I am a science educator because of people like Frances Bowman. Miss Bowman taught seventh-grade science at a junior high school outside Chattanooga, Tennessee. She was my teacher in the early 1980s. We covered a lot of ground in that class: Miss Bowman taught her students a form of shorthand so that our note taking could keep pace with her lecture speed. Once a week, the lectures took a backseat to labs. I had been raised with an appreciation of science, but one of these sessions brought biology into focus as a real career possibility. It was a classic activity: peering through a microscope at a drop of pond water. The thriving community of tiny creatures captured my imagination like nothing before.

Looking back, I believe that the taxonomy of biology was what initially attracted me to the field – as an awkward teen who felt completely out of place,...

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