May light, May death

Some years I fish, with joy and exuberance, ecstatic at the pull of an animal on the end of the line.
Other years, I avoid it, acknowledging the pain and cost of life to the fish. It's not something I'm ever going to resolve....
This was written two Mays ago. I may go fishing today.

I tossed some plastic out at the setting sun on the Delaware. Striped bass are around, and as much fun as they are to catch, they are even more fun to eat.

    Flapflapflapflap...

A large bunker had hurled itself out of the sea, away from the jaws of a striper, onto a slightly less inviting scenario, the edge of the surf. Were I a true striper angler, I'd have stuck a hook through it and tossed it back at the striper that precipitated its predicament.

I didn't. I tossed it back. It may well be striper shit now.

We had pesto for dinner.

***

I do not like to kill, but I'm pretty good at it. We all are. Every step we take, every spadeful of dirt, every short jaunt in our car, no matter how "green," results in destruction.

We mostly ignore this. This has not always been so.

People used to die at home. People used to get buried without embalming fluids contaminating the earth. People used to wake kin under a shared roof.

I know a lot of people who never witnessed death, except on a screen. Most of us have witnessed a lot of deaths on screens.

Witnessing the last hours of agonal breathing will change you. If nothing else, it puts things in perspective. Exxon and Pearson and Microsoft will be here long after I'm gone. My priorities should not be their priorities. If more of us realized we're mortal, we'd be a kinder culture.

There's a cemetery in Cape May county that still buries folks the old-fashioned way: no diesel backhoe, no embalming, and the casket is optional. The Steelmantown Cemetery has been this way for over three hundred years.

 

Steelmantown Cemetery--where the dead are treated as the dead

***

I find it ironic that my children must limit their intake of certain fish because of the chemicals they contain:

In coordination with the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services and agencies in six other states, the DEP updated its fish consumption advisories and is recommending that the public consume no more than one meal every other month (six meals per year) of bluefish larger than 24 inches.

DEP, June 3, 2009 (Source: StripersOnline)

For women of childbearing age, the recommendation is none. None.

The less we know of death, the more ill we've become.

***

This morning I wandered out to the bay again, this time to the ferry jetty, as steel gray fog rolled in ahead of a thunderstorm. I got to the party a bit late.

Several old men dragged the limp bass carcasses like sacks of manure, leaving abraded scales on a jetty  that was not here 100 years ago, and will likely be gone before the hundred years pass.

The bellies of the bass are full of bunker, and one may have held the partially digested corpse of the bunker I heard slap against the sand last night.

Tomorrow an old man will excrete the undigested remains of a magnificent creature into a bowl, and the water will wash it away into the sewage below our streets, our River Styx now laden with the poisoned remains of animals we no longer dare to feed to our children.

The world is a wonderful and terrible place for all living creatures, incomprehensible in both its beauty and its entropy.

If we cannot teach this, we cannot truly teach biology, or really anything that matters.

The Steelmantown Cemetery picture from an article here. And yes, it is a green cemetery.
The woodcut by Gustave Dore, 1861, via Wikipedia

On reading Galway Kinnell again

Almost a quarter century ago, my eldest, all of 7 years old, and I wandered around Liberty State Park in the shadow of the Lady herself, trying out various foods at an international festival. Folks were amused at her voracious boldness, I was amused at their amusement. I had known her her whole life.

The day was glorious, the sky as stunningly clear as the day the Towers just across the water fell a dozen years later. There are a lot of reasons to fear north Jersey, and our myriad foods may be near the top of the list. Foreign. Exotic. And delicious enough to challenge anyone who fears crossing the line from sensuous to sensual, John Milton be damned.

A bluefish she caught, and we ate.

We ambled by a kid goat roasting over coals. As we stood there feeling the heat from coals, the kid's head broke off the body, and tumbled onto the grass by our feet.

I looked at Kerry, she looked at me. I doubt she remembers, but I do, my seven year old wunderkind looking as puzzled as the goat's eyes looking back at us. This was not supposed to happen. But it did.

A few years later I watched the Towers burn as I waited on the same island for the injured who never came, on a day as lovely as the one with the rolling goat head.

Both memories remain mostly tucked in my skull, then Galway Kinnell comes by and rumbles through my soul, again.

Here is the moment. Here is the world. Here is the choice.

Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Galway Kinnell, from "Wait"

From our hands, to our mouths

Maybe the point of teaching is to remind my lambs that there is a choice.

Sometime I forget this.
David Wallace Foster reminds us, too: "The real value of a real education … has almost nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with simple awareness.

In the light, again

This was written a 2 years ago, and it works again today. We only get so many Msys in a lifetime.

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

Theodosius Dobzhansky

I should be crafting a descent with modification (misnamed "evolution") exam.

Descent with modification is the heart of biology. Without it, a world with red-lipped batfish, roly-polies, and humans makes no sense, no matter how clever God pretends to be.

Without it, nothing in biology makes sense. Nothing.

Seems sacrilegious to test it using vocabulary and a few standard examples any student paying attention can just fly through half aware of our universe.

 ***

 
I walked tonight, crushing thousands of insects and worms, breathing in microbes, watching squirrels and starlings and dogs and robins and humans go about their business.

A cherry tree late for the party dropped a few last petals on my head.

Mosquitoes paraded around my tiny pond, blissfully unaware that soon it will be filled with young fish born in a tank in Room B362, trapped by glass they learned to avoid, soon to be munching on the young wrigglers laid today.

Sunlight bathes us now, and everything that buzzes or tweeps or flaps or gurgles has forgotten that darkness was ever possible. At least I have.

