Truth

A drum found on the edge of the Delaware Bay.

 Grace

God, I know nothing, my sense is all nonsense,
And fear of You begins intelligence;
Does it end there? For sexual love, for food,
For books and birch trees I claim gratitude,
But when I grieve over the unripe dead
My grief festers, corrupted into dread,
And I know nothing. Give us our daily bread.

Donald Hall, Old and New Poems, used without permission

Late January, and though warm enough to get the bees about, we still need light, more light, to keep us all alive. And not all of us will get through the winter.

I stumble upon death along the bay's edge--the detritus of uncountable lives lost accented by the stray wing of a gull licked by the edge of high tide today.

Still, a honey bee found it worth her while to spend some energy sipping nectar from our rosemary bush. A blue bottle fly joined her,shoving its head into the sky blue rosemary flower, seeking what it wanted at that moment.

We're not so good at knowing what we want. How do I know this? Just look around.

***

On Thursday, my students were subjected to propaganda, their amygdalas tugged by a series of images and videos tying together Columbine, Hitler, smiling toddlers, Anne Frank, and (for the love of Zeus) Chuck Norris himself.

We all sat in an auditorium with no windows, entertained by "Colleen," a young woman with lovely teeth and healthy skin, telling stories meant to instill fear. The presentation was well choreographed, and it had its intended effects.

Create the bogey man, then tell kids that kindness will kill it.

***

I fell into Bloomfield by accident almost 30 years ago, and stayed because I love it. We're a mixed town, in mixed's myriad senses. We're scrappy. We're a bit to the left on the intellectual (but not intelligence) curve. Most important, we're kind.

That's a huge statement.

When my wife got smashed by a car, meals showed up on our stoop for weeks, meals made by friends, and meals made by friends of friends.

We used to have factories--we made flags, we made metal tubing, we made candy, we made rubber products. We had saw mills, cotton mills,copper mills, paper mills, and woolen mills. We had Schering and General Electric and Westinghouse. We still have an abandoned field where the Manhattan Project first enriched uranium, our town tainted by our patriotism.

We don't make much anymore because other towns across the oceans make it for less. We're a little bit desperate these days.

But we're still kind.

***

Walks along the edge of the bay remind me what is true, what matters. We are all mortal, every one of us, and every day I remember this, and every day it surprises me.

Walks along the bay remind me that there's a lot more going on than language and electronic images can capture.

Earlier today I saw a Canada goose at the ocean's edge, an unusual place for this bird. As we approached, it waddled into the surf, getting smacked one wave after the next.

It will not likely make it to February. No guarantees any of us will. My student's do not need to hear the multiple shots of two very troubled young men in Columbine to know this.

A walk in the beach will suffice.

***

Bread made by Jessica Pierce.

So here's my late resolution for 2012.

I will speak truthfully, always, to my students.

They know that I am happy, they know I find love using a clam rake, but find my joy, and maybe any joy, confusing. They have been trained by parents, by teachers, by culture, not to know what they want.

They seek immortal life with no idea why.
They fear death with no idea why.
They chase what others tell them they want with no idea why.

My primary task as a science teacher is to show them that the natural world dwarfs our imagination, and that the more we seek, the less we know, and that with this comes a paradoxical comfort.

Few of my students have seen the stars as their grandparents did, few of them know where food comes from as their grandparents did, few of them grasp how tenuous all this is as their grandparents did.

Death is certain, fear of death is not.

Joy is possible (even) in a classroom. I know nothing, but I know joy.
By June I pray my students know a little bit more about what is possible and about what is not.

Grace.

You are mortal. Why not act as though you believe it?

A science teacher's challenge

 "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."
Thoughts on Rachel's Challenge.

Atoms, as most adults know them, do not exist. Never have. Our models are human constructs, useful but little more than organized patterns of neurons firing away, as we try to make sense of the world around us.

Yet most reasonable adults in these parts will tell you that they know what an atom is.

Quahogs, on the other hand, are as real as these hands upon this keyboard. Beautifully curved mollusks that live with as much purpose as most of us, tucked away in mud flats just a few miles away. Good eating, too.

Yet most reasonable adults in these parts could not find one with a GPS mounted on a bull rake.


Which matters more?


The abstract matters, of course. Without it, language dissolves and bridges fall. Still, the point of language is to share our collective grasp of the world around us.

 We worship our words, our images, more than the ground we literally walk on, the dirt that keeps us fed.

