So I took Biology twice. Once in middle school and then once again in high school. Neither time did I really enjoy it. There was a lot to memorize, there was very little math for me to excel at, and the idea of dissecting stuff really just did not appeal to me at all. No here I am ten years later kicking myself for not trying to learn biology a little bit more. As I am starting to garden and have high hopes for having a variety of animals I figure that it could be important to have at least a little more that a rudimentary understanding of how it all works together.
Thanks to the wonders of technology and libraries I checked out Biology for Dummies and a Basic Biology textbook and have started to teach myself biology again. I am finding that it is still just as hard as it was ten years ago but at least this time I am a little more motivated to learn this time around. I know that I am not retaining about three fourths of it so far but I am hoping to retain more as I go through the second book (and probably a third or fourth book after that).
I guess that this all started when I tried reading a botany textbook at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Botany but found that I could not understand every fifth word or so. I at first tried looking each one up but then I did not understand the definitions much better than the original word. So I decided that I had to back to the basics and start with Biology 100. Sometimes that is what is needed to actually understand something.
Sometimes practical experience gives the fancy words meaning. I love growing plants. (Have you tried the book Secret Life of Plants?) R loved bringing home animals. I teased him that if we opened all the cages we had a complete food chain. I discovered that my desire to learn something fueled my curiosity. My curiosity took me to all sorts of amazing places. You will get where you want to be.
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