Coding, NGSS, and cultural madness

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.” 

Aside from coding (and more on that in a minute), pretty much everything about computers and their use impedes the spirit of the Next Generation Science Standards.

If the goal of the NGSS standards is to create scientific thinking in a child, then the child must be immersed in the natural world, swimming in the sea of sensations outside of our artificial universe of screens.

Everything on a screen is reduced to pixels and sampling, following algorithms--the foundation of reality in a machine is defined by humans.

The natural world cannot be captured intact by the models we create.

An impossible being that visited me one evening.

Coding for schoolchildren matters. It helps develop a working sense of logic and presents interesting challenges for young brains. I could say the same for solving Sudoku problems or learning to use a slide rule. All of these have value for similar reasons.

What separates coding from other exercises is the potential for a child to see the machine for what it is; to develop a feel the algorithms beneath the life we now impose on humans, to expose its artificiality.

If a child gets that, she just might see the cultural delusions that limit her ability to see the universe around her.

Still, in a world where we have become the gods, where artifice becomes reality, a child may never know what she's missing when she no longer notices the earth around her. And maybe that's the point--a child less distracted by reality will be that much more compliant when she's sitting in her corporate cubicle.

Science starts with the mud between a child's toes.

Thomas Hardy vs. the NGSS

This is a year old, but I like it, and it' my party....

Basil seeds taken from a seed pod.

"I rather like this . . . outside all laws except gravitation and germination."

Sue Bridehead, Jude the Obscure

All of us are bound by the laws of physics, entropy, and mortality.

All of us are open systems consuming organic materials, stripping off the energy and stuff we need to live, then tossing off the useless remnants to be put back together again and again and again by the sun, as close to a corporeal god as humans will witness.

This week thousands of children here in NJ took the state biology "competency" test, at significant cost in time and money. Turns out you can be competent in biology without knowing anything about life.

***

Few folks read Hardy's Jude the Obscure anymore, and aside from his rich descriptions of life before electricity and petroleum raised our culture to its current (and temporary) fantasies, I've little reason myself.

Sue and Jude had "escaped" (temporarily) from the culture that molded the roles of men and women of the time.

"You only think you like it; you don't. You are quite a product of civilization."

Jude in response to Sue

Image by Steve Paine, CC

Our children are the product of the lies we share with them. The images and the voices on the screens we give them, knowingly and willingly, help create the fantastic and false universe they live in.

Technology perpetuates fantasies; science, done right, demolishes them. They both grant humans immense power to manipulate the world.

The European Church, the center of power in the western world, supported science early on, until the truths of science shattered deep truths of the Church.

When we confound technology with science, when we insist that engineering hold the same place as science in a classroom, we are perpetuating our fantasies at our peril.

None of us live outside the laws of gravitation, or germination, of life, of entropy, and of, ultimately, death.

If a child "understands" entropy without a nightmare or two, you're teaching tech not science.

We are all Louis Slotin

 An award--and a few months later, a fatal slip.

"At 3:20 PM on Tuesday, May 21, 1946, Louis Slotin's hand slipped-- a small, practically insignificant blunder, except that Slotin was the chief -bomb builder at Los Alamos, and at that fateful moment he held in his hands a plutonium bomb core named "Rufus".  The slip caused a chain reaction that in turn released a deadly "prompt burst" of radiation.  Slotin and others saw a blue glow and felt a momentary flux of heat on their faces.  Slotin flung the shell to the floor but it was too late. The damage was done.  In the milliseconds it took for the plutonium to spit its deadly neutrons, Louis Slotin became a walking dead man."  -Paul Mullin

Slotin was 35 when he saw that blue flash, the beginning of a long few day as he burned from the inside out.

Hubris, confidence, arrogance, laziness, cleverness, humanness.

We are all Louis Slotin, pushing edges, trusting our senses, our muscles, over the power we coalesced. It is why we are the dominant species, and also why we will not be on this planet much longer than the wink of a stegosaurus's eye.

We name plutonium bomb cores.
We worship dead humans.
We forget who we are.

You are no more (or less) gifted than the earthworm a few yards away from you, churning through the soil, eating, fucking, being.

If you teach science, technology, marksmanship, political science, or anything else that entrusts humans with power, remember Louis Slotin in your prayers, if you still pray.

The earthworm will be here long after we are gone.

Lessons on soil, lessons for the NGSS

What's new is just a reminder of what was once old. The Next Generation Science Standards is two words too long--science standards is sufficient.

Each generation of westernized humans thinks its the  pinnacle of evolution, but we're no more "advanced" than the earthworm's (almost) perfect fit with the soil under our feet. We are a dependent on good dirt as the worm, though a lot less appreciative.

E.J. Russell, a soil chemist,  wrote Lessons on Soil in 1911 based on his work with school children in Wye, England, long before any of us were born.

"The book is intended to help children to study nature; there is no attempt to substitute book study for nature study."

The heart of science starts with observing the natural world; the soul of science is our imagination, putting together what we observe into a coherent framework. Without the heart, you are working with groundless souls, and we have plenty of religions to choose from if that is your aim.

"The necessity for finding local illustrations constitutes one of the most fundamental differences between Nature Study subjects and other subjects of the school curriculum. The textbook in some may be necessary and sufficient; in Nature Study it is at most only subsidiary, serving simply as a guide to the thing that is to be studied; unless the thing itself be before the class it is no better than a guide to a cathedral would be without the cathedral...."

"No description or illustration can take the place of direct observation; the simplest thing in Nature is infinitely more wonderful than our best word pictures can ever paint it." 

Dr. Russell sounds prescient, anticipating the complaints of teachers who feel time pressure. Working with nature requires knowing the local, requires hands on activities.

"Of course, this entails a a good deal of work for the teacher, but the results are worth it. Children enjoy experimental and observation lessons in which they take an active part and are not merely passive learners. The value of such lessons in developing their latent powers and in stimulating them to seek for knowledge in the great book of Nature is a sufficient recompense to the enthusiastic teacher for the extra trouble involved."

 Little of the new pedagogy is truly new, though lots of money changes hands with every announcement of the Next Big Thing©.

The book itself has many brief, easy, thoughtful experiments requiring standard school lab-ware and a patch of ground. No computers, no videos, no worksheets, no DCI arrangements.

We are of the earth and of the air, ultimately put together by light. There's a lesson worth teaching.

Beltaine, again

“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” 

Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle

The increasing light, the returning horseshoe crabs, the bay rising, falling, and rising again, remind me what I'll forget again in a moment. If I were not mortal, the forgetting would not be sin.

But I am, and it is.

Belltaine again.