from the desk of stinkpot

i tutor biology at the cambridge high school now. for the past semester, i’ve been waking up a little earlier twice a week and helping out a student with her homework and readings.

i decided to this for all the usual reasons. feelings of guilt induced by the inherent selfishness of trying to build a career. a desire to know that i have some practical utility. the satisfaction accompanying making someone else’s life slightly easier and perhaps even better.

what i didn’t foresee (and am so excited about that i thought i’d blog about it): how much richer my understanding of biology could become.

you see, i’d been so caught up in the minutia of my high school and college biology classes — essentially memorizing the names of enzymes in pathways or the precise number of ATP generated by certain cycles — that i kept missing the big pictures. for instance, last week, as i explained photosynthesis and cellular respiration to my student, i finally realized: life means turning light into carbon, and carbon into work.  that, in a nutshell, is what life is all about.

the profundity of that realization was awesome.  and, it once and for all organized all of those damn chains and cycles that i had previously memorized individually and therefore left unconnected, un-unified: the electron transport chain, the krebs cycle, the calvin cycle, glycolysis.  now, i could see the gears in the clockwork and appreciate their beauty.  walking outside and looking at a tree was suddenly like seeing the matrix.

scary to think that i could have gone through grad school without gaining an understanding of something so fundamental in biology.

still, tutoring hasn’t been all emotional fulfillment and intellectual gain: i dropped my breakfast banana on the ride into the lab from the high school on tuesday.

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