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Quote of the Week….“Youth looks ahead, old age looks back and middle age looks tired.”

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Fake Frogs – say it is

not so!

Many of us remember dissecting a frog when we were in high school. It was not a pleasant experience. I learned this past week that some schools have switched to synthetic ones that can be reused. Tawnell D. Hobbs of the WSJ shares the following:

Destiny Castillo hovered over the glistening wet frog in science class. It was dark-colored, with buggy eyes and female anatomy.

Is it real, or is it …?

She had no qualms about slicing into its pudgy abdomen and pulling out the insides, because it wasn’t real.

“It was a lot easier, and didn’t smell as bad,” said Destiny, a 16-year-old student at J.W. Mitchell High School in Pasco County, Fla. “I didn’t really like cutting through a real frog. I felt bad.”

A synthetic frog has leapt into the hearts of some educators and animal-rights activists. The model, complete with man-made internal organs, has become the humane answer to classroom dissections and an antidote for squeamish students.

But some teachers ask: Are we protecting students too much from the messiness of real life and real science?

They say students are missing out on the feel and, yes, smell of dissecting a formaldehyde-drenched frog, considered a rite of passage for middle schoolers. And gone are any surprises, they say, that come with a real specimen—extra limbs and organs, or bellies full of insects, rocks and even remnants of other amphibians.

“Students look forward to doing the real one,” said Robert Glotfelty, a middle-school science teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools, who doubts his students would take a fake frog seriously. “I could see frog livers thrown across my room with a synthetic frog.”

The synthetic frog, called the SynFrog, has rolled out at a time when more educators are moving away from dissecting dead specimens. Instead, they are doing dissections digitally on screens or using virtual reality headsets. The new methods resolve animal-welfare concerns, cut out the ick factor and don’t force terrified kids to wield scalpels and forceps in class, they say.

Adding to the fake menagerie, there are also synthetic cats, dogs and even human cadavers on the market.

“We have students that typically would opt out of dissections, but no one did with the SynFrog,” said Jessica Schultz, principal at J.W. Mitchell High School, who has also ordered four fake felines, branded CopyCats, for science class.

The SynFrogs, which are all female and come with a reproductive system and eggs, were such a hit at Mitchell High that Ms. Schultz wants to phase out dead specimens.

“I would definitely do it again,” said Shawn Eden, a Mitchell High student who dissected a SynFrog. “It didn’t smell too bad.”

His classmate, Marissa Ellis, said she has never dissected a real frog, but the fake one seemed pretty real, with liquid flowing out of it when she cut into it. “I was pretty excited,” she said.

Synthetic Frogs Challenge Science Class Rite of Passage: ‘It Was a Lot Easier and Didn’t Smell as Bad.’

Ellis, said she has never dissected a real frog, but the fake one seemed pretty real, with liquid flowing out of it when she cut into it. “I was pretty excited,” she said.

A fake frog has no appeal for Colorado science teacher Tim Lundt. He uses roadkill for dissection and skeleton reconstruction in his wildlife class. His marine biology class dissects fish, which he and the class later fi llet and cook.

“Synthetics wouldn’t do me much good,” Mr. Lundt said.

Supporters say synthetic dissections could bring an end to cringeworthy videos from science classrooms. In Oklahoma, students conducted a synchronized dance with cat cadavers to the Meow Mix song. Texas students jumped rope with cat intestines to demonstrate their length and toughness as part of a lesson. A teacher in Florida juggled a trio of dead frogs in class.

Christopher Sakezles, founder and CEO of SynDaver, a Florida-based manufacturer of synthetic human and animal models, said the company’s SynFrogs won’t break down internally like preserved real ones can.

“Once it’s preserved, everything changes, turns like a grayish mush,” Mr. Sakezles said. “What we’re offering with the frogs and other animals is actually superior to real animals. There’s no carcinogens, no smell, no danger.”

The SynFrog costs $150, which includes fi ve refurbishments in which the frogs are refilled and resealed, dropping the initial cost to $25 per dissection, Mr. Sakezles said. Standard refurbishments after the fi rst five are $25, compared with around $8 to $10 for a real specimen.

Some teachers and science associations wonder about the makeup of the SynFrog. “Is it plastics? What are we contributing to in terms of waste?” said Jaclyn Reeves-Pepin, executive director of the National Association of Biology Teachers.

