Science teacher

Imbolc

2012-02-01T21:33:00.001-05:00

An Cailleach Bhearra wandered around back in the 10th century in western Ireland,
eating "seaweed, salmon, and wild garlic" (my kind of woman), looking for firewood.

If the day was bright and sunny, beware--she had gathered plenty of wood and was set for many cold days ahead.
If the day was gray, she didn't bother, and she will make the days warm up again. Sound familiar?

Imbolc again.
The daffodils have broken through the earth. My words shrink as the sunlight grows.
Groundhog Day has always been a favorite of mine.

***

We are trapped by words.

This week my lambs are being tested. They sit silently as they analyze stylized marks on paper, then fill in 90 bubbles on a piece of paper holding 500.

This is serious business, this thing we do with words. Outside a gull glided by lifted by the unusually warm mid-winter breeze. No one else in class saw it.

What's the use of knowing the word gull if you have no use for the animal?

We pretend our words make us safe. We pretend our words give us control. We pretend that words make us special, and that these words separate us from the bacteria, the fungi, the jellies, and the gull.

***

A few days ago I watched a crow at the ferry jetty caw caw caw at a gull sharing a light post. The gull did not respond. The crow then swooped down, picked up a piece of paper, then returned to its perch near the gull.

The crow carefully ripped up the paper, piece by piece, dropping each piece, one by one, watching each piece until it hit the ground, looking at the gull between pieces as if to say Hey!

When done, the crow cawed once more, and this time the gull squawked back. The crow, now seemingly satisfied, nodded, then flew to a trashcan and cawed at a few humanfolk, one (not me) who cawed back.

I have no idea what that was about, nor could I justify discussing it in my classroom. So I don't.

Curriculum stops at the point where humans are besides the point.

That makes sense if you live in a world of words. It makes less sense at the water's edge.
A child can parrot the Calvin cycle without knowing a thing about a seed, about food, about the billions, trillions of other organisms teeming around him.

If we keep ignoring things where humans are besides the point, we will become just that.

***

I teach biology, the study of life, in a culture that fails to recognize death. The children spray themselves with Axe, yet shy from the pond water and the mud brought in from outside.

I can hardly grade a child on her ability to keep a plant alive in a public building . I cannot ask a child to slaughter a calf in class. I can ask her to tell me how many NADH molecules are generated from one molecule of glucose during the Krebs cycle.

With the return of the sun comes the return of my sanity, when I feel comfortable letting go of the words again, learning (again) that what I thought was besides the point is the point.

Photos by us.

New Jersey versus General Ripper

2012-01-31T21:15:00.001-05:00

I realize that this is going to push me on wrong side of the angels, but really, folks, take a good hard look at the wheelsbefore jumping on any bandwagon.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a year.

Yep, a reprint, but New Jersey's under attack by do-gooding, mean-welling folk who need to find a new hobby,

A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.

General Jack D. Ripper
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Ah, March madness.

I recently suggested that beer in moderation may be better for my health than milk. My first responder, Mr. Anonymous, lumped me together with "the anti-vaxxers, & anti-fluorides."

OK, I confess--I oppose fluoridation of my local water supplies.

Please read that carefully. I am not opposed to the use of medical grade fluoride applied by a dentist. I am not opposed to prescribing medical grade fluoride for use by a child so long as an adult in the home can carefully follow directions.

I do, however, oppose fluoridation of the water that comes out of my tap, especially if the fluoride used comes from industrial waste.

In regard to the use of fluosilicic (fluorosilicic) acid as a source of fluoride for fluoridation, this agency regards such use as an ideal environmental solution to a long-standing problem. By recovering by-product fluosilicic acid from fertilizer manufacturing, water and air pollution are minimized, and water utilities have a low-cost source of fluoride available to them.

