade, and then a few years before that you were in third?  Let me give you some hints from someone who has been there before. Seventh grade is wonderful it really is.  Yes I will have expectations. I expect you to be quiet during the lesson not because I don’t want to listen to what you have to say, but because we need to learn and we all need to have the same opportunity to do so because for some of us we don’t learn the same way or as quick as everyone else.  I will expect nothing but the best from you.  I know everyone has the best inside of them and I get so disappointed when I don’t see it. Maybe you think your best is not inside the school walls or in the classroom.  I know that’s not true and it’s another lame excuse I will hear in an attempt for you to feel better about a situation you are in. I expect you to respect me, my classroom and other people.  If you don’t, I know that you don’t respect yourself.  There will be times when I am not your favorite person or teacher, but either way I am still a person who expects to be treated politely just like you do.  I want you to respect my classroom because we have to be here for another 179 days so we should try to make the best of it and keep things clean and orderly.  I want you to respect other people because some day somewhere you may be on the other side of  the fence of teasing, of bullying, or down on your luck, and you’ll be hoping that someone will be able to lift you up and carry you away from all of it.

So what will you learn here?  I hear this question a lot.  I hear the question like how will this help me because I want to do hair or dance? I have no need for science.  This might be true, but there are a couple of things you should know from someone who has been on the other side and was once a seventh grader.  There are things I had to do that I didn’t like.  I hated math, I knew the basics but then math just got harder and I didn’t really understand why I needed all of this hard math? Like Geometry, who needs it really? I mean was I ever going to memorizing areas of prisms, diamonds, etc. What I learned from math was something that I didn’t know until I left college.  First I learned that I could do it.  I had a few bad teachers that pretty much told me I wasn’t cut out for math.   I failed math for a couple of years because of believing what those teachers said. I just figured why do math if I wasn’t cut out for it to begin with?. But then eventually it came down to not being able to do what I wanted to do because I wouldn’t do math, so I finally sucked it up and did the math. I realized I could do it and do it well mostly because I worked really hard at it.  Math also taught me that sometimes you have to do something you just don’t want to in order to get to something else. Sort of like the drive to ocean city, you just want to be there instead of having to pass all those other places first.  But you pass those other places because you know eventually you’ll be in that one place you want to be.  School is like that.  There are things I have to teach you not because I want to punish you but because it is my job and I have to make sure I set you out with everything you’re supposed to know about life science.

So besides that, there is something that life science will teach you that you will use no matter what you’ll be doing ten years from now.  The most important thing that I can teach you is to have curiosity and to keep learning.  Life Science is a mystery, not one that you can solve in a day, but one that takes many years to completely unfold in your brain.  Life science teaches you to be curious because you really never know what is under that rock or in the ocean that maybe you were swimming in this summer.  You will need that curiosity in your life.  If you stop being curious then your life will get boring.  But if you remember ten years from now how curious life could really be it won’t be so scary when you have to try something new.    So even if you never need to know who discovered the microscope, or what DNA is, maybe the one thing that will stick with you is how curious you were when you were looking at your hair under the microscope and maybe because of it you’ll discover something really fantastic.