***

Today our lambs got exposed to a cacophony of sound and images--Chuck Norris and bullets and Sean Hannity and smiling babies and Hitler and  white coffins and Anne Frank and moving anthems and stories of coincidences that defy logic all to send a simple message: be kind.

The show was designed to rip at the amygdala, an organ already pretty charged up in the adolescent crowd. I don't like seeing truth and children manipulated, even if (or maybe especially if) the message is kindness.

The models of science ultimately rest on our understanding of the ground beneath our feet. As abstract as science can get, it's ruled by what can perceive of the physical world. Science requires evidence, and it requires open discussion of how that evidence can be fairly interpreted.

Maybe I just don't like Chuck Norris.

I'm a science teacher. I worried a bit about my students accepting the stories told today at face value simply because their emotions were twanging like Duane Eddy's guitar.

I needn't have worried. My students have been mostly kind this year. I kept quiet as I listened to their conversations.They're adding a healthy skepticism to their kindness.

The kids are all right.

Oh, and a suggestion--if you spend an hour telling the kids how everyone matters as much as everyone else, don't end it by announcing a "select" few will get together later to start a club.

Chuck Norris photo from Amazon.

Breathing biology

We got beans growing in our classroom. Three gorgeous rattlesnake pods hanging from a vine, the soft purple puff of a flower between the second and third bean.

Most of the stuff that makes up these beans is carbon dioxide, much of it from the breath of all those who share ideas here in our room.

Carbon dioxide from yesterday's Pop Tarts,
Snapples, and bologna sandwiches.

Carbon dioxide that traveled through the hearts 

of every child in our class.

Carbon dioxide expelled as a sigh, 

broken down by a few brain cells that would

rather do anything but this school thing.

Carbon dioxide that is invisible and soft as a baby's breath

as real as the ancient massive maple tree 

just outside our classroom window.

Carbon dioxide children are taught to fear as "bad,"

the harbinger of catastrophic climate change.

We ruin it, this carbon dioxide communion, reducing it to hieroglyphics on a page, to be regurgitated by spilling bubbles on a sheet, a religiously messy communion of sorts sterilized to a formula:

C₆H₁₂O₆ +6 O₂  =>  6H₂O + 6CO₂

And yet, for a moment, the moment before eating the bean, a few students allow themselves the beauty and the power of the story to let them believe what they've always known to be true, that this whole life business, as messy and complicated and incomprehensible as it seems, gets down to this:

Each living thing, every living thing, shares an intimate bond that goes beyond the language of science, beyond the language of art, beyond human boundaries.

The universe belongs to all of us, as we belong to it.

No matter how we do in school, no matter what we know, now matter what we do.

I would trade all the biochemical pathways we "teach" for a child's grasping, for more than a moment, 

that we are indeed the stuff of the universe around us, and that this stuff cycles through us, is us.

Food is not energy

A response to a response to my last post--NASA, food is not energy.

Language matters, especially to young children trying to make sense of the world. I remember being utterly confused as a child thinking that Karl and Groucho were the same guy--how dangerous could the Russians be if they were led by a man with a fake mustache who made silly movies?

As adults, with reasonable frames of reference, we laugh at obvious holes in our schema. The best comedians make a living at pointing out the oblivious obvious.

Children, however, will try to weave the inconsistencies into their worldview that already exists. They don't get jokes because they're so busy trying to make sense out of everything.

And they do, internally if not correctly.

As we get older, we learn that people will laugh at us if we do not share a common schema, so we learn to laugh at jokes we do not get, then wrestle quietly with the punchline, stuck in our brain like a piece of corn caught between molars.

***

We live in a Newtonian universe. Einstein was a smart guy, and his work led the way to all kinds of remarkable things, but we'll not be transforming matter into energy in our classroom, nor energy into matter.

 Matter is matter, and energy is energy.

But what about food? And plants? And sunlight?
I'll get to those in a moment.

Matter
is usually defined in public schools as something that has mass and occupies space, and we toss this at kids as though they have some special understanding of mass. 

I certainly don't, so I use a different definition my students can grasp--matter is "stuff." I can tell them it has inertia, or I can tell them that if I throw it at them fast enough they will feel it. (Yes, I know, some particles fly through us since we're mostly empty space...another story for another day.)

Energy
is usually defined in public schools as the ability to do work, and we toss this at kids as though they have some special understanding of a physicist's concept of work.

