Course companion · 2026–2027
Mr. Ryan Sajdak
City Honors School
186 E. North Street, Buffalo, NY 14204
Our Year in the Lab
Environmental Science has a garden across the street. This course has something closer than that. You walked in with it. Every unit on the syllabus is happening inside you right now, and most of it can be measured in one class period with equipment that fits in a shoebox. This is a list of things we could do, unit by unit, September to June. It is a starting point, not a schedule.
- Lab one
- You. Measured the same way, all year
- Lab two
- The medical campus, half a mile south
- How often
- Five minutes, one class a week
- Kit
- About $300 for the whole room
Two labs, not one
A garden works as a classroom because it is real, it is close, and it changes on its own whether or not anybody shows up. Three things. This course needs the same three.
The first lab is your own body. It is real, it is as close as a thing can be, and it changes on its own. Your resting pulse in September is not your resting pulse in June. Your hands are a different temperature in January than they are in May. Buffalo gets about 15 hours of daylight in June and about 9 at Christmas, and your skin, your sleep, and your hormones all know it. We do not have to invent a reason for the numbers to move. The calendar does that for us.
The second lab is the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. It starts about half a mile south of our front door. UB's medical school runs group tours for high school students. The short version is around 90 minutes in the gross anatomy lab and the Brain Museum, which holds about 40 human brains and is the only museum in the country that is only about the brain. The longer version adds the simulation center. Going twice is better than going once. Once is a field trip. Twice is a place you know.
The same six numbers, every week
Whatever unit we are on, we could start one class a week the same way. Same order, same instruments, five minutes.
- Resting pulse, at the wrist, counted for 30 seconds and doubled.
- Breaths per minute, counted by a partner who does not tell you they are counting.
- Temperature, forehead and fingertip.
- Blood pressure, sitting, left arm.
- Grip strength, dominant hand, best of two.
- Reaction time, one ruler drop.
One week of this is boring. That is fine. Do it from September to June and you end up with something almost nobody your age has: a year of real measurements of yourself, taken by you. In May we will ask questions we have not thought of yet, and you will already have what you need to answer them.
Your numbers are yours. The class record uses a code, not your name.
The aging thread
Look at the course outline and something jumps out. Twelve of our sixteen units end on the same lesson: how this system changes with age. Skin, bone, muscle, nerves, hormones, vessels, immunity, lungs, digestion, kidneys, reproduction, and then the whole body at once in the last unit of the year.
You cannot feel aging in a class period. But you can measure it across people in one afternoon. So we could build an age panel: volunteers of different ages who agree to be measured with the same six numbers, once. Students. Teachers in this building. Somebody's grandmother, if she is willing. First names or a code, never a full name, and only people who say yes in writing.
Every time the outline hits an aging lesson, we plot that system against age using our own panel instead of a textbook graph. By June you have twelve graphs of the same people. The last lesson of the year asks you to explain how the systems work together and how aging affects the body as a whole. You would answer it with numbers you took yourself.
Unit by unit
The same sixteen units as the syllabus and the weekly schedule, seen from the lab bench. Ideas, not promises.
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Introduction to Anatomy & Physiology
Chapter 1
The day the bench opens. Before we define homeostasis we could measure it: your first six numbers go in the record, and that is your baseline for the year. Feedback stops being a word on a slide the moment you hold your breath for 30 seconds and watch your own breathing rate overshoot and settle. Levels of organization gets easier when you point at the thing. Cell, tissue, organ, system, you. And from the first day, every measurement gets written down in real anatomical language. Not "the wrist," the radial pulse. Not "the front," anterior. You will use those words 200 times this year, so we start using them on day one, out loud, even mangled.
