A Teacher to Remember

(I love this story)

Two years after I retired and moved to Port Ludlow in Washington State on the Olympic Peninsula, I got a call from Peninsula College.  They needed a part time Marine Biology teacher in a hurry.  The teacher they were planning on to teach a marine biology course off the main campus in Port Townsend became unavailable.  The class was in their class schedule and was full with 25 students.  It was to start in four weeks.

I hadn’t been teaching for a while and jumped at the chance to get back into the classroom with the future leaders of our country teaching my favorite subject.

The class was to be held at the Marine Science Center on the end of the pier at Fort Warden State Park in Port Townsend.  That was good news and bad news.  Being 45 miles away from the main campus, all the normal lab supplies were not available.  They had microscopes and a few prepared slides but that was all.  The good news was there were a dozen major aquariums in the building that we could use, and being my only class I had time to collect live specimens to use in our lab sessions.

It worked out well and I had a great time mixing with the younger generation again.  I stayed for six years.

Like in any class there are things that occur that were unplanned that you remember as special.  This is the story of one of those occurrences.

The lab session for this particular night was to look at live plankton.  Plankton is mostly very small animals and plants that drift in the ocean.  To catch and look at it under the microscope we use a ‘plankton net’; which is a very fine mesh butter fly type net.

This evening my plan was to have the class go down to the dock on the pier and pull the net along the dock, then go directly to the classroom (100 feet away), and watch the live specimens swimming around through their microscope.

Not wanting to get caught flat-footed I came an hour early and went down to the dock to check if there were enough plankton in the water to catch.  Sometimes the water was clear and almost no plankton would be in it, then I would switch to a different exercise.

The ramp down to the dock was forty feet long and as I walked down, the eight river otters that were resting on the dock all went back into the water.  They used the dock all the time and it was covered with otter poop.  As I was tiptoeing between the piles, I had a sudden realization that the poop on the dock looked exactly like the ‘Cliff Bar’ I was in the process of eating, as my ‘before class’ snack.  I broke off a good size chunk and placed it on a ‘clean’ spot at the edge of the dock, and went back up the ramp to meet my class.

An hour and a half later after my lecture, the class got their plankton nets and we all marched out to the dock to collect our lab material for the 2 hr. lab that was to follow.

There were a couple of otters on the dock that hit the water when we came down and I announced to the class to be careful not to step in the poop.  They all became very aware of it all over the dock.  I had them now – the con was on.

I said, “I wonder if they were males or females.”  I was sure one of them would take the bait, and one did. College students are always interested in sex.

“How can you tell?” was the question from the crowd.

I said, “It’s easy, the females have estrogen in their feces and it makes it sweeter than the males.”  I bent over, picked up my planted Cliff Bar, and popped it in to my mouth.  “This one is a male,” I said spitting it out, and going on with the class collecting like nothing had happened out of the ordinary.

Those 25 students may not remember much about marine biology as they grow old, but they will never forget the teacher, and have a great story to tell to their grandchildren.  Don’t you just love it when a plan all comes together?