As two high school girls sat down in their anatomy class last week, they could not wait to pick up a scalpel and dig into a cow's eye.

Pacheco High School, which has a junior class for the first time this year, added an anatomy class to its selection of science offerings for upperclassmen.

"We were going through the eye, looking at all the parts: the cornea, the retina and the iris," said junior Brianna Magana after the dissection.

Magana's lab partner Aleena Mathew said the idea was to compare the cow's eye to a human eye. She said the anatomy students have already sliced up a sheep's brain this year.

"That was pretty cool," Mathew said.

As a whole, American students lag in the fields of science and math. They scored 23rd in math, behind Lichtenstein and Singapore, and 31st in science, behind Estonia and Hungary, when compared with 65 other top industrial countries.

Anatomy teacher Jennifer Brock said those subjects have a stigma of being hard and are often intimidating to students. However, her class has a dozen students and most of them are headed into science or medical fields in college.

"In this school district, we push science and math as much as we can," Brock said.

Brock said the anatomy class is always popular at Los Banos High, so it was an easy decision to bring it to Los Banos Unified School District's newest high school.

Grace Taylor, an assistant principal, sees upperclassmen in science classes as a victory.

Excerpt from:
Anatomy class makes science pop at Pacheco High