I really did not have to take any "hard" sciences during college. By that I mean that I avoided Biology and Chemistry. I took some courses in anthropology and evolution...
I studied a little about D.N.A, proteins, heredity...
...and there was a psych class called "Sex and Behavior" that everyone was surprised turned out to be a class on the endocrine system.
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Finally, I took some classes on weather and climate that covered things like weather systems, the water cycle and a lot of maps.
That has been my recollection of my relationship to science in school.
As I write this it's been close to 30 years since I graduated high school. Again, I don't remember much from this time but these are the science related events I recall.
First, there was the right of passage known as the dissection of a frog.
I remember a girl in class held up the intestines and kissed them.
What had my interest and everyone else at the time was the Space Shuttle. A reusable space craft blew our minds. It was a space ship, but it looked sort of like a plane.
Back on Earth though, things were getting dark because people were getting sick and nobody knew why. Science didn't have the answers and people panicked and then they labeled:
It was the gay disease that nobody was studying because it was the gay disease.
I remember this as a time for science because along with the activists it was the Doctors, the immunologists and the researchers who told us this was H.I.V. and it could affect anyone. It was really the first time I got to see how important science was to the general public. You could really see how panic, misinformation and bigotry can spread when people turn to unscientific answers.
The other big medical science story I recall was that of Barney Clark.
Because of this event and all the news coverage, I learned more about the heart on TV than in school! It was on the magazine covers...
...and there were plenty of news broadcasts similar to this:
The last big science story I recall about that time was again, related to the space shuttle...
We all learned about what went wrong. There were plenty of specials about heat shields and insulation and how they malfunctioned. What I recall about that time was that it showed that science is about exploration and because of that it can be dangerous...but that doesn't mean you give up.
Space was big. Just 5 years before I entered kindergarten Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. With the launch of Voyager 1 and 2, outer space got even bigger. I recall that being all over the place.
I don't recall any special lessons about it at the time, I'm sure my teachers must have spoken about it but there were no reports that I remember working on. If anything, if a teacher saw an interesting program in the TV guide they would tell us to watch it. Something like this perhaps:
While outer space was all over the news things were pretty interesting on earth as well. The Concorde ushered in supersonic flight.
"From London’s Heathrow Airport and Orly Airport outside Paris, the first Concordes with commercial passengers simultaneously take flight on January 21, 1976. The London flight was headed to Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, and the Paris to Rio de Janeiro via Senegal in West Africa. At their cruising speeds, the innovative Concordes flew well over the sound barrier at 1,350 miles an hour, cutting air travel time by more than half."
The last big science related story I can remember from the time has to do with this woman...
That would be Louise Brown, but when I was a kid she was known as the first test tube baby. Her birth introduced the word to in vitro fertilization and if you were a kid, you got a lesson in biology whether you wanted it or not because it was everywhere.
Try as I might, I can not remember what I was studying in science class back in elementary school.
My high school science education is equally abysmal with my only recollection being a very, very boring teacher.
I can however recall some of the big science stories of the time. These would be some of the stories that I would have been interested enough to watch a tv special or read an article in a magazine or newspaper (no internet or cable back then).
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