I certainly don't, so I use a different definition. Energy is some quality that can cause a change in stuff. That is, of course, a lousy definition, hardly covers all its various forms. I might say that if stuff has changed, then energy was involved, also a limited definition. 


I'd rather use crippled definitions with their defects discussed than the "real" definitions in textbooks that tell us nothing new. (Starting science units with "vocabulary" just adds to the fun.)


My students are told, upfront, that I have problems grasping the concepts of matter and energy. These are hugely difficult concepts. If you truly grasp them, you own the universe, and no one owns the universe. No one.

Stuff is stuff, and energy is energy, and in Newton's world, "never the twain shall meet."

***

NASA tells teachers that "food is energy," and it's simply not so.


I put a pie in a slingshot and fire it your way, you will feel it. It's stuff. It moved, made a sound, broke into several pieces, warmed up my face, all evidence of "energy," but the stuff is still the same stuff.

If I burn propane by mixing it with oxygen, I mix the stuff around a bit, but I will end up with exactly the same amount of stuff (defined as the measurement of force exerted by that stuff on a scale placed between it and the Earth) in the form of water and carbon dioxide. Exactly the same. For all the light and heat and noise released, the amount of stuff remains exactly the same.

(You can easily demonstrate that water comes out of this reaction--grab a propane torch and flash the flame over cool metal--use a desk leg or a faucet.)


This is a big deal. 


If kids get through their first 8 years of public school knowing nothing else besides the conservation of mass and energy, we'll take it from there.

***

So where is this thing called energy? Bad question--it is no "thing."

How is energy stored in food? Better question, but still almost impossible to answer if you do not have a reasonable grasp of chemistry, so let's leave food for a minute and go to a 5 pound rock. 

If I drop a 5 pound rock on your head, how much damage does it cause? Well, that depends on how high the rock was (relative to your head) before it was dropped. The higher the drop, the more damage done, the more energy released. We call this potential energy, a deceptively difficult concept.

If I pick up a rock, it is the exact same rock it was when it as still on the floor. It is now in a less stable position by virtue of having been lifted from the floor, but it's still the exact same rock. It can make more change now when I drop it--louder sound, more damage--but it's still the same rock before and after I drop it.

The potential energy is not "in" the rock, it's in the rock's relative position to the floor. The less stable the rock's position, the more energy it "has."

The rock got less stable because I invested kinetic energy using my muscles. My kinetic energy came from, the potential energy created by the unstable complex organic molecules we call "food"--when I exercise, I convert unstable food molecules into more stable water and carbon dioxide molecules. I need oxygen to help strip the electrons off the food molecules.

The mass of a molecule of glucose and the oxygen molecules needed to break it down need to break them down is exactly the same as the mass of the carbon dioxide and water molecules left when the energy has been released..

The potential energy "in" food came from a plant's ability to combine carbon dioxide and pieces of water together into a larger, less stable compound, using the energy of sunlight.

You cannot weigh sunlight because it's not stuff, it's energy.

Plants do not "eat" sunlight. Stuff is stuff, energy is energy. Food is not energy. It is stuff.

Plants recycle the stuff, but they cannot recycle energy. Energy goes from useful to less useful to even less useful.

And where does sunlight come from? Here's where Einstein joins the party--hydrogen atoms are fused into helium, a tiny bit of mass converted to tremendous amounts of energy.

That's fascinating and deserves study but not until later, when a child knows what food is.

Newton and the Marxes lifted from PD sources.

Potential energy diagram from McGraw-Hill here.

Open letter to elementary school teachers everywhere

Dear Elementary School Teachers and Principals,

I know you have an impossible job, and I know you're getting hammered from 73 different angles, and I know the last person you need to hear from is another high school teacher sitting on his throne blaming you for every ill that ever afflicted humans.

Your students worship you. Every casual word that slips from your lips influences the variegated connection of neurons that forms a child's view of the world. A child's obvious misconceptions get corrected early and often, and that is great!

You've done a wonderful job convincing them spectacularly difficult things to accept are true. My lambs come to me believing that the Earth is round and that is spins, that we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, that humans arrived long after the dinosaurs left.

It's the subtle stuff, though, that slips by:

• Winter has nothing to do with how close the Earth is to the sun.
• Oxygen does not get converted into carbon dioxide.
• Plants do not get most of their mass from dirt.
• Food is not energy.
• Energy does not recycle.

