I’ve written this before, but on a superficial level, I look nothing like a scientist. I don’t own or wear a lab coat. I don’t wear fancy clothes. I don’t attend formal, academic events. Hell, I don’t even talk about science when I’m not bitching about how much busywork I have to do between now and finals week. Frankly, I feel like I’m doing the bare minimum, academically-speaking. Yet, I’m getting straight A’s in all of my classes, and my peers and professors alike are convinced I’m obsessed with studying.
Except… I’m not.
In fact, I really hate words like “study” and “homework”, because they just… leave a bad taste in my mouth whenever I say them aloud. Of course, when I’m working on stuff for class, I’m technically studying and doing homework. But, I don’t particularly enjoy it. I just do it to get it done, so I can do other, much more fun things. Such as… well… take pictures of wildlife and foliage for artistic reasons.
Except, through my photography, I’ve learned a ton about the nature around me since I catalogue everything. And before getting obsessed with nature photography, I still obsessively learned about the nature around me by watching nature documentaries, watching videos on YouTube about nature, reading books about nature, and of course, hunting, fishing, hiking, off-roading, etc.
Turns out, all of that has to do with science. In fact, almost everything I thoroughly enjoy doing is explicitly scientific. Right down to data-entr- er I mean- comparing my photos of unknown plants and animals to images on Google till I find a match, and then titling the picture that thing I matched it with on Google.
In other words, I’ve been actively enjoying and even contributing to science all of my life. Yet, I grew up “hating science”. Why?
Well… it turns out that I never hated science. I hated school. School ruined science for me, plain and simple.
Until I ended up in Homebound, every science teacher I had taught science terribly. Hell… school as a whole made education seem as appealing to me as dog puke or pink, frilly dresses. School was simply unbearable to me, for so many reasons. And the worst of my school experiences happened at a “college-prep” school called DSST: Denver School of Science and Technology.
In fact, DSST was the school that introduced the idea of college to me in the first place, and rubbed it in my face, constantly. Everything that school did was apparently “college focused”. Teachers bragged constantly about the universities they attended. The school was obsessed with being “distinguished” (which is another word that’s still grating to my ears today), and building up “distinguished” students. Because of that, they had a direct school-to-university pipeline, including guaranteeing a spot at CU Denver’s Medical School to those who graduated high school from DSST.
Speaking of which, DSST’s way of building up “distinguished” students was akin to a fucking military school. Our uniforms had to be perfectly clean, fit, and colored. I once wore a pair of Ugg boots that were a shade too close to red instead of solid brown, which resulted in me being sent to a version of detention they called “refocus”, which was basically an after-school class wherein one of the teachers would essentially berate us for not being perfect.
“Refocus or fail!” was a commonly-used motto in that “class”, if you could even call it that.
However, most of the time, I ended up with the second kind of detention known as “college-prep”, because I almost never completed the copious amounts of homework we were assigned daily, even when I wanted to. After all, I was very sick back then. My parents and I did everything in our power to keep me healthy, but Cystic Fibrosis is a merciless condition that, at least back then, progressed exponentially.
Despite numerous school meetings where my parents would argue with teachers and principals alike, having a highly detailed 504 plan, and many other accommodations that were on paper (but hardly ever enforced), I simply could not keep up in my classes. Legally, I couldn’t fail. But damn near every assignment I turned in, including writing and reading assignments, came back with D’s and F’s. To add insult to injury, my teachers weren’t exactly kind to me about my failing grades… to put it very lightly.
All that hardly scratches the surface of the absolute hell I endured at that school.
