Josh Wienczkowski
EN 101 Saunier
November 21, 2005
Documentation, "Advanced Biology"
"There is no God! How do you explain the evolution of monkey to man?! With some story of Adam and Eve?! I bet there's a virgin that gave birth to a mythical figure, am I right?" The view of an analytical atheist, only fourteen. That was me in an argument with my parents over grades that seemed to follow the annual trend of slipping. I was young, ignorant and confident of my superiority in intellectual dialogue. I also had the audacity to not only question a religion that had been in existence for over two thousand years, but to castigate my parental units for their faulty parenting on my behalf. "You never brought me to church, not once! So you're trying to tell me that because of my lack of religiosity, I'm doing bad in school?! No, bad things happen to bad people because the world gets it's own revenge in fate. So you have cancer, where's your God now?" A feeling of "I won this round" through the silence and shock impressed on their faces was accomplished. Judith Ortiz Cofer, teacher of literature and writing at the University of Georgia in Athens writes a similar experience in "Advanced Biology" (Rites of Passage, Judie Rae and Catherine Fraga, eds. Singapore: Thomson and Heinle, 2002. 228-234) "?that was the harshest thing I could have said to anyone?my cheek was burning from the slap and I wanted to hurt her" (233).
I was in the excelled classes; the classes for the awkward teenagers to shine like their faces from a new biological phenomena, puberty. One class I grew immensely interested in was Advanced Biology and AP Human Anatomy. Th ...