Most of you know these things, and most of you are too busy prepping the children for their NCLB-driven tests to spend much time on science, and that's OK.

If you are going to spend time on science, though, please be wary of glib explanations that will confound a child's true understanding just a few years down the line.

Language matters far more than facile explanations of the natural world. Unless you know what energy is, and I got to tell you that I do not, do not pretend a 7 year old can master this. Unless you can explain a concept accurately without using science jargon, do not pretend your lambs will get it.

My students are amazed water comes out of flame, something easily demonstrated at any level of public education, yet accept that the Earth is round at face value, because you, the most powerful person in this child's life outside of family (and sadly occasionally including family), said so.

Your words carry the power of Cassandra, and like her words, can easily be confused, even when you speak the truth. I envy your power. Please don't abuse it.

Your Colleague,

Michael Doyle

Proust effect

 

If we could teach science by shoving a funnel up a child's nose then pour in "knowledge" as a slurry of data, vocabulary words, and equations, I've no doubt that we would--for the glory of our nation and our economy.

That we cannot does not keep Arne from trying to force us to use bigger, shinier funnels.

Arne and his crew will see progress measuring the internal diameter of the nostrils of our students, No Choana Left Behind.^* With enough time, our children will have nostrils at least as wide as the Koreans, perhaps even as large as the Finnish. Our economy will hum as every child has the opportunity to master the dismissive sniff of the 1%er.

***

The world outside the fluorescent hum of my classroom reminds me what matters, and though I have as big a collection of funnels as any teacher could want--SmartBoards, Mobis, digical cams, and 1:1 netbooks--I think a nose has a finer purpose.

I keep the skeletal remains of last summer's basil in a bag--brown sticks with rosettes of seed pods, each pod holding several tiny black specks, each a potential basil plant. I spend a little time each week picking at  the pods to collect the seeds, using my fingers, as fingers were meant to be used.

I keep a Petri dish on the teacher's desk to hold the seeds I gather.

Yesterday some students saw me take a deep whiff of the bag holding the seemingly dead plants, and they saw the pleasure that it gave me.

A few children will take a dried, broken branch of last summer, and sniff. A few children will take some seeds from the same broken branch and watch a new plant grow from a speck.

 ***

This past week, a child was upset that his carrots, grown from seed, were not doing well. He had planted several dozen seeds where one would have done. He was trying to save them all.

I suggested that he thin the plants. He plucked the first plant, and held it a moment. I could tell it bothered him.

      Crush it, then smell it.

He looked puzzled, but then did just that. His surprised smile lit up the room.

     It smells like carrots!

I'm not sure where this particular child falls along the norms of the internal diameter of choanae, and, like many children, he's a bit resistant to funnels that stretch his nostrils for no reason that makes sense to him.

The pleasure of the aroma of a freshly crushed carrot seedling in the middle of winter's dark days will not help him pass the New Jersey Biology Competency Test, and his results are not likely to bolster my career. The economy will not be helped by children who find pleasure in using their noses well.

But that's not why I teach.

*I had no idea that the word "choana" came from the Greek χοάνη ("funnel") until after I wrote this.

A scatalogical myth

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

Genesis 3:19 KJV

I teach high school biology. I happen to love teaching, and I enjoy learning how things work, but many of my lambs come to high school with some deep misconceptions that skew their world view.

It's mid-January, a busy time of year, but I need to take a few moments to talk to my colleagues at the elementary school level.

Psssst...you, yeah, you....come a little closer.....poop is not digested food.

The food that gets chopped into bits tiny enough to enter cells either ends up as part of you or exits as part of your breath (CO₂) or your water.

When you diet, most of the you you lose is lost as carbon dioxide, bits of you lost with every exhaled breath. Some is lost as water, some as urea, but most of it gets cast off with each breath. I once lost 60 pounds, breath by breath by breath.

Why does this matter?

It gets the knee-high crowd thinking of mass ("stuff") as something other than solids. It complicates the whole food to poop business.

Trees are massive hunks of stuff made mostly of carbon dioxide drawn in through tiny holes in their leaves. We're massive hunks of stuff made from the stuff we eat, stuff mostly put together by plants.

Carbon dioxide to food to carbon dioxide again.

Thou art carbon dioxide, and to carbon dioxide shalt thou return.

OK, bile comes from RBC's, which were once food--but this does little more than give poop its lovely colors.