The closest to inspiration was my beloved fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Ponti, who I’m delighted lived long enough to get that book’s dedication. I exchanged Christmas cards with her for the rest of her life. She was a wonderful woman. I think the main way she inspired was by respecting students’ interests. She herself knew very little science. Science was not formally taught at all, as far as I can remember, at grade school level. She realized there were a group of us who were interested in science, so she would let us sit by ourselves in the back of the classroom once a week for a couple hours, and she got books for us and discussed science. So I suppose she was a very good model for good students.
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Stephen Jay Gould, Ph.D.
Palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist; essayist
United States · 1941–2002
Science and medicine
American palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist at Harvard, co-author of the theory of punctuated equilibrium and author of three hundred consecutive essays for Natural History.
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