A Hummingbirds Heart

The first page and almost the whole writing talks about how hummingbirds and other animals structures and systems work on a factual level.  There is no real deep meaning of the man who wrote this, Brian Doyle, listing off facts about the hummingbirds metabolism and mitochondria or how many chambers the whales heart has.  But then you realize as you get farther into it, he isn't talking about the structures, he is talking about the feelings and emotions of other animals that we are nowhere even close to understanding except for the fact that they are present.  The fact that we are not the only animal on earth that communicates and shows emotions towards other people.  Brian Doyle also talks about every animal has about two billion heart beats in a lifetime and how you can spend them fast like a hummingbird or slow like a tortoise.  What I really think he meant about this part was it is not how long you have to live, but how you spend your life. Even if you only have two years to live you can spend them just as good as if you had 50 years.  I think that this writing is meant to be discouraging, but it gives me a new view on life and others hearts.  

Whats Worth Knowing

Nothing they teach you in school is worth konowing. I sit in various class rooms six hours a day, five days a week learning complex equations or how to conduct scientific experiments.  I learn everything, but what I will need for life after college.  Schools should teach kids how to interact with others and how to solve group problems.  They should teach us how to work together to get things done and how to find and use our inner creativity.  With these skills all of those useless facts are unnecessary.  I think that in school up until college we should learn basic skills like how to read and write and add.  In elementary and middle school they should also teach us how to express ourselves, talk to others about our feelings, and everything else I just listed above.  Then when we get to college and know what we want to major in we can get more advanced in math or science or writing.  Not everyone is going to want to be a mathematician when there older, so they don't need to learn distance formulas or how to find the perimeter of a octagon now.  There is time for that in college.  Anyway this is all getting back to my point that teachers aren't preparing kids with the right skills for there lives.  What we should learn should not be able to be Googled at the touch of a button and the typing of a few words.