Rebecca Hanmer, 1983
Deputy Assistant Administrator for Water, EPA, back then

I'm sure Ms. Hanmer is a decent person. She's the former director of the Chesapeake Bay Program, she's won the President’s Distinguished Federal Executive Award, and she's a wonderful advocate for clean water.

Still, she advocated putting industrial waste into my water supply. That's the way it was done a quarter century ago. That's the way it's done today.

Florida has a few lucrative industries, and not all of them are Mickey Mouse. Florida produces tons of phosphate fertilizer. It also produces tons of hazardous waste. Fluorosilicic acid, a mixture of waste products from pollution scrubbers used during the processing of phosphate fertilizer, is shipped all over the country.*

Yes, it's diluted over 100,000 times when used for fluoridation. Yes, it helps prevent dental cavities.

No, I don't want my government deliberately dumping toxic waste into my water supply.

No, really.

And it's not just because I own a tinfoil hat.

*Yes, you can buy this stuff--Lucier Chemical Industries will sell it to your town. Yes, it's Lucier, not Lucifer.

Truth

2012-01-28T21:50:00.002-05:00

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

2012-01-26T21:56:00.000-05:00

"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

2012-01-23T20:36:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-22T09:36:00.001-05:00

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

2012-01-21T19:38:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-21T14:06:00.002-05:00

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

2012-01-18T20:11:00.000-05:00

"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.

The Bambification of Dr. King

2012-01-16T11:30:00.000-05:00

When I die, I hope nobody mistakes my kindness for niceness. I am not a nice man.
This is a repost. Dr. King was, and still is, my hero.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice....Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

Martin Luther King, Jr., from "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

***

Death's shadow stretches long on a mid-day January beach.

Energy's no longer cheap. Last year's abundance has become scarce, and the sun is too oblique to fulfill last summer's promises.

Purple sandpipers picked at the remnants of horseshoe crabs that failed to return with the last tide; several vultures hunkered down at the edge of the bay.Glistening glass orbs marked the end of comb jellies just out of reach of the receding waters.

We stumbled upon a hole dug by a gull, its presence betrayed by its footprints. Next to the whole lay a small, live clam. I tossed it back into the bay, figuring the gull had given up.

A few steps later, I found another displaced clam, again sitting next to a hole dug out by a gull, and again I tossed the critter back in the sea.

Then a third.

Winter beaches kill the ignorant. I looked around. Several similar holes, each with a clam next to it.

Gulls know how to open clams--I've watched them do it. They pick them up, hover over the jetty, then drop them, following them as they fall, ready to eat the freshly exposed flesh as the shell shatters on the rocks.

I suspect the clams had been left to die--their gaping shells would have saved a gull a few trips over the jetty.

I left the remaining clams on the beach.

One creature's death is another creature's grace. Powerful stories emerge daily from the beach--stories of grace and power and even love. None of them, however, are "nice."

Bambi never lived in the real world.

***

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was loving, and kind, and powerful. His words still resonate, should you choose to hear them.

Do not confuse non-violence with passivity.
Do not confuse kindness with niceness.

During school announcements yesterday, our students were told that Dr. King pushed "cooperation." Rania Jones, a 3rd grade winner of the Milwaukee Public Schools' "People Must Work Together" King contest wrote "That's what we must do today - demonstrate cooperation." This is the Dr. King lite version of a complex story. This is the version that gives so many of us the day off on Monday.

"Love" is a complex word, and one not easily used in public settings. "Cooperation" is much safer, more sanitary.

And it's the wrong message.

***

My Dad joined the 1963 March on Washington, dressed in full uniform, a proud US Marine officer. He flew A4 Phantom Skyhawks off carriers, in love with a country that let poor first generation children fly.

My dad was pulled to the front of the parade, or so the story goes. If you see a full-dressed USMC officer in photos from the parade, it may well be Bill Doyle. Dr. King later went on to oppose the Viet Nam War as unjust, and my father, a die-hard leatherneck, resigned his commission for the same reason.