And if I can forget, despite centuries of words telling me of death and of destruction and of entropy, well, what hope does the fledgling robin I saw bouncing around the Green yesterday have of grasping how serious this all must be.

Seriousness is a human conceit.

It's May. I going to listen to the fledglings for now, as long as now lasts, as long as the sun continues to bathe us with grace.

Red-lipped batfish--really, how serious can we be if red-lipped batfish exist?

The red-lipped batfish photo from PBS here.

My problem(s) with Kiera

The whole Kiera Wilmot kerfuffle made no sense at all until I saw her photo.

Trying to blow things up falls under white male privilege. Kiera has too much melanin and chromosomal material to qualify for that club. See what kind of nonsense happens when we elect a black President?

If I were the prosecutor, I'd have only one question for Ms. Wilmot:

Were you wearing safety goggles?

If not, well, sorry kid, 3 days detention for you.

For the record, I did something even dumber in school when I was 17, but used "Get Out of Jail Free" card.

In a state with giant reptiles fond of eating family dogs, don't they have bigger things to worry about?

Kierra photo from Miami New Times blog 
President Obama photo from America.gov Blogs

Build, harvest, brew, be human

When I clam, I put a couple back. I know there will always be more when I do this. I am also keeping a promise to my niece, who has a habit of returning more quahogs than she actually rakes, though she eats them readily enough. (Hi, Claire!)

When I build something permanent, I try to get it right. Wood is forgiving, to a point, and it will last past a lifetime if cared for properly. The tree has already given up the ghost, and I will soon enough.

I obviously need sunscreen on my head now, photo credit Leslie

Every piece of wood I ever worked with had its own personality. Cedars tend to act like cedars, oak like oak, but even within a species is just enough variation to keep things interesting. 

I stacked together hundreds, maybe thousands, of rocks back in my early twenties, to build a wall that would outlast my life. I built it carefully, and I hope someone acknowledges as much a hundred years from now. No way to know, of course, and in the end, the admiration of someone who has yet to breathe is besides the point.

That's me, being human....photo by Leslie again

What matters is caring every moment we have.

Not sure my students grasp why I do half the things that I do, but by this time of year, they trust why I do them. It's a good time of year to be a teacher, if you've been doing this right.

And for all the errors I make every day, I mostly do this right. 

And all we have is moments.

   

I have a chance to write for a national organization, and I may yet, but I need to do it for the right reasons.

In the end, why we do things matters almost as much as what we actually do.

My children still live in our village

If you want to be universal,
sing your village.

-Leo Tolstoy

Arne Duncan wants your children prepared "to participate in the global economy."
I want our kids to learn a little bit about the natural world.

I took the AP Biology students out to the Bloomfield Green today, ostensibly to study ecological relationships. They're only here for a few more weeks before they're off to save the global economy, and I thought poking around a few dandelions might serve them better than anything else I might offer under fluorescent lights.

A honey bee doing her part in our local economy.

 
At least one of my lambs had never seen a honey bee before, and while I have no doubt she has the tools to become one of the finest international trade lawyers ever to grace our land, I still have her here in Bloomfield for a few weeks, and I want her to remember what home feels like.

If you've never seen a honey bee up close, you're a long way from home.

It's not the homeless in Bloomfield who are wrecking my town, though--it's the homeless in D.C., sitting under fluorescent lights, scouring abstract charts, manipulating statistics, and dictating policy that only alienates our children more from the one world they can ever truly know--the ground beneath their feet.

I suspect the power folks are not happy people, but I have no way to tell, and I am not interested in Arne's happiness quotient anyway. I do care, however, about the happiness of our children here in Bloomfield, and Arne's ill-thought journeys into education policy have affected my ability to teach children about things that matter, about lives worth living.

Not saying we need to make honey bees part of any national curriculum.
Just saying if a honey bee is part of the local fauna, and you want to know anything about the world, you should see a honey bee.

The Tolstoy quote was lifted from Bill McKibben's Hope, Human and Wild.

Teaching a skink Latin

This week in my classroom, really my home...

• My lambs groaned as I ate a carrot a child grew from seed under the light of the weak winter sun--and a few wondered, out loud, if it tasted like a carrot.
• We fetched our salamander guy from our terrarium to let him loose in the suburban wilds again because a student wanted to bring him a mate, then thought maybe the little guy would be happier out looking for his own when we couldn't decide how to sex a salamander.
• Our eggplant and basil seedlings grew their first set of true leaves, which we hope to transplant into our new school garden in May (itself an interesting lesson in politics and territoriality).
• A student brought her two foot long pet blue-tongued skink to class and shared it with everyone.
• Some of us held earthworms, millipedes, snails, slugs, and mealworms--the hissing cockroaches had a quiet week (despite a suggestion that we offer one up to the skink).
• "We" (mostly me) droned on about restriction enzymes to several dozen mid-adolescents who have yet to be exposed to chemistry.

Last year's carrot--I forgot to take a photo of this year's "crop."

Guess which one will be forgotten by Monday, never mind May when our kids face the state biology end of course exam?

To attempt to teach biochemistry to children with little connection to the natural world they can directly observe is like trying to teach a skink Latin. Even if it could be done, it makes little sense for the skink to waste energy mastering a skill that does nothing to improve its chances of living and loving.

Maybe that's the real lesson here--laziness is a valuable evolutionary trait. No sense wasting ATP on an activity that doesn't make lives worth living. Even skinks know that.

Question from Biology (Campbell, Pearson)

Really, what are we doing when a child is too scared to eat a carrot she grew from seed, and then wonders what that orange carrot-shaped thing tastes like?

What are we doing?
Why are we doing it?

Content is dead.

Long live content.