- Baseline six
- Breath-hold feedback
- Anatomical position
- Directional terms
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Tissues
Chapter 4
Four tissue types, and three of them are on your hand right now. Prepared slides do the microscope work, but the sample that makes it stick is yours: a hair, a nail clipping, and a scar. Everybody has a scar. That scar is the fibrosis lesson standing up. It is not skin that grew back, it is a patch, and it has no hair and no sweat glands, which you can check with a magnifier. Regeneration versus repair, on your own knuckle. For the muscle lesson, three dollars at the meat counter buys real tendon, real ligament, and real muscle in one piece. Pulling on all three tells you more about connective tissue than any diagram.
- Microscopy
- Hair and nail
- Scar survey
- Tendon vs. ligament
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Integumentary System
Chapter 5
This unit lands in the fall, while the daylight is dropping about two and a half minutes a day. Good timing. Thermoregulation is an infrared thermometer and a walk to the door: fingertip, forehead, back of the neck, inside, then outside. Then the same four numbers again in January, and the difference is the lesson. Pigmentation and UV get UV beads outside in October and again in March. Vitamin D is a Buffalo problem, because from November to February the sun here sits too low to make any in your skin, no matter how long you stand in it. Mark a fingernail with a pen line in week one, measure it in week five, and you have measured how fast you are growing. Nails move about a tenth of a millimeter a day.
- Infrared mapping
- Cold response
- UV beads
- Winter vitamin D
- Nail growth rate
- Skin recoil by age
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Skeletal System
Chapter 6
You can find about 40 bony landmarks on yourself through skin, and naming them by touch beats naming them on a diagram. For the inside of a bone, ask the butcher to cut a beef femur the long way. Compact bone, spongy bone, and marrow, for the price of a sandwich. A chicken bone in vinegar for a week loses its mineral and turns into something you can tie in a knot, which is the collagen half of the answer. Joints get a goniometer, the plastic protractor that clinics use. Measure how far your own elbow, knee, and shoulder move. Then measure the age panel and watch range of motion fall off a cliff somewhere north of 50. That is the aging lesson, and it is your data.
- Landmarks by touch
- Cut long bone
- Vinegar bone
- Goniometry
- Range of motion by age
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Muscular System
Chapter 7
Fatigue is the easiest curve in the course to draw. Squeeze the grip meter as hard as you can, hold it, and call out the number every five seconds until you cannot. That falling line is ATP running out, and everyone's line falls. Then squeeze once a second for a minute and watch the same thing happen faster. Rigor mortis is the strangest lesson on the outline and the meat counter explains it: this is exactly why beef is aged before it is sold, and why fresh-killed meat is tough. Sliding filament gets a model you build with your hands. And the September grip number is sitting in the record, so in June we ask what changed and whether anything you did caused it.
- Grip to failure
- Fatigue curve
- Filament model
- Why meat is aged
- September vs. June
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Nervous System
Chapter 8
The best measuring unit of the year, and the one that earns the trip. Reaction time with a dropped ruler, three ways: plain, then pick left or right, then with somebody talking to you. Three numbers, and the gap between them is your brain doing extra work. A reflex hammer at the knee beats all three, because that signal never goes to your brain at all, and the timing proves it. Two-point calipers map your own sensitivity, fingertip against forearm against back, and the ratio is enormous. Map your blind spot on paper and find the hole in your vision your brain has been hiding from you your whole life. Then we walk to UB and stand in the gross anatomy lab and the Brain Museum.
- Three reaction times
- Reflex vs. voluntary
- Two-point discrimination
- Blind spot map
- Brain Museum
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Endocrine System
Chapter 10
Hormones sound invisible until you make some. The stress lesson on the outline can be run on the class in ten minutes: pulse and blood pressure at rest, then during a timed task with a countdown on the board, then four minutes after it stops. Three sets of numbers, and the middle one is adrenaline. The recovery is the part worth talking about, because how fast you come back down is a skill and it can be trained. For the slow hormones, a week of sleep and wake times against the sunrise, in the darkest month of the year, is melatonin on a graph. Buffalo in late December is the whole argument for why a first-period class feels the way it does.
