What a lovely article: jsomers.net/i-should-have-. My school experiences with bio were similar: "astonishing facts were presented without astonishment.” A great tour through more stirring approaches to the subject, centered on great questions, like “What is the bandwidth of a cell?"
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Also enjoyed the comments on learning: “…textbooks never worked; it all only started to click when I started to do little projects for myself. The project wasn’t just motivation but an organizing principle, a magnet to arrange the random iron filings I picked up along the way."
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There's always a little bit (or a lot, sometimes) of historial revisionism in things like this. I'm old enough that a significant amount of NOVEL info is in cell bio texts, for example, and "discovery" for a student or polymath confuses a priori with a posteriori all the time.
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I got lost at his (repeated from the beginning) critique of domain-specific vocabulary; biology is teeming with entities that have no parallel in normal language, and thus neologisms must abound.
But I'll give it another go.