Ever since acquiring a new microscope, I have been spending quite a lot of time renewing old acquaintances with some once familiar microscopic flora and fauna. Needless to say, despite my best efforts and plenty of dipping into assorted local ponds for specimens, blowing the dust off my identification skills has been progressing somewhat less quickly than I’d hoped.
As luck would have it, the grade school I attended had just that year reduced its size from a kindergarten through sixth grade school to a kindergarten through fourth grade school as the result of a then new “middle school” being opened as part of a nineteen-seventies progressive restructuring that took in the fifth and sixth grade students from our grade school as well as two other grade schools in the area. As a result of this, my school ended up with a number of no longer needed classrooms – one of which was a biology lab.