Now how's that for a positive attitude. Would it kill you to try? Think about how excited and great you feel when you arrive at Disneyland. Now just pretend your classroom is Disneyland. Actually, being able to pretend and using your imagination will help you a lot, a whole lot, when learning human biology or any science class. So don't be afraid to slip back into thinking like a child again.

The good news about this class is that the concepts are not very difficult. The difficult part of this class, as is with most science classes, is just the amount of new material and all the new words for things. But learning new names and words is not a hard thing at all. You only make it hard by thinking you can't do it, or that you're not smart enough.

If you take your notes for any lecture and look them over, and then compare them with the chapter in the textbook, you will most likely find that there are maybe 15-20 new words or topics to learn. Now you will do everything in your power to put off learning those 20 new pieces of information. Why? Because, according to you, it's too hard. You're so wrong.

I can tell you all about 'J-Lo'. Now I don't want to really know anything about 'J-Lo', I'm just not that interested. I would rather devote what little precious brain cells I have to store some useful information, but there she is, in my memory. How did I learn all the trashy gossip about J-Lo? And without even taking 'J-Lo-101'. It's familiarity. You hear it enough, see it enough, you're bound to learn it. Remember back, how did you learn your multiplication tables? You just practiced them, over and over again.

If at the end of our first class session I offered $100.00 to anyone who could come back on the next class and recite the names of 10 of their new classmates I'd be broke. You'd all have no trouble at all learning 10 new pieces of information for the $100.00 reward. Now if I were to quiz you on the second class meeting, asking you 10 questions from 10 new pieces of information from the first class session, you'd moan and complain how hard I'm being as a teacher.

The point being, to get an "A", or let's say an "A+" in Human Biology, all it takes is becoming familiar with the new information. You know if I ruled the world, this human biology information would be on the nightly news, on the entertainment tonight shows, on KISS fm and KROQ, even on the bad talk shows and everybody would learn it all without having to study. But I'm afraid that's not how the world goes around. You know who 'the real Slim-Shady' is, so learning what your liver does should not be any harder.

Why do students typically like taking Cinema courses and typically hate taking science courses? In a cinema class, you still have to learn facts: Who is John Ford? Why was Orson Wells' career shortened? What was Alfred Hitchcock's influence on modern drama? All sorts of facts. All we ask in Human Biology is that you learn facts also. Nothing more than that. Some facts require your imagination: What's on the inside of a muscle cell? How do you send a nerve signal from your brain to your toe? What happens to my Snickers bar after I swallow it? All sorts of facts. So don't even think for a second that a science course is too hard or that you can't do it. You can, and if you trust in me for the semester, you will.