I grew up in an Irish Catholic home, but Dr. King held as much influence as the Pope, maybe more, years before he was assassinated. My Dad loved the man, not the cartoon he has become.

Read "Letter From a Birmingham Jail."
Take a walk outside and watch the grace and agony of life around us.

Yes, it's complicated. Life is complex,

Bambi's just the celluloid illusion of a corporation that owns a good chunk of the airwaves today, including ABC. I'm betting you won't hear much about King's letter from jail Monday.

You want to learn about Dr. King? Go read his words, listen to his speeches, learn everything you can about him. But don't "cooperate" with those who would steal his image without his words, the Glenn Becks, the Arne Duncans, the innumerable talking heads that will piously bow on Monday.

Take a walk on Monday, a walk outside, away from noise. Carry a copy of King's letter and read it under the January sunlight.

Share it. Live it.
Don't let the dream die.

The photo of Dr. King (D.C., August, 1963) is from the National Archives and is the public domain.

The crab claw was taken by Leslie.

Seeing thro' the eye...

2012-01-12T22:18:00.000-05:00

We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro' the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.

William Blake

I found the light above after it passed through the multiple lenses of a horseshoe crab that no longer needed them. The light was there whether or not I saw it, but I saw it, so now I share it.

It's been an interesting year. I sat directly across the Governor Christie in my school building, and next to the NJ Acting Commissioner Cerf in his.

I listened to both of them, and they both deigned to listen to me. I heard their words, then parsed the meaning of those words. I am blessed with moderate intelligence and keen curiosity, so I have little doubt of how they expected me to interpret their words.

And, sadly, there is nothing true from either meeting worth sharing.

It's been an odd year here in New Jersey.

I'm sticking to the classroom--where I can still effect change.

National Canine Latin Barking assessments

2012-01-11T22:00:00.000-05:00

While immersed in the Krebs cycle in mid-January, pushing biochemical pathways on sophomores who have yet to learn chemistry, I marvel at their persistence, trying to grasp what I know they cannot, but I ask them to do it anyway. (There is something unethical about this....)

Should I ever train a dog to bark in Latin, I will be praised for my remarkable puppy and my methods of puppy training. I could write books about my methods, and others could train their pooches to recite Virgil as well.

I could develop a whole system of tests, the National Canine Latin Barking assessment system, and make those with less educated mutts feel shame.

I would be rich, my puppies would gain universal acclaim, but truth be told (and truth has become a rare commodity), my trained terriers would no more about Latin than I know about the mind of a frisky horseshoe crab clasped onto its partner under a June moon.

My dogs would know nothing more than they did when they only barked, no matter what the NCLB assessment measures.

***

Come May, I will take a few busloads of young humans to watch horseshoe crabs mate at the edge of the bay, to remind them (and me) that there's a whole lot more going on than we can ever grasp in a lifetime, much of it as beautiful as it is incomprehensible.

And we will return to Bloomfield, our Bloomfield, different critters than the ones we were that morning, in ways no standardized test can measure.

Mid-January is as good a time as any to be cranky.

Photo by me using Leslie's point-n-shoot.

Oh, dear, New Hampshire, too?

2012-01-09T22:32:00.001-05:00

"I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It's a worldview and it's godless....Columbine, remember that? They were believers in evolution. That's evidence right there."
Rep. Jerry Bergevin, New Hampshire

For all the excitement over whether evolution can explain H. sapiens without appealing to the dominant version of God in these parts, I'm working on the small battles.

Leaves come mostly from air, a lit propane torch emits water, a dime falls as fast as the 7th edition of Campbell's Biology, a charged glass rod can bend a stream of water, a tiny pinhole can flip an image upside down, you can light a lamp by spinning a magnet in a coil of wire, and you can balance a gyroscope on a finger.

Sunlight makes a radiometer spin, gingko fruit smells like vomit, red cabbage juice changes color when you add acid, a garbage bag with the air vacuumed out can immobilize a JV high school football player, and you can crush an empty Pepsi can instantly simply by cooling it quickly.