- Stress trial
- Recovery time
- Sleep log
- Daylight and melatonin
- Receptors
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Cardiovascular: Blood
Chapter 11
No student blood in this room, ever. No lancets, no fingersticks, nothing. What we can do is better anyway. Synthetic typing kits let you run ABO and Rh on made-up patients and decide who can receive what, which is the actual job. A real de-identified blood count is a page of numbers you will be able to read by the end of the unit. And the pulse oximeter on your finger is hemoglobin doing its job in real time, which is why yours reads 97 or 98 here and would read lower in Denver. This is also the unit for visitors. ConnectLife sends speakers, including people who are alive because of a transfusion, and a school blood drive is a physiology lab that comes to the building.
- Synthetic typing
- Reading a CBC
- Pulse oximetry
- Blood drive
- Donor speaker
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Cardiovascular: The Heart
Chapter 12
Dissection week, and the one most people remember. A sheep or beef heart is close enough to yours that everything on the diagram is there in your hands, including the valves, which you can work with a finger. Before that, a stethoscope each. The lub-dub is two sets of valves slamming shut, and after a flight of stairs it changes, and you can hear it change. Cardiac output stops being a formula when you put your own heart rate into it and find out you move something like five liters a minute sitting still. For the EKG lesson, a cheap single-lead recorder or a smartwatch will draw a real P wave, QRS, and T wave off a volunteer, and then the tracing on the test is not a stranger's.
- Heart dissection
- Stethoscopes
- Your cardiac output
- Live single-lead EKG
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Cardiovascular: Blood Vessels
Chapter 13
The cuff comes out for real in this unit. Blood pressure sitting, then standing up fast, and the dip you feel in your head for a second is on the gauge. Both arms, because they are not the same. Capillary refill is two seconds pressed on a fingernail, and it is the check an EMT does first. Vasoconstriction can be watched with the infrared thermometer: one hand in cool water, and the fingertip on that side drops while your core holds steady, which is your body choosing your organs over your fingers. Nobody has to do that one. And the age panel matters most here, because the clearest age signal in medicine is the top blood pressure number climbing as arteries stiffen.
- Sitting vs. standing
- Capillary refill
- Cold vasoconstriction
- Pressure by age
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Lymphoid System and Immunity
Chapter 14
This unit hits in spring, when Buffalo's pollen count climbs and a third of the class starts sneezing on schedule. That is a live experiment nobody has to set up. Log daily symptoms against the published pollen count for two weeks and you get a dose and response curve for an allergic reaction, which is the immune disorders lesson with your own class as the subjects. Barriers and nonspecific defense get the glow powder and the handwashing test, and the result is always worse than people expect. For the aging lesson, ask why people over 65 get a different flu shot than you do. The answer is the whole unit in one question.
- Pollen vs. symptoms
- Glow powder
- Barriers
- Why a stronger flu shot
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Respiratory System
Chapter 15
The outline already asks you to investigate what changes your breathing rate, so this unit is half built. Peak flow meter and a phone spirometer: at rest, after stairs, after a breath hold, and then breathing through a straw, which is roughly what an asthma attack feels like from the inside. In these zip codes a lot of people in this room already know that feeling, and the air quality index on a bad Buffalo day is a number we can pull up. Vital capacity plotted against height is a straight line you will discover instead of being told. And a lung and windpipe from the butcher, inflated with a bike pump, is the best five dollars spent all year.
- Peak flow
- Straw breathing
- Capacity vs. height
- Local air quality
- Inflating a real lung
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Digestive System
Chapter 16
Chemical digestion starts in your mouth and you can time it. Hold a plain cracker on your tongue, do not chew, and raise your hand the second it turns sweet. That is your own amylase cutting starch into sugar, and the class spread runs from about 30 seconds to over two minutes, which is a real difference between people worth explaining. Iodine on a starch solution shows the same reaction outside your body. Mechanical versus chemical is a mortar and pestle next to a beaker of acid. And surface area, the thing that makes the small intestine work, is a folded paper model against a plain tube: same length, wildly different amount of wall.
