[GovernmentShrinker]

One really cool thing we did: get one of those big eyedropper thingies (it's got some technical name but I forgot it) and we put them down their throat then blew in the other end and inflated their lungs. Can't do that in a computer simulation.

What a beautiful illustration of my point that dissections at the high school level are a waste of time. What can we infer that the students learned from this exercise? That air entering from the mouth and going into the lungs causes the lungs/chest to expand? Anybody who hadn't figured that out by kindergarten is a lost cause, academically.

[discostu]

We learned how a frog makes their croaking noise (if you did your extraction just so you'd get a kind of zombie-oid croaking sound as the lungs deflated), about the glotal flaps the protect the throats of almost all living things, and about the elasticity of lung tissue both in reptiles and mammals (if you were good and blew slow giving the lungs a good chance to stretch rather than tear you could inflate the lungs to a good 6 or 7 times the size of the frog). We also learned the importance of healthy lungs because even the slightest nick in either lung caused by sloppy disecting caused all the air to go out the hole and thus caused you to fail that particular excercise of the lab (not a lot of lost points, but at the end of the year every lost point counts).