From 1982 until 1985, Mr. Lapp was my science teacher.

Mr. Lapp was an aging hipster with gold chains and a shirt unbuttoned a button or two more than most would in a teaching environment. He had cut his hair and behaved pretty professionally, but he would slip now and again and you could see he spent the 70s inviting women back to his hottub.

Mr. Lapp taught us sex ed without a hint of uncomfortableness. He’d break the air of tension now and again with a joke.

A man and a woman go to visit a fertility doctor. Because both of them have very long hair, the doctor could not tell which was the man and which was the woman. He tentatively asks, “Which one of you has the menstrual cycle?”, to which the man replies, “Not me, man, I got a Harley.”

After Mr. Lapp would deliver a joke or a one-liner, he would strut in front of the blackboard with a half-grin, snapping his fingers and hitting the palm of one hand against his cupped other hand, making a *snap* *pop*, *snap* *pop* sound. It was our cue to laugh, like when George Burns would take a puff of his cigar.

The point is that Mr. Lapp was cool, as in calm and collected (though he considered himself the other type of cool as well). Very little phased him. When Kurt Loy was mixing a batch of gunpowder during Independant Project Fridays¹ and it exploded accidentally, burning off one and a half of his eyebrows, Mr. Lapp just said “far out.”

When we got to the chapter on evolution, Mr. Lapp’s hands shook. He stammered and explained in a faltering voice full of hedges that we wouldn’t be covering it, though he couldn’t explain why, and he hoped no one got offended at the chapter’s presence in the book.

This made no sense to me at the time. And now it just seems outrageous and sad that 57 years after the Scopes trial, a hipster science teacher was still afraid to even discuss the fact that he wasn’t going to teach evolution.

Just a little depressing memory for a cold Monday.

¹Every Friday we got to do anything we wanted, as long as it was a project, and as long as it could be loosely tied to science. Developing pictures, for instance, counted because there were chemical reactions involved. I mostly wrote computer programs out by hand on graph paper, later getting in line to type them into the class Apple II+.