Week 1 -- Childhood Memory Sample Assignment Course home | Weekly schedule | Announcements | Instructor Info | Desire2Learn | MasteringBiology® | Honor Code | FAQs | HELP!

[Sample by Mark Walvoord]

As a child, I loved spending time in the great outdoors. Perhaps "great" isn't the best adjective to use, because my front and back yards of my Amarillo, TX home were the most common places I would experience nature. Though we moved from there to Oklahoma City when I was 7, I still vividly remember a couple of biological experiences.

One of my favorite creatures were roly-pollies (aka pillbugs or woodlice). I don't know if it was just the easiest animal to catch, the fact that they were abundant in my backyard, the convenience of them not pinching or biting, or that I really did think all their moving feet and ability to roll up was impressive. Whatever the reason, I would spend hours finding and watching them. I learned the size variation of this species, their preferred habitat (the moist, dark ground under our stepping stones), and the amount of time it took them to uncurl after being disturbed. One day I was taking a census of all of the roly-pollies I could find in my backyard, so I was piling them all in a jar. The jar was getting rather full just as my mom called me in for dinner. I placed the jar on the back porch, and forgot about them. When we returned from a trip a few days later, I was very, very sad to find them all dead in their glass coffin. From that point on, I rarely ever collected live animals, preferring instead to just observe them or handle them in nature, then let them go.

Anytime it rained and I could slip out the front door unnoticed, I would duck underneath a wisteria (pruned to be a small bush) on the front corner of our lawn. It had beautiful purple flowers in spring, and lots of overlapping leaves to redirect the rain. I would stare at the rainwater running off those leaves and be amazed at how much protection I was afforded under its canopy. Talking about it makes we want to plant one right now because of the peace I felt there.

[352 words]

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Contemporary Issues in Biology -- BIOL 1003 Mariëlle H. Hoefnagels, Ph.D. © 2004-2015. biology1003 at OU dot edu (at = @, dot =.) Last Updated August 5, 2014 11:02 PM