Creativity

I loved to hate high school. It was the perfect "system" to pit my teenage sense of injustice against. Common enough that everyone could understand and relate, and large enough that no one had to be specifically targeted as the source of its evil. I never had any terrible experiences there, like bullying or unfair teachers. My main complaint was that it stifled creativity by teaching students to aim only as high as the checklist guidelines to get an A. The real trick to achievement was not in doing outstanding work, but in figuring out people's expectations and meeting them. I was pretty convinced that my mind was rotting away as I sat in classes listening to useless lectures or trying to reason other students into helping with group projects as they talked about last night's tv shows.

Although I still agree that there is a lot of babysitting that goes on at high school, now looking back I'm not so sure about the stifling of creativity. The teachers only ever encouraged me when I stretched the limits of their assignments. My favorite things were the daily bellwork journals. I could be as angsty or silly as I wanted and always get perfect scores and smiley faces from the Language Arts teachers. They even put up with my microscopic writing. Dad inspired a lot of this, telling me to somehow fit flying monkeys into my math project, or use Borax the cleaning man in a World War II comic strip. 

I wasn't the only one who played with the guidelines. One day before class a friend of mine was scratching up her arms with a pen. "What are you doing?" "We have an environmental debate today. I'm against them cutting down the rainforest, so I'm pretending that I was out hugging trees this morning. They have scratchy bark, you know." I think they won the debate. 

Anyway, do you know the difference between Meiosis and Mitosis? Well, let my 9th grade self tell you!

Dissension in Cell City!!!

By Rochelle Holmes

   Cell City was a very harmonious place since the day it was made. All of the cells and processes lived happily together, helping and reproducing, healing and creating. Every week the cells would get together and have a city meeting to discuss current issues and to put in checkpoints to make sure that everything was running smoothly.

   One week at the city meeting, Me Meiosis brought up an issue that he thought needed to be addressed. "I feel that my process of cell division is superior to that of Mi Mitosis's process!" At this Mi jumped up from his seat with a look of disbelief. They had lived in harmony for years! Me went on. "Because Mi here only goes through one process and creates identical cells to itself, I don't think that he is an asset to our society. We don't need replicated new cells running around the city. I think that we should disband Mi from our city meetings and not let him go through his process anymore, but rather use my unique way of creating new cells to provide for the whole community.
   Mi was very indignant at this time and stood up to put down Me's claims. "What blasphemy is this?!?! I have always produced more satisfactory cells. Mine have 46 chromosomes in them and are diploids! They may be identical, but I am much more efficient. I only need to go through one stage of Mitosis to get the same numerical result as Meiosis does in two stages. If anything, we should ban Meiosis from its cell division processes," Mi said in a huff.

   The other members of the council were slightly confused at this outbreak, having never had to deal with personal attacks on other members. They did, however, find Mi's point that he only needed one process to go through convincing, but the argument still seemed like a waste of time. “Why is it that we can not use both of your processes as we always have in the past?” asked one of the other cells. “We need both of you! Mitosis is good at dealing with the somatic cells and Meiosis has always dealt with the sex cells. Neither one of you would want to take up the other's job, would you?”

   Both Me and Mi conceded that the cell who had just spoken was correct in that, and that they wouldn't want to have to do each other's duties. The two stared each other down for a while until Me professed that he would let the issue go for now, or at least until he could bring up more evidence against his former friend Mi Mitosis. The council was dismissed that day, but not without hostilities made.