Anthropologists Beware

Turns out that future anthropologist might look askance at a certain segment of the Backroads population.

An article in our science magazine reported on the Chinchorro mummies. How they are different from Egyptian mummies like King Tut, and modern-day mummies like Kim Il-Sung. A student new to our school this year raised her hand. "At my old school? We made our own mummies out of chickens. We wrapped them and buried them in the yard. I don't know why they were teaching us how to make mummies."

"Chicken parts? Or a whole chicken?" I was curious. Because at my old school, I taught the kids how to dissect a chicken wing. It's just like the human arm, you know. They're homologous structures. The part of the chicken wing that most people avoid has two bones like the radius and ulna in your forearm. The icky part you throw away is like your hand and fingers. The meaty part we like to eat is like your bicep muscle. You can put a dull probe under a tendon in that upper chicken wing, and make the bottom part move, like your bicep moves your forearm when you flex it. Coincidentally, my students declared that they would never eat chicken wings again.

"We mummified the whole chicken."

"Are there plans to dig them up?"

"I don't know."

"Because, I wonder what the point would be, just to bury them, and never look at them again."

"I know. If somebody finds all those mummified chickens, they're going to think something weird was going on."

Maybe a Missouri teacher of the lower grades can fill me in. Is this come kind of GLE objective? I remember The Pony learning an awful lot about mummies in one of his classes. But then again, The Pony loves all things Egyptian. So he might have picked up some knowledge elsewhere, and elaborated when discussing what he was doing at school that week.

I'm all for hands-on learning. But I draw the line at having my students make mummies. Besides, it's not part of my CLEs that will be tested on the EOC next spring. I certainly don't have time to kill and mummify.