Do not believe in Cuttimungus; that is what my eighth grade science teacher taught me. Walking into my science class on the first day of eighth grade was very exciting prospect given that I had the same teacher I had in seventh grade; a year filled with exciting hands on experiments and projects. My love of science, having already been sparked the year before, had led me to enter the science classroom ready to learn as much as I could. What I didn't know at that time was that this class would have such a huge impact on how I looked at the world.
As soon as I entered the room with the rest of my class my teacher told us to take out a piece a paper; we were to take notes on the animal called the Cuttimungus. He proceeded to tell us all sorts of things about this creature and I obediently took down notes. When he was done he gave us an
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I was sure I had a perfect score, but I didn't, in fact no one did. We had all scored zeroes. It turned out that the Cuttimungus was an animal my teacher had made up in order to teach us a valuable, and at least for me, lasting lesson. That lesson was that it is always important to question everything; whether that be people, teachers, adults, textbooks, Internet, or the world surrounding us. All though it may seem like a small lesson of many that a child may learn in school, this one had the greatest effect on how I viewed the world. From that day on I started to question everything. I would always ask anyone giving me any sort of information for sources. “Oh, tomatoes help burns? Well why? Where is the evidence behind that?”, those are the types of questions I would ask myself. My newfound curiosity made me appreciate science and its methods even more. This appreciation was strengthened by the projects we did in class. The experiments were anything but boring and incorporated lessons from different branches of science. They ranged from using chemical