You can launch a rocket a couple of hundred feet up using just a little water and a lot of air, you can float a paper clip on water, you can make that floating paper clip act like a compass by magnetizing it first, you can make green chlorophyll fluoresce red.

You can catch (and listen to) a radio signal with a long wire and the right crystal, you can make a coat hanger sound like bells, you can see Jupiter with your bare eyes, and you can grow a bean in the back of a science classroom.

I got a whole lot of things every bit as interesting and seemingly miraculous as evolution, and none of it is magic.

Maybe we should just ban the teaching of science period--God only knows how much damage thinking might cause to this fine democracy.

You cannot make this stuff up....

Clamming: a 21st century skill

2012-01-08T10:57:00.000-05:00

19th century version:

Yesterday I headed for one of my favorite places with one of my favorite people to do one of my favorite things--clamming. The moon is waxing and near full, so I knew low tide would fall in the early afternoon.

COST: months of intermittent observing, which I enjoy.

21st century version:
Yesterday I checked the computer for the tides, clicked through a few buttons, and saw that low tide would fall precisely at 1:29 PM. and that the moon was 93% full.

COSTS: computer, internet connection, electricity.

Jersey fresh quahogs, a couple of hours out of the mud.

Which gives me more information?
Probably the latter. It's clearly more precise, and it's also more efficient than watching the moon and tides in a particular area for a few seasons.

Which gives me more knowledge?
Depends on what you mean by knowledge, but becoming part of the local natural rhythms requires a deeper understanding than needed to read a computerized tide chart, and maybe even something called wisdom.

Which gives me more pleasure?
Following the rhythms of the moon, of the bay. We do not talk much of pleasure in education, and I'd bet most "educators" would would put pleasure far down on the list of reasons for schools to exist.

Of all the reasons to push for high technology in the classroom, arguing that it prepares students for the 21st workplace, that students need to be trained on computers, is, well, hogwash.

Our students do not lack for information--many carry phones more powerful than the computers that got astronauts to the moon back in 1969, and can easily look up today's tide should the need arise.

We've come to see schools as little institutes for job preparation. We used to call that vocational school.

Given the economy, kids around here might be better off learning how to read the moon the 19th century way.

A wise child might wonder why it's warm enough to clam comfortably in January.

It's called biology for a reason

2012-01-05T22:08:00.000-05:00

I'm a pretty good teacher--I can train a young H. sapiens to recite the Calvin cycle in such a way that everyone, including the young H. sapiens, believes that she actually knows something.

That same young H. sapiens can graduate high school without having a clue that her food comes from the ground, that the water from her tap was once a raindrop, and that her waste flushed down the toilet goes somewhere.

I ostensibly teach biology, the study of life, but there are days when I think I am merely teaching acronymology, the study of Holy symbols--ATP, NADPH, DNA--worshiped for their ability to confer riches on the true believers.

You want biology? Hatch chickens in a classroom, raise them for a generation or two, spend a few hours each week to get to know them a bit, then slaughter their descendants as a final exam. Feed them seeds from plants grown on the windowsills. While feasting on the birds, discuss why we eat the meat but not the intestines, why chicken fat tastes so good but the feathers not so much.

If a child leaves my class knowing nothing about food, then that child has learned nothing about biology, no matter how well she does on the AP Biology exam.

I really would like to do this in class.

The picture is of Gail, my sis-in-law. She looks happier than the chickens....

Watch the wheels....

2012-01-03T21:24:00.000-05:00

I've ridden motorcycles on and off (always better on than off) for over thirty years. While a few things are annoying--bugs in the teeth, bits of rotting roadkill kicked up by a car, the unexpected downpour--the joys far outweigh the negatives.

The one thing that threatens to tilt joy to despair are the folks in the 4-wheeled cages who simply do not see bikes. Live cars sitting at intersections make me wary.

