"In Love With Lichens" Helps Young Girls Get Over Stupid Boys

CONCORD, Mass.  Ethel Farley has been a teacher in the elementary schools here for over two decades, long enough to be able to spot a young girl with a broken heart halfway across a crowded lunch room.  "They get a valentine from a boy and they read too much into it," she says as she comforts Tracy Nubin, an 11-year-old who's just been given the cold shoulder by Kenny Reynolds, a hyperactive boy in her fifth grade class.

Fun with lichens!

In the spring, young boys' fancy turns to things other than girls, Farley has discovered, particulary once spring training begins for the Red Sox.  "Once the boys start thinking about baseball," she says, "all the 'Be Mines' and 'I Go 4 U's' are forgotten, leaving a trail of shattered dreams in their wake."

"I said I liked you?  What was I thinking?"

So Farley has devised a special spring program to help girls get over crushes gone bad--"In Love With Lichens!"--which takes their minds off boys by substituting thoughts of the fascinating hybrid organisms.

"Boys are stupid doody-heads!"

Lichens are a composite of a fungus with a photosynthetic partner, usually either a green alga or cyanobacterium.  "Boys have fungus between their toes," explains Diane Forskett, "but they don't have green alga, although their teeth look that way sometimes."

"Lichens don't need boys--and neither do we!"

Many lichens (pronounced "LI-kens") reproduce asexually, another feature that Farley says makes them an appropriate object of study for the girls, as well as a role model for them in later life.  "A lichen needs a lover," she notes, "like a fish needs a thesaurus."