We help teacher and day care providers by assembling teacher collections. We are one of the few in our area who still offer this service. A teacher collection was dropped into my lap, after it was left on the desk for hours and my co workers refused to start on it. (but that's another story)
This collection for a selection of biographies and books on different scientist. The teacher had listed some names on the back (my favorite one was "polio vaccine guy") but one named stumped me.
"Mendeloveh"
I'm sure it was a long diffcult name to spell but after Googling it, I got nothing but random twitter handles and facebook pages.
Could it be Mendelssohn (no he's a musician) some how the name Mendel was ringing at the back of my brain but I couldn't place it. Wasn't he that Nazi scientist/doctor/torturing slimeball? Well at that point it was time to close, so I left this mystery till the morning.
I quizzed my co-worker on the name the next morning. She came up with a similar answer. "There was a scientist named Mendel, but wasn't he a Nazi?" No that can't be right, so more researching.
Sorry all the useless knowledge of the order of the Wimpy Kid books, Star Wars trivia and presidential anecdotes block out the information in my brain that Gregor Mendel was indeed a scientist and considered the father of modern genetics. And we did have biographies about him on our shelve. Guess who he's shelved next to? Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi.
My co worker fretted that that might be the person she was requesting and I boldly said I would never willingly give them to a child (we are talking 3rd grade here) So Mendel it was...until we found who we were really looking for....
Dmitri Mendeleev, A Russian chemist and creator of periodic law.
Well I gave them both Mendel and Mendeleev, but not the Nazi. And I learned some more about scientists....all in a days work
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