Today's vocabulary word is "vivisection"
 

hxxp://www.local6.com/news/4480144/detail.html


I don't really know what to say here, except that this is an example of why my daughter will not go to public school.

I don't see the problem.

Nor I. Notification was sent, and I can see how this would be more informational than disecting frogs. I know in our high-school they did a cow (already dead).

Outside of religious reasons, I really don't get the public/private school debate. Private is not inherently better than public. Look at the kinds of people who can afford to go to private schools - they're from families that are typically better off and already have an advantage over lower-income students in terms of school-wide sets of skills.

This article is pretty interesting on the subject:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/educati...-schools_x.htm


One of my main concerns about private schools is the quality of teachers. Now, public school teachers don't make a helluva lot of money, but I've yet to come across a private school that pays its staff more. My wife was a teacher for a few years before we had our kids, and every single private school she applied to (both in South Florida and in Tallahassee) paid far, far less than public schools. How are private schools hiring the best and brightest teachers, at least as compared to public schools?

Admittedly, we're lucky because where we live, all three schools that our girls are/will attend are among the top 2 or 3, if not the best, in our county, so the decision is pretty easy for us (since we don't necessarily want to send them to a religious school). But I've yet to see an overwhelming benefit to private schools that would justify paying $6K a year.

I bring this up because I'm not really sure I understand why what occurred at this school is a "public school" issue. Would this kind of thing not happen at a private school - teacher wants to teach a particular lesson, school sends notification of project, then goes through with it? The public/private angle to the original poster's comment doesn't make a bit of sense to me.

As long as student has the option to opt out of the lesson then I do not see the issue

Dogs are bigger and cuddlier than frogs or fruit flies.

That's the last time that dog with answer an ad for a voluntary study just to get a case of milk bones.

I wouldn't have thought that a substitute teacher would be allowed to preside over a dissection...especially one as unique as this.

Very true, aside from the elite prep schools (Choate, Exeter, Andover, etc.), private schools are a crap shoot in terms of quality. And you are right in that the kids going to prep schools are already advantaged to begin with...

Typically (but not always), the parents that send their children to private school actually care about their child's education. Support from the parents makes a teacher's life a hell of a lot easier.

Try a lightsaber.

This got me thinking... /tangent alert/

I have often been suspicious of the frequent science teacher argument that dissections/vivisections are an essential learning tool for students, that bring something more to the education experience than could be achieved through models and the like. I did my share when in school, including pithing a live frog, and I'm not sure that I really got a lot more out of it than I might have if I just saw a film on the same experiment. (Though my memory of the experiments is pretty indelible, I will grant that, while I surely would have forgotten a comparable film by now)

However, it seems to me that more than ever, we're teaching institutional skepticism in our society. Something is on the news? Somebody will certainly tell you that the news people are biased (either the ones from that particular station, or just all of them) and you should discount the information they give you. Your teacher says something? Or your textbook? Well, maybe that's just a "theory" and only one of several possible explanations for how things really work. After all, here's some other guy who calls himself a "doctor" and he says that the world is just six thousand years old and that dinosaurs were walking around right up until last Wednesday. So, from an intellectual point of view, it's starting to sound like everything's basically up for grabs, credentials mean nothing as long as someone else is willing to make up another argument.

So, back to dissection, and the like. A teacher can state, "inside a dog, believe it or not, there are 20 feet of intestines, as part of its digestive system." Why should students believe it? Sure, they can memorize that statement for the test, but maybe -- in an environment where there seems to be less and less respect for science and establishment thinking, maybe it's more important than ever to actually offer hands-on proof of things where we can. If that means cutting up a sedated dog that was going to be euthanaized anyway... then maybe that's worth doing just for that reason. Maybe it's the best, or only, way to establish some credibility of the people who have theirs challenged all the time.

Really this is nothing big. In my high school class, we dissected a pig and no notification was sent out. We also dissected a frog. As usual, it's the parents who drop the ball and want to blame the school. This was done to teach, you know...make the upcoming generation more intelligent so they can learn to explore and discover things. I have a hard time believing this is mainly a public school issue.

Who knows, in 5 years, the religious zealots in the country may make us put stickers on the biology books saying the workings of the body are just theories and may not be true...

I believe they mistyped the news article. The actual test was "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH"

SI

Just a quick point: Pay does not *necessarily* equal quality.

I don't think the "dissecting a dog" is what most people are having a problem with. I think it has more to do with the "still alive" part.

Outside of a classroom, he goes to jail for animal cruelty.

That's what would make me a little uneasy about it. So you see a heart beat some breathing, etc. I think we know that is going on anyway.

(the whole pithing a frog/hook it's heart up to a battery to stimulate beating experiment in BME lab was one of many reasons I decided medical research may not be for me, btw)

In my medical school, all of the second year students were expected to perform a vivisection on a live dog to examine it's heart and actually inject various drugs into the dog and directly see how it affected the heart. Reportedly, my class was the first class to object to this and about 30 of us were actually threatened with expulsion for refusing to do this. Eventually, we worked out a compromise where we had to watch a video of it being done and write a 10 page paper discussing all of the hemodynamic issues. It is still the thing that made me the most sick in medical school. It was because the dog was still alive, that I had such a problem with this. I had no problems dissecting my cadaver. To me, this is a case of animal cruelty.

Because only an ignorant religious zealot would object to dissecting a live animal?