SynDaver won’t give the exact makeup of the frog, but says she is “made from a proprietary formula of water, salts and fi bers.”

Science teacher associations have mostly stayed out of the fray, leaving it to local educators to determine the best methods of learning, but they caution against banning dead specimens.

“A synthetic frog is a model, and all models are exactly the same,” said Elizabeth Allan, president-elect of the National Science Teaching Association. “With a model, you do not see the natural variation that occurs, or malformations.”

Ms. Reeves-Pepin said, “For some students in an urban environment, that’s the only time they’re going to see a frog.”

Mr. Sakezles said the company has received lots of inquiries about the SynFrog, which rolled out in November and is partly funded by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Advocates say using fake frogs in the classroom helps preserve real frogs in the wild, where a broad range of amphibians are disappearing, and spares lab-bred frogs from a tragic fate.

Erin Spellmeyer Jochum, a teacher at Jasper High School in Indiana, ordered 12 SynFrogs, paid for with a grant, to give it a try.

“A lot of medical schools and pre-med courses practice on fake humans,” she said. “Letting kids attempt to dissect something that isn’t real might give them a great understanding of the material without the preservation and continued cost of purchasing preserved specimens.”

Still, that isn’t the way students in Syndi Murphy’s science class in West End, N.C., saw it. The class was set to dissect owl pellets, looking for pieces of bone or other signs of what the hunter had eaten. But unbeknown to them, artificial pellets had mistakenly been delivered.

“They quickly realized that it was fake and lost some interest,” Ms. Murphy said.

interesting notions around science that were culled from essays, exams, and classroom discussions. Most came from fi fth and sixth graders.

A vibration is a motion that cannot make up its mind which way it wants to go.

Genetics explains why you look like your father and if you don’t why you should.

Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know they’re there.

Some oxygen molecules help fires burn while others help make water, so sometimes it’s brother against brother.

We say the cause of perfume disappearing is evaporation.

To most people solutions mean finding the answers. But to chemists, solutions are things that are all mixed up.

In looking at a drop of water under a microscope, we find there are twice as many H’s as O’s.

Clouds just keep circling the Earth around and around. There is not much else to do.

Water vapor gets together in a cloud. When it is big enough to be called a drop, it does.

Humidity is the experience of looking for air and fi nding water.

We keep track of the humidity in the air so we won’t drown when we breathe.

Rain is saved up in cloud banks.

One horsepower is the amount of energy it takes to drag a horse 500 feet in one second.

You can listen to thunder after lightning and tell how close you came to getting hit. If you don’t hear it, you got hit, so never mind.

Talc is found on rocks and babies.

The law of gravity says no fair jumping up without coming back down.

When they broke open molecules, they found they were only stuffed with atoms. But when they broke open atoms, they found them stuffed with explosions.

When people run around and around in circles, we say they are crazy. When planets do it, we say they are orbiting.

Rainbows are just to look at, not to really understand.

While the earth seems to be knowingly keeping its distance from the sun, it is really only centrifi cating.

Someday we may discover how to make magnets that can point in any direction.

South America has cold summers and hot winters, but somehow, they still manage.

Most books now say our sun is a star. But it knows how to change back into the sun in the daytime.

Water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212 degrees. There are 180 degrees between freezing and boiling because there are 180 degrees between north and south.

There is a tremendous weight pushing down on the center of the Earth because of so much population stomping around up in there these days.

Lime is a green-tasting rock.

Many dead animals in the past changed to fossils while others preferred to be oil.

Some people can tell what time it is by looking at the sun. But I have never been able to make out the numbers.

In some rocks, you can find fossil footprints of fi shes.

Cyanide is so poisonous that one drop of it on a dog’s tongue will kill the strongest man.

A blizzard is when it snows sideways.

A hurricane is a breeze of a big size.

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And last of all my favorite story of the week. Cheryl Peters writes...

As a tour guide at the University of Saskatchewan, I accompanied a group of first- graders to the biology museum. One young tyke was fascinated with a mammoth tusk. “The mammoth is extinct,” I said,  “which means it died many, many years ago.” He looked up at me with big eyes and asked, “Were you sad when it happened?”