Strongest Subject in School

[John Dibble]

In high school I got A's in everything, except Physics which was an honors class anyways and as such my B counted as an A for GPA purposes. So I can't say that I really had a strongest subject at that level - usually I just had favorite classes due to the teachers or subject matter.

My favorite classes were my first two semesters of art classes, Biology, and my senior year English literature class.

The art class was because we had a cool teacher and we had interesting projects - my favorite was the one where we had to make a display using a Barbie doll. The only grading criteria is that it had to be something the teacher wasn't able to make in 24 hours. My project was "Ghetto Crackhouse Barbie". I remember sewing her this potato-sack like dress to wear, making a mirrored little table with lines of fake cocaine on them, and making her this crappy little shack to live in.

Biology was just fun and interesting as a class. We had a good teacher (very nice lady, knowledgable but not particularly interesting) and we got to dissect things. It was rather grody at some points mind you, like when we had to dissect a fetal pig. The teacher would give bonus points if you could achieve certain things, like finding an earthworm's brain or getting the fetal pig's brain out of it's skull without damaging it.

The English Lit. class had a really interesting teacher. He had a very confrontational teaching style. We had interesting debates. My favorites were on A Modest Proposal and on Genesis. The Genesis debate is what started me moving towards atheism rather than the apatheism I had before.

College is a bit hard to measure as well. I did get very different grades, ranging from A's to C's, but the classes themselves had starkly varying degrees of difficulty. Generally speaking the Computer Science, math, and science oriented things were more difficult than the history and social studies type classes. I was definitely weakest in calculus, though ironically calculus made physics a breeze - working through physics problems is so much more sensible with calculus than it is with algebra.