I didn't think much of plant biology when I was starting out either. My work is in animal behavior and zoology related work; but recently plant biology has become very interesting. I'm of course not changing my field, but I love learning a bit about it now. Plants actually DO far more than many of us think - they just do it slower, and live longer.
If animals slowed down by factors of 10 to 100s they would look pretty boring too.
I just found this interesting site:
Plants In Motion
Check out the movies there - some are better than others I really liked the 'morning glory twining' under 'nastic movements'.
Do you they get amusement watching students learn about plant sex?
Unfortunately they don't realize that such a topic may not be interesting until you have a context to put it in and see how unique it really is. Much of the theory behind animal behavior draws on how animals reproduce - All animals have a vested interest in helping their offspring survive as their offspring are the vehicle of their genes. There are two general strategies: produce a lot of offspring and hope for the best, or produce a few and spend the extra energy taking care of them. This latter form is what we see most often when birds feed their young, or wolfs protect and teach their young to hunt, etc. But there is another aspect for sexually reproducing organisms: each offspring has only HALF of a given parents genes (in most organisms.) Siblings are also thus related by only a factor of one half; someone's cousins are 1/8 related, etc. This factor of relatedness is important for much social behavior - most animals tend to help closely related animals more.
Now why did I bring all that up? Because in animals the battle of the sexes lead to a stalemate: each offspring gets half it's genes from the mother and half from the father. One exception is Hymenoptera (Bees) where many of the offspring get all their DNA just from their mother - and this does have consequences for their behavior. There are MANY such exceptions in the plant world where the genetic compliment of the offspring is not a 50/50 split from the parents. This is why plant reproduction became interesting to me - but of course if you haven't learned about all those other things than plant reproduction is not only boring but confusing as hell. Even though I'm quite interested in it I have a hard time grasping many of the details. So personally I'd agree it is a poor choice of topic for high school biology, but I also suspect that your teacher has good reason to be excited about it.
Jez -
I had a very similar experience with english teachers, except my "good" one wasn't until I was in college. I've always known writing well was important, but I also always dreaded english classes, but this one professors english class was one of my favorite college classes. A good teacher can really make the difference. I hope our education system shapes up and we get more 'good' teachers.
Until then, however, student's need to be partially self-taught. Find some things you want to learn about, something that excites you, then tie everything else to it. It's incredible how much all different fields of study do in fact overlap. I found a passion for animal behavior, and that helped me learn history: the way people understand animal behavior has always influenced and been influenced by the politics of the day - so if I wanted to really understand the study of animal behavior I had to become familiar with history. Once I realized that I started doing really well in history related classes.
I've also given the example (though somewhat vaguely) about how plant reproduction can be tied into my subject of animal behavior.
So if you are ever bored in a class, or with a subject, then the challenge is to figure out how that subject can help you with your area of interest.
Shakespeare may be pushing it, but despite all the challenges in working through it Shakespeare was well aware of human nature. His plays and other writings capture aspects of life that happen in everyone's life, and in the lives of social animals (which is why I can appreciate his work). His work includes commentary on these common themes in human life - often pointing out how foolish our natural reactions often are.
My studies can be summed up with the question: "Why do animals do what they do?" and of course humans are just another animal, so we are included in that, and while Shakespeare does not have much to say on the WHY part of that he does accurately capture precisely what it is that animals often do.
Anyhow, animal behavior is my thing, it's what I tie everything back to to find motivation. Figure out what motivates you, and tie everything back to that and suddenly learning those things will be fun.
The only risk is that you may loose any inkling of a social life and spend all your free time and libraries and laboratories - hey I'll admit it, I'm a geek - but it's pretty cool when the whole world is my laboratory - I can go outside just about anywhere to make observations on my current subject of songbirds.
