Your post really demonstrates how different people can have very different experiences of the same field. I love biology too, yet I care very little about chemicals or chemistry, and I wish there was more of a track for studying biology while abstracting away from the biological particulars. An approach to biology focused on the large scale- ecology, biospherics, and life exists as a geophysical phenomenon, would be really nice. That's the sort of thing that I care about, and you really don't need to reference the nanoscale in detail for considering it.

I think we can all agree though that the unstructured memorization approach benefits 0 students.

> I found my high school and college biology classes to be a dry litany of jargon and diagrams, sucking the wonder out of the incredible machinery of life.

Indeed, same here. As of myself I always liked the biology but the way it was teached was always far from what could be considered as good.

For example, I remember classes about proteins. There were some mentions about protein structures, from aminoacid sequence to 3-d shape. But it was never explained what the proteins are actually doing and why they need to have different shapes. Why do we need so much of them? I remember that it was very profound experience when I discovered how complex is the molecular machinery and I started to look on the biochemistry from completely different perspective

The second half of the article is certainly preferable to the whining at the beginning.