Summer Lesson #2: Don't believe anything you learned in grade 5 biology.

When I was 10, my family moved to a reservation in South Dakota for a 3-year term with Habitat for Humanity, and I was enrolled in a Catholic school there. I've never actually asked my parents why they decided on Catholic school; I can only assume that it was because the other alternative was a public school of some notoriety*. I had never realized that my brand of Christianity was not the only one, and so from the moment I entered Religion class and was handed a rosary, I started learning all sorts of things I had not bargained for.


I was going through my Atheist phase at the time, which made things even more interesting, but as my Atheist phase did not coincide with my Rebellious phase***, no one got to hear about it except me and the stylized Barbie Doll I tried to worship in my bedroom cupboard for a few days until I realized that my own religion was just as unrewarding as all the others and gave up.

This meant that I was fully prepared to disregard everything I learned in Religion class. However, it never occurred to me that I should watch what I learned in my other classes as well. Over the years, I have come to strongly question my grade 5 teacher's qualifications. At the time, I thought it was only English that she had problems with, what with our little battle over the correct use of quotation marks on my final exam (a battle which I won, hands down). The laws of the English language are quite complex, and the more I lord them over others the more I forget them and end up with truly awful sentences. Like this one. However, I assumed at the time that the rules of biology were all cold hard fact, and I did not question what I learned there. Until Sunday.

This Sunday, my mother and I were having a discussion about teeth, which somehow became a discussion about ribs, which led to me making the following statement:
"Well, men do have one rib less than women, and maybe that explains it***....don't they?...?" Yes, that is right. In grade 5, I was taught that all women are born with one more rib than men are. I still remember the day where we were each given a little baggy with pieces of paper detailing all the bones and internal organs of a human skeleton and instructed to put it together, and then my grade 5 teacher explained to us that we could tell this was a female skeleton because it had an equal number of ribs.

And I was, as I have said, an atheist at this stage in life, but I did, as I have said, trust the lessons of biology with such a blind faith that I accepted this statement whole-heartedly. I then came to the conclusion that the original creators of the Judeo-Christian creation myth must have noticed that men and women did not have the same number of ribs, and had founded the creation story on that realization. I thought it was kind of cool. I salted this bit of information away in my mind and forgot all about it, but continued to believe it in a very passive sort of way.

This brings me to Sunday, July 24th, 2011, a day where I suddenly found myself searching the internet (reliable source that it is) for information that would put a sizeable dent in the faith I have put in my grade 5 education. Thank goodness the laws of punctuation were so firmly drilled into my brain that when my teacher informed me that "when there is a paragraph of dialogue, even a paragraph of dialogue that is all spoken by the same person, each of the sentences of the paragraph must have opening and closing quotation marks around them.""Thank you for the letter your father sent me.""I mean, you're both wrong, but I love getting letters like this from parents.""It really keeps me on my toes.", I was having none of it and had her check that bit of information with the grade 7 English teacher, and then re-mark my paper accordingly. My understanding of the human body may be shaky at best, but at least I have quotation marks down pat.


*But then we moved back to Winnipeg and they put me in Gordon Bell, where there are bars on the windows, bullet holes in the library doors, and they lock the front doors between 8am and 3pm to keep students from sneaking out and setting teachers' cars on fire.**

**It was also an excellent school, and very multicultural, and I received a superb education there, but that's not what made it interesting.

***Never mind what it was.