Frog dissection


Did elementary school students in the US really kill and dissect frogs in the 1980s (and presumably earlier)? My high school biology class (late 2000s) dissected mice, but they were already dead when we got them in class.

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Yeah no school would ever have students kill frogs in class. The frogs would have arrived already dead and preserved in formaldehyde.

It's one of my few nitpicks in an otherwise flawless film.

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Guilty. Don’t remember if it was elementary or jr. high, but we did. Early ‘80s iirc. NE US. Maybe it was at summer camp, actually. Possibly both.

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We didn't do dissections until I was in high school, Freshman Year. We were given rats near the end of the semester in Biology Class, and they had already been prepared in a lab before ever reaching us, so we didn't have to kill them or deal with anything slimy. The entire process was actually less gross than I thought it would be, though there were 3 parts that I didn't enjoy:

- the rats we were given apparently had been pregnant when they were anesthetized

- the smell of formaldehyde was nasty

- at a certain point in the dissection, the teacher instructed us to break our rats' jaws so we could see inside the mouth, and boy was that difficult!

I will not go into any more details, but I will say that the advanced Biology students got to dissect minks instead of rats.

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In 7th grade we dissected worms, frogs, huge grasshoppers and crawfish. The teacher dissected a sheep's eyeball and something else. In regular high school bio we had to dissect fetal pigs. ...In AP Bio, since we had a college within walking distance, we had the joy of going to see a cadaver (they said we could cut into it (more, certain things were already done) and such if we wanted, but thanks but no thanks.) I can't imagine doing any type of dissections in elementary.

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Wow! Your school was hardcore! The only thing I dissected in 7th grade was a tropical flower (we were studying flower anatomy at the time). However, my teacher wasn't above showing us gross stuff either, like his "dead zoo." One wall of our classroom had a bunch of shelves with jars full of preserved animals and animal parts. My teacher showed us things like a lamprey, a pocket gopher, a deer's heart, and a rattlesnake's head. We did not dissect a worm, but the teacher did show us a living one when we were studying annelids. He used an overhead projector to show us housefly larvae, since he felt it was way less gross than having us look at them in person, though they moved pretty fast for the projector, hehe.

He also told us an incredible story about carpenter ants turning his family's front door of their house into a colony and it took them years to figure it out, and when they did, they carefully took the door off, left it at the local garbage dump, and put a new door on there. As you can guess, he was one of my fave teachers in 7th grade.

There was one interesting thing that happened with my biology teacher, when we were dissecting rats. She actually got a rat that was further along in her pregnancy than the ones the rest of us were working on. The rat fetuses from her rat were the size of small beans (or peas), and she showed us some of them under a dissection microscope, and it was interesting seeing how far along they were in their development. You could actually see their tiny faces in the process forming out of the little pink blob.

I'm afraid the only human "cadavers" I've seen worked on were on forensics cop shows, so you know they're fake. But mom did tell me once that students studying to become surgeons at college practiced on cadavers for safety reasons, so I can get why a college would have them. Usually the donors put in their wills to have their bodies "donated to science."

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I dissected a fish in school, and I remember later on that my classmates and I were handling whole animal organs!! I remember being teased with a sheep's windpipe, for example!

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When I was in 7th grade we dissected worms, in 8th grade frogs that were already dead, in 9th grade fetal pigs, in 10th grade a pig heart and then 11th and 12th we took field trips to the university to view cadavers 🤢🤮🤮

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From memory, it was year 9 or 10 when we were all given eyes from lambs or something to study. This is in Western Australia.

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