Prologue

I’ve always wanted to write a book. Its definitely towards the top of my bucket list, which happens to be very short and not that detailed, but that’s a different story for a different day. The problem with writing a book (at least for me) is that I have a problem maintaining the focus and dedication to write a two hundred page document. I get about five or six pages in and then move on to something else. Because my bucket list is the poorest excuse for a bucket list in the history of bucket lists (with the exception of that movie starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman) my book-related entry is literally “write a book” with no other details. So the lazy person in me could easily write a short children’s book and call it a day. But that’s not what I want to do, which brings us here.

At the time of writing this sentence, I have been a high school science teacher for nine years. Over the past almost-decade, I’ve seen many students enter my classroom, hold on to every word I say and every little thing we do, gain a great understanding of biology, and move on to study it in college. But for each one of those students, I’ve seen countless more walk into my room, oblivious to anything going on around them, goof off and not pay attention, fail, retake the class, fail again, and basically barely get by. Now as a public school teacher, I have a certain set of professional rules I have to follow. No swearing, no telling the students who would much rather flirt with the boy or girl next to them (or across the room) how I really feel about their pitiful attempts to get some action, and having to keep everything PG, or at least PG-13.

But science and especially biology isn’t exactly a PG-13 subject. Biology is all about death and sex. Everything an organism does is to either prevent death or to make babies. I challenge you to find something that doesn’t connect to one or both of those actions. And while all this is taking place, there is some crazy stuff that is happening in the background. The longer I taught, the more I’ve realized that my class would be much more interesting if I could just speak bluntly about what is going on. Maybe then the unmotivated students who are more concerned with their social life would be more engaged (to throw out some good educational jargon). If I could freely drop F-bombs, S-words, discuss P’s and V’s with no concern about which parent is going to email my principal and try to get me fired, the class would be my dream job. That’s how we got to here. So this prologue has been clean. It's been censored. It is the advisory warning that in the pages following these, things are going to get vulgar. If that offends you, stop reading now. But then again, if you picked up a book titled “High School Biology For Bastards,” you probably don’t mind colorful language. Let’s learn some fucking biology.