Biotechnology and the Holocaust
It's my first week of teaching high school (hooray, I survived!), and I came in two weeks after the Winter Break so I'm rushing to get the students ready for their state performance quizzes in Unit 5 Genetics. We've been slamming through presentations and notes, and just took our last quiz (before Monday's unit exam). I wanted something easy on them for Friday, but still worth the time. The last section of Genetics is biotechnology. We talk about genetically modified agriculture, karyotyping, and the bacterial production of insulin through recombinant DNA. I decided to include part of the TED Talk "The Ethical Dilemma of Designer Babies" by Knoepfer and use the last half of class to engage the students in an ethics discussion. As a small sidebar, I like to have the National holidays on the board (National Pie Day, etc) and I'd forgotten to look them up. My co-teacher noticed and wrote "International Holocaust Remembrance Day". It was a perfec...