Monday Memory: Dolphin-dogs and dino-men

I don't know if this Monday Memory thing will become a permanent fixture on this blog or not, but for some reason I started having funny memories of college and decided to blog about a few. I'm not sure what possessed me to do so, but hopefully someone will find them as hilarious as I do!

I majored in Environmental Studies. I never had anything I really wanted to do (besides be a mom), but I was interested in geology. Lots of the classes, however, wouldn't work with my work schedule (plus there was too much math and physics). I then discovered my major, something I'd never heard of but ended up really liking because of the diversity of science classes. I had classes in almost every -ology you can think of. Anyway, one semester all my classes seemed to focus on evolution in one way or another (this wasn't the only semester with classes that talked about evolution). I had a geology class with some weird professor (I can't remember his name, but my brother had him a few years before this and when we worked together we used to draw pictures of him) who on the first day of class showed us a slide show of stuff we'd be discussing throughout the semester. As his voice droned on, I started to lose interest, until he came to a picture of what looked like squirrels. He casually said, "And these are the animals we evolved from..." and continued on to the next slide. WHAT DID HE JUST SAY? Was I the only one who heard him? I sat in the back laughing while nobody else seemed to have noticed anything out of the ordinary.

Amber was in my biology class that semester. It was 10x better because of this. We had lots of fun. When we started the evolution unit, our professor (who talked like Winnie the Pooh) showed a film to introduce the topic. It talked about how animals started out in the water and slowly evolved onto land. It then showed a dolphin swimming in the ocean and it slowly morphed into a big, black, hairy dog running along the beach. Amber yelled out, "I AM SURE!" and we both just sat back laughing. Again, no response from anyone else in class.

Finally, I had a class that semester called World of Dinosaurs. Yes, it sounds funny, but it was really cool. Our professor was a famous palaentologist who helped discover and name a new dinosaur in Madagascar. But toward the end of the semester, we talked about what dinosaurs would be like if they were still around today. Of course nobody knows, but I remember seeing a picture of a T-rex wearing a suit and glasses. I just about lost it. What was the deal with my classes? The funny part is that everyone taught evolution like it was fact, like the text book was the ultimate source to answer all questions. Ah, those were good times!