When I see one, only one thing matters--its front wheels. Are they moving?

Only that, nothing else matters, nothing. Riding gets down to the bare physics of things.

If it creeps forward, react. Do not waste time looking amazed, or yelling, or flipping the bird. All are useless
The motive of the driver does not matter. At all. It cannot be changed even if you knew it.

You'll hear a lot about how Arne cares for kids, how Gates humanitarianism saves thousands of children, how the new nationalized standards and multimillion-dollar tests are good for our children, and a few misguided souls may even believe it.

When the front wheels are moving, it doesn't matter what the driver thinks. We need to react.

The front wheels of the edu-plutocrats are spinnning so hard they're leaving patches of rubber. React

Arne photo from Colorlimes.com; motorcycle photo (no one hurt) from lowellsun.com.

Card carrying member of The Anti-Anthropomorphizing League of Rational Thinkers

2012-01-01T18:46:00.000-05:00

A repost. Hey, it's my blog...

In Galway Bay, nestled on the west coast of Ireland, lives Fungi, a lone male dolphin who seeks the company of humans, as he has for over a quarter century now. He's a tourist attraction, and an enigma. No one knows why he sticks around—perhaps he was abandoned by his pod for some nefarious dolphin behavior during his wild youth, maybe he happens to like humans and their noise.

I once watched spearing, ti ny fish with aluminum foil strips pasted on their sides, jumping over a piece of straw floating near the surf. One or two would jump over it, then circle back around, then jump over it again. The science teacher in me tries to equate this jumping over a piece of phragmites with evolutionary fitness. For all my training, though, I can't help myself—I see joy.

Our reference is human—it's all we have, really. We see trees as humans see them, smell the early morning mud flats as only humans, fear the humming of a bee as only humans can. (If you prefer a lonely nihilistic view, as only humans can, then imagine that you alone can know what you sense.)

There are certainly problems with anthropomorphizing, impugning motives on critters going about their business. I should not presume joy on the part of the silver-sided fish—no way to know—but we make a bigger mistake presuming the absence of shared motives. (Obviously the tiny fish had some motive.)

Science rests on models. A water molecule consists of 2 hydrogen atoms, 1 oxygen atom, fused together by covalent bonds, which is to say they share electrons. The electrons spend a little bit more time on the oxygen side of the molecule than the hydrogen atoms, creating a slightly more negative charge there.

If I were to draw an electron in class, it would look like this:

I might even add a charge sign to it, like this:

The children will dutifully write it down, and the symbol becomes the electron. I suspect that's the act that makes us most human, the symbol. It is also, ironically, the one that separates us from the universe.

Obviously the “dot” is not an electron—it reflects a tiny part on the board where less light reflects back to the children's eyes that the rest of the board. The “dash,” a dose of negativity (which only makes sense when contrasted with a dose of positive), reflects another slash of less reflected light.

We teach this and children memorize it, and we pretend we know what charge means, a relative term that measures, um, attractiveness, much like the confusion we have when we are attracted to others, but not in that sort of way....

We are ascribing motive or behavior to the non-sentient, or rather to models of the non-sentient, since electrons are unknowable beyond the models we create, and in my very stern voice I will chastise the children for ascribing motive to the very same things. (These are the problems with trying to keep the universe in some neat mechanistic package.)

This becomes a sticking point for a lot of us teaching science—we carefully present models using words like “attract” and “repel” and then get our knickers in a twist when a student confuses attraction with desire.

And with that, we extinguish the tiny spark.

I was once a card carrying member of the AALRT (the Anti-Anthropomorphizing League of Rational Thinkers). There are plenty of reasons to join—baby robins don't smile and crickets don't sing.

I am still a member, though I may let my dues lapse this year. If adding emotion to a cute drawing of a couple of hydrogen atoms sharing their electrons with an oxygen atom starved for electron love holds my lambs' interest long enough to get them to glance at the concept of bonding (another loaded word), maybe I'll try it.

