High school teachers have a unique power to shape our lives, often in ways we don't fully appreciate until years later. Long Beach High School was fortunate to have a number of excellent educators during my time there, and our school consistently ranked highly in state and national standards tests.
I had several favorites. One of them was Coach Robert Cave. An accomplished grower of camellias and a skilled artisan of carved wild fowl, he'd won national awards in both. To us, he was "Coach" and he taught Biology II and Marine Biology. While I was able to take his Bio II class, I've always regretted being unable to fit his Marine Bio class into my schedule.
Since Bio II was a science class, I already found it enjoyable, but Coach's passion for the subject made the class that much more memorable. A number of things I learned in his classroom I can still rattle off today, including the seven levels of taxonomy - Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus, Species. Not exactly useful in my tech job, but retained knowledge is always a win.
During the winter months, he lit off the Bunsen burner on his table and boiled water in a beaker. He explained it was to throw humidity into the air to counter the dryness from the season. This was new information to me, and I still have a designated cast-iron kettle that I use during the much colder and drier Maryland winters.
His tests usually had an extra credit question. Sometimes it was at least obliquely related to the material, "What type of sea turtle never returns to land?" Other times, it was strangely random, "Why are daytime programs called 'soaps'?"
I sat in the back table of the class between Thomas and Ronnie. Over the course of the year, inspired by Coach's penchant for trivia, our table initiated our own trivia challenges. At first, we tried to keep questions class related. "What's the body's largest gland?" and "What's the body's largest organ?" were typical.
We eventually went off the rails. "Who's the patron saint of both sailors and children?"
While Coach Cave's trivia challenges tested our knowledge of biology and even pop culture, he had a more hands-on examination in store for us.
In a serious escalation from Bio I's dissection of a large earthworm, in Coach's class we were faced with the dissection of a fetal pig. Being at the same table, Ronnie, Thomas, and I shared the same specimen which Ronnie duly christened "Seymour D. Pig". We took turns wielding the scalpel and managed to not lose our lunch in the process, but tellingly, none of us became a surgeon.
It was whispered among us that a friend of ours received a challenge in another class: eat a portion of their "Seymour's" liver for $20.00. While I didn't witness the deed, others did and our friend claimed his prize. For context, $20 in 1986 is worth almost $60. Not an insignificant sum for a high school kid, but one I'd still pass on.
Coach's class made for a memorable year. He was a rare instructor who was able to instill his passion for the subject in his students. There's a plethora of biology factoids still taking residence in my grey matter that I learned while in his class. While I don't get to pull them out very often, on occasion they serve me well in trivia challenges and rock and roll blog posts.
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