Pig
Hearts Don’t Faze These Seventh Grade Students
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They have steady hands and strong stomachs. For Cynthia
Ouzts’ seventh grade Life Science class, dissecting
pig hearts was a cinch. The students concluded their study of the
circulatory system with the dissection, which was aided by current
parent Dr. Carson Johnson and his wife Andrea Johnson.
Dr. Johnson, a cardiac anesthesiologist, captured the students’
interest with a video of a heart ultrasound. With the heart beating
on screen behind him, he told stories from the operating room, emphasizing
the danger of not taking care of your heart. The students were fascinated
as he described a recent patient who had a blockage in the left
coronary artery, often called the “widow maker.”
After reviewing the anatomy of the heart and discussing the differences
between a human heart and a pig heart, the students were ready to
see it for themselves. During dissection, the class explored all
of the chambers of the heart; their favorite parts to examine were
the ventricles and valves, noted Ms. Ouzts.
The only part of the class that made the students a little jumpy
was when a slippery heart popped out of Dr. Johnson’s hands
and onto a table, narrowly missing student Hunter Kuykendall.
With students scrambling to avoid the unusual projectile, Hunter
noted that only the corner of his notebook was hit.
It would be no surprise to find several future heart surgeons in
this intrepid group of seventh-graders.
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