And who knows, maybe an incomplete orbital shell is more than just a metaphor for unrequited love.

The photos are ours, which I will gratuitously place in my posts, because I like them, and because they remind me that as much as the classroom matters, a few things matter more.

A science teacher's resolutions

2012-01-01T12:09:00.002-05:00

Say a prayer every morning honoring a mystery. A prayer for light, for life, for gravity, for cosmic rays, for the source of water. I pretend I know nothing. I want to know what knowing nothing really means.

Remind myself every morning, when I wake up, should I wake up, that I am mortal. Not as in some shimmery philosophical sense, but in the full entropic mess of death that marks the end of any life. Keeps one focused on what matters.

Continue to get outside. Every day. Hubris melts under the sunlight, dissolves in the rain.

Teach children science, as science. Every day. Not technology. Not trivia. Not as a means to better the economy. Teach children to know the world more today than they knew yesterday, to understand their place in the natural world. Why else teach?

Every minute spent on this machine is a minute in Dante's Bolgia 4.

Faith based science

2011-12-30T10:36:00.000-05:00

Everywhere I look I see signs of spontaneous generation. Scum blooms in a puddle of water, flies erupt from a wintry beach, and I once found a possum carcass writhing with maggots obviously emanating from its flesh.

We see this, but we all know that spontaneous generation does not happen. We know this with a certainty, a certainty that confounds me given the evidence to the contrary all around me.

Comb jelly spontaneously generating from wet sand.

A colleague reproduced Pasteur's experiment with the gooseneck flask and chicken broth. We both watched the open flask for a full school year. We both knew in our heads that nothing would grow, yet we were surprised anyway.

I have yet to meet a child, however, who believes in spontaneous generation. We've knocked it out of our culture, more through magic than science.

We tell kids every year that every cell comes from a pre-existing cell, and every year the students write this down like ancient Irish scribes, preserving truth without question, to be recited as Gospel, never questioning where the first cell came from.

Here in urban New Jersey, evolution gets presented with hardly a murmur. Most students think it's obvious, this evolution thing, and if surveyed by Gallup would call themselves "believers."

My frustration with those who accept the theory of evolution is not that descent with modification is invalid. It's not--it's a wonderful schema that makes sense of all of biology. No, my frustration is that most adults I know do not grasp the fundamental idea behind Darwin's work, the same fundamental idea he wrestled with for decades:

While natural selection is not random, the genetic variation it acts upon is random.
Humans, it turns out, were not inevitable. Evolution has no goal.And our demise is inevitable.

I am not saying we should teach children that life springs up from spontaneous generation, and that evolution's goal is to produce the perfect human. That would be silly, and grounds for my dismissal.

If a child accepts evolution and denies that spontaneous generation occurs before dabbling in anything resembling science, then my job is paradoxically much more difficult.

Science starts with your relationship with your senses, not your culture. We're raising priests, not science literacy.

Good Lord, it's gorgeous outside--see you again when winter returns.

Pasteur's flask came from Microbiology GPC.

A late December walk

2011-12-29T19:51:00.000-05:00

'Turn away no more;
Why wilt thou turn away
The starry floor,
The watery shore,
Is given thee till the break of day.'
William Blake

Today is the last day of the darkest two weeks of the year, the shadows stretched long on the beach like languid lovers unaware of the long darkness just hours away.

Leslie and I, shadows of each other, walked along the edge of the ocean, gathering whirly whelk skeletons tossed up by the tide. They look harmless enough, and are lovely enough to be our state shell. When alive, though, they tore at the insides of clams and oysters, slicing away at living flesh, as utterly cruel as anything, and everything, carnivorous.

I wandered over to the bay side, to see what I could see, and to feel what I could feel. It's late December, and I need light.

The beach is littered with dying comb jellies glinting like diamonds in the long light of the sun. Hundreds lie like lenses, highlighting the grains of sand that mark their morgues.