- Cracker timing
- Amylase and iodine
- Mechanical vs. chemical
- Villi surface area
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Urinary System
Chapter 18
No student samples in this unit either. Simulated urinalysis kits come with a set of patients, and reading the strips to work out which one has diabetes, which one has an infection, and which one is just dehydrated is exactly the normal versus abnormal lesson on the outline. A kidney from the butcher, cut the long way, shows the cortex, the medulla, and the pelvis in one look, and suddenly the nephron diagram has a place to live. For the hormone lesson, you already know the answer from your own life: why you run to the bathroom after a big cold drink and why you barely go at all on a hot day of practice. That is ADH, and you have been watching it work for years.
- Simulated urinalysis
- Kidney dissection
- Water balance
- ADH in daily life
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Reproductive System
Chapter 19
This is the unit where the lab bench steps back on purpose. No measurements on students, no personal questions, nothing collected. What is real here is the anatomy, the hormone graphs, and the facts, taught straight and clinically, the same way we taught the kidney. New York law gives people your age specific rights to confidential health care, and knowing what those are is part of the unit. If district policy allows it, a school nurse or a health educator is a better source than I am for the questions students actually have. Families get advance notice of the week this unit runs, and the opt-out route is spelled out before it starts, not during.
- Anatomy and gametes
- Hormone cycle graphs
- Guest health educator
- Advance notice
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Review and Synthesis
Cumulative
The year's file gets opened. Everyone gets their own numbers back, September through June, and writes what changed and what did not. The age panel gets plotted for every system at once, and the last objective on the outline, how the systems work together and what aging does to the whole body, is answered with data this class collected instead of a chart from a publisher. The virtual autopsy and the diagnosis cases land differently when you have already read a real blood count, a real urinalysis, and a real EKG. And this is the spring window for the second trip to the medical campus, the longer tour, where a fourth-year medical student answers your questions. Some of you will be applying there.
- Your year of data
- Aging, all systems
- Virtual autopsy
- Diagnosis cases
- Second campus visit
What the bench costs
The whole standing lab, bought once, runs about $300. Prices are rough and everything on this list gets used in more than one unit.
- Pulse oximeter, two. Units 8, 9, 12.
- Blood pressure cuffs, two. Units 1, 7, 10.
- Infrared thermometer. Units 1, 3, 10.
- Stethoscopes, a class set of the cheap kind. Units 9, 12.
- Peak flow meter, with one-per-person mouthpieces. Unit 12.
- Grip dynamometer. Units 1, 5.
- Goniometer. Unit 4.
- Two-point calipers and a reflex hammer. Unit 6.
- Synthetic blood typing and urinalysis kits. Units 8, 14.
- Meat counter, a few dollars at a time. Units 2, 4, 5, 9, 12, 14.
Who comes to us, and where we go
Half of this is people, and most of them are within a mile of the front steps. All of it needs asking early.
- Fall, Unit 1. The school nurse or an EMT, teaching us to take vital signs the way they do it.
- Winter, Unit 6. UB Jacobs School, gross anatomy lab and the Brain Museum. Booked well ahead.
- Winter, Unit 8. A ConnectLife speaker, and the school blood drive if the calendar lines up.
- Spring, Unit 15. A health educator, if district policy allows.
- Spring, Unit 16. The longer campus tour, with the simulation center.
Before we measure anything
- Your numbers are yours. The class record uses a code, never your name.
- We never measure or discuss weight. Not on the sheet, not out loud.
- You can opt out of any measurement, any day, without saying why. Measure your partner instead, or the manikin, and you still do the whole lab.
- No blood, no urine, no needles, no fingersticks. Simulated kits only.
- None of this is a medical test. A strange reading almost always means the cuff slipped. If a number worries you, we go see the nurse, and that is the end of it.
- Hands washed before and after. Cuffs and probes wiped down. One mouthpiece per person, and it is yours.