Courage

You asked me, “What is Courage?”
And I took the dictionary down and spelled it out.
For such a little boy, the heavy book was ponderous.
You twisted it about;
You said, “It’s being brave-and what is that?”
You said, “It’s not to fear-am I afraid?
Does courage arch its back up like our cat, 
     	And spit at everything it meets?” you said.

Perplexed, we closed the book and took a walk
And came where fire had worked untimely death;
The woods were gone; but on a slender stalk
A flower inched for life.  I caught my breath.
“Courage,” I said, and took you by the hand, 
 	“Is one white flower in a fire-swept land.”
					Helen Frazee-Bower

1.  What do you think courage is?

2.  What does the poet use as a metaphor for courage? 

3.  The poet says, “Courage is one white flower in a fire-swept land.”  What does she mean? 

4.  Can a person who is afraid show courage?  Explain.

5.  Is a person who shows courage a hero?

6.  Do you have to be courageous to be a hero?

Life

Life isn’t about keeping score.
It’s not about how many people call you and it’s not about who you’ve dated, are dating or haven’t dated at all.
It isn’t about who you’ve kissed, what sport you play, or which guy or girl likes you.
It’s not about your shoes or your hair or the colour of your skin or where you live or go to school.
In fact, it’s not about grades, money, clothes or colleges that accept you or not.
Life isn’t about if you have lots of friends, or if you’re alone, and it’s not
about how accepted or unaccepted you are.
Life just isn’t about that.

But life is about who you love and who you hurt.
It’s about how you feel about yourself.
It’s about trust, happiness and compassion.
It’s about sticking up for your friends and replacing inner hate with love.  
Life is about avoiding jealousy, overcoming ignorance and building confidence.  
It’s about what you say and what you mean.  
It’s about seeing people for who they are and not what they have.  
Most of all, it is about choosing to use your life to touch someone else’s in a way that could never have been achieved otherwise.  
These choices are what life’s about.

Little Beasties
By Arthur J. Snider

	The first person to see microbes- tiny creatures such as bacteria- was not a scientist.  He was the janitor of the town hall of Delft, in Holland.  His name was Anton van Leeuwenhoek.
	Leeuwenhoek left school when he was 16 and went to work in a linen shop.  He learned how to use a magnifying lens to look at threads in the cloth.  But he grew tired of that job and went to work in the town hall.  In his spare time, though, he still looked at things with his magnifying glasses.  He looked at a thread of wool, a drop of wine, the head of a fly, the sting of a bee, the scrapings from his own skin and teeth, the wood of different trees, and the seeds of plants.
His lenses showed details that were too small to be seen with his eyes alone. Leeuwenhoek grew more and more curious.  He ground and reground the lenses to make the images even bigger and sharper.  He grouped lenses together to form a simple microscope.
	One day Leeuwenhoek put a drop of rainwater in his microscope.  To his great surprise he saw “little animals” in the water.  “They swim and play around,” he shouted to his daughter, Maria.  “They are a thousand times smaller than any creatures we can see with our eyes alone.”
	Leeuwenhoek had found a fantastic, tiny world of little things that lived and died completely unseen by people.  They were the oldest living things on earth-yet no one had ever seen them. Leeuwenhoek wrote a letter to the Royal Society of London, a famous group of scholars and scientists.  He told them about his discovery. Leeuwenhoek’s discovery startled the members of the Royal Society.  They could not believe he had discovered a new world of “little beasties” (the name Leeuwenhoek gave to the “little animals” he had discovered.”  So they asked Robert Hooke, a great British scientist, to make the best microscope he knew how and try the same experiment.  Hooke reported to the Royal Society that Leeuwenhoek was right.  The science called microbiology had begun.
Now Leeuwenhoek set to work to track down the creatures everywhere.  He looked at water from the roof of his house, water from the canals of Delft, water from wells and from rain barrels.  He even grew his own “animals” on a few grains of pepper.
	Because of his careful work and study, the Royal Society made Leeuwenhoek and honorary member and sent him a diploma in a silver case marked with the coat of arms of the society.  It was the greatest day in the life of the humble janitor who had never been formally trailed in science.
	Before his death in 1723, at the age of 91, the whole of Europe had come to know of Anton van Leeuwenhoek.  Peter the Great, the czar of Russia, came to pay his respects.  The queen of England traveled to Delft to look at the wonders to be seen through the lenses of a microscope.
	Many scientists studied the little animals that Leeuwenhoek had brought to their attention.  They named them and put them into groups according to sizes and colours and other characteristics.  But 200 years passed before people learned that some bacteria produce disease in people, animals, and crops, although most of them are actually helpful.

1.  How did Leeuwenhoek’s discovery make him a ‘hero’ of modern science?

2.  Is he a typical hero, or an accidental hero?  Explain.

Research assignment:   Choose someone who has made a major contribution to medical science….