Frog dissection

Wow! Your school was hardcore! The only thing I dissected in 7th grade was a tropical flower (we were studying flower anatomy at the time). However, my teacher wasn't above showing us gross stuff either, like his "dead zoo." One wall of our classroom had a bunch of shelves with jars full of preserved animals and animal parts. My teacher showed us things like a lamprey, a pocket gopher, a deer's heart, and a rattlesnake's head. We did not dissect a worm, but the teacher did show us a living one when we were studying annelids. He used an overhead projector to show us housefly larvae, since he felt it was way less gross than having us look at them in person, though they moved pretty fast for the projector, hehe.

He also told us an incredible story about carpenter ants turning his family's front door of their house into a colony and it took them years to figure it out, and when they did, they carefully took the door off, left it at the local garbage dump, and put a new door on there. As you can guess, he was one of my fave teachers in 7th grade.

There was one interesting thing that happened with my biology teacher, when we were dissecting rats. She actually got a rat that was further along in her pregnancy than the ones the rest of us were working on. The rat fetuses from her rat were the size of small beans (or peas), and she showed us some of them under a dissection microscope, and it was interesting seeing how far along they were in their development. You could actually see their tiny faces in the process forming out of the little pink blob.

I'm afraid the only human "cadavers" I've seen worked on were on forensics cop shows, so you know they're fake. But mom did tell me once that students studying to become surgeons at college practiced on cadavers for safety reasons, so I can get why a college would have them. Usually the donors put in their wills to have their bodies "donated to science."