I grew up in a family of medically minded people--my parents were doctors and my sister, who is also now a doctor, showed early signs in junior high of wanting to carry on in their steps.
I wanted nothing to do with the field.
Oh, I didn't mind the conversations around the table growing up, between my parents and then progressively including my sister--it's made me very comfortable with any medical issues me or mine have had to deal with, not to mention that I can fake a conversation with a group of doctors for about 15 minutes before they realize I am not of their ilk. I probably could have handled going to medical school, much to the delight of my parents, if it hadn't been for one thing: I hated biology. It seemed (and I know the fallacy in the next statement, believe me I do) unscientific.
I blame it on the year of biology I was required to take that forever killed any joy of the subject in me by going on incessantly about planktons and zooplanktons and plants and, god kill me now. Do you blame me that, compared to my first year of physics which was laws of motion and velocity and then later optics etc., I decided that biology and its compatriots could kiss my ass?
I still dug chemistry, though, and as luck would have it, the math/physics curriculum (aka major) in high school meant no biology, but lots of physics and math (algebra! trigonometry! geometry! finite math!) and chemistry (tailored specifically to our curriculum, which meant lots and lots of lovely equations and balancing). Easiest decision I ever made, checking off the box declaring my curriculum at the end of my freshman year.
(Explaining to my father why I lied about what I'd picked what I did, when we went to enroll for my sophomore year was a little trickier. The argument of I how I didn't exactly lie, just withheld the truth didn't really fly with him.)
***
That would have been the end of the story with any subject having the word "bio" in it where I was concerned if I had not come across a strange little book my junior year. I came across it when the private English after school program I used to go to, up until the end of my freshman year (they just didn't have anyone pr materials to teach anything age/class appropriate after that), asked to hire me for the summer as a teacher's aide for the younger kids. They also assigned me the task of also categorizing all their books, including those just recently donated or found and bought from people who had kept their textbooks from before the revolution, before the summer session started.
Naturally, I went through the books with an eye to making note and possibly borrowing any that were new to me (I'd already read through their 'library' while I attended classes myself), before we started class. That's where, in one of the textbook boxes, I came across a little slim yellow book called 'The Biochemist's Handbook' by someone called Harold Baum. Hmm, I thought, let's check it out. It turned out to be several songs on biochemical processes and pathways set to the music of popular songs. I knew almost all of the original tunes and started humming the biochem 'songs' to them and before I knew it, I was hooked.
I ended up learning almost all of the songs by heart, not because I set out to do so, but because I read the darn book so many times. It opened up a whole new world of possibilities where songs were concerned. I knew of song parodies, of course--and both culturally and because of my family's weird sense of humor, I'd been exposed to song and literature parodies from early on. I was--and still am--pretty good about off the cuff parody song writing myself (just ask the kid, who has all sorts of strange lyrics associated with well-known songs). But to actually use popular songs as a way to learn to teach things? That was new and crazy--and fun. The inner geek in me rejoiced.
Learning those songs did something else, too: it gave my family pause when I started spouting some of what I'd learned by heart at the dinner table. (It also unfortunately started up the whole, "See? I said you had it in you to become a doctor" conversation again. Which took off the pressure off the "You could be a professional pianist" one, so I guess it ended up being a wash.)
Here is a link to a page with some information on the book and also the songs actually being sung. I still remember them, especially my favorite called 'Waltz Round the Cycle'. Get me really drunk and I may even sing it in public.
Link below should open up the mp3 directly:
Waltz Round the Cycle