Crabs stare vacantly at their scattered parts, a few limbs here, a few more there, the sand pocked by the webbed prints of their murderers. Every calorie is precious now.

I see now what I fail to notice in summer--the delicate array of white dots outlining the dead crab's carapace, the ornate ridging of its body, the shadows cast by the undulating shell.

Every crab I saw today was dead. I saw a dead gull, a dead menhaden, a few dead horseshoe crabs, and hundreds of dying comb jellies.

The gulls barely moved to get out of the way. The sun has left us, the cost of useful energy is steep. The sunlight is useful for sight, but not much more now.

The few horseshoe crab shells look like they could walk back into the bay, their compound eyes seem to watch everything happening around them, Lazareths of the Sea.

They, too, are dead, their pointed armor useless now, allowing the weak winter light to penetrate.

The sun holds still in the south now. Soon it will creep northward again, bringing with it the unimaginably alive late spring beach, where the dying are ignored.

The last few moments of my walk I saw a fly on a jetty, a spirited reminder of the springs to come.

Now, though, the beach belongs to the dead, who will own all of us eventually, and despite the ragged edges, the broken bodies, the rank smell of decomposing flesh, the beauty of the beach will not allow me to turn away.

All photos taken today, North Cape May, along my favorite bay.

A shore thing

2011-12-29T12:24:00.002-05:00

Late December, the back bay, still autumn-warm, gets blown up the beach by the stiff breeze, and washes my feet.

"I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."TSE

A shell on the beach, once alive, now falls apart in the dull sunlight, its intricate markings still telling stories.

Winter break is marked by the long shadows of mid-day, as good a time as any to wonder what matters.

The point of education, the only point, really, is to learn how to live a life that matters. Education itself matters no more than the swirls etched on a dead oyster's shell.

It's the stories we read from that shell that define who we are.

If our biggest concern is how well our children do on abstract national standards, we've lost our way.

I'm taking my kids to the edge of the sea in May to help them rediscover the stories that matter.

Doyle's School of Educharlantry

2011-12-28T18:26:00.002-05:00

Trust me, I'm an expert in this--I have multiple degrees, have traveled multiple continents, play 17 instruments, and have the pedigree that rivals an AKC champion Pekingese. I speak 3 languages, dabble in a dozen more, and I can recite the alphabet in one burp.

I am a consultant.

Follow these simple rules and you, too, can lap up the slop lying in the public trough:

•Write self-published, self-referential manuals loaded with cute acronyms. Borrow from the best, and claim it as your own. Make stuff up! Worked for Ruby Payne. She sold over a million copies of her vanity manual A Framework for Understanding Poverty. If she cleared $3 per book, she's made enough money to feed Eritrea for a year.

•Looks. The paler the better. Get yourself a pair of northern European parents. Robert Marzano's professorial coiffure, Ruby Payne's blond hair and good teeth, and Grant Wiggins' distinguished goat beard have served each well. Beauty trumps truth.

•Creative math: use the numbers available and make them dance to your premise. Worked for Marzano, might work for you.

•Rich friends: if Bill Gates or Eli Broad love you, you will be loved. Most of us lack enough pheromones to make a killing in the eduwonk field--greenbacks more than make up the difference.

•~~Cojones~~ Gonads.[Excuse my sexism.] It takes a lot of gamete production to push shite on the allegedly college-educated crowd we call teachers or educators, or whatever we're called these days..

•Testimonials and anecdotal stories--because nothing says research like cute stories. Bonus points for smiling kids of colors in the foreground.

If you want to be professional, act like one. Silence is unacceptable.

I don't need your support after the meeting.

Telling me I said what everyone else is thinking after I get my ass handed to me on a platter does no good.

Join the fray, that's how democracy works. And shame the charlatans back to the ooze they came from.

Snake oil poster from Oregon state--I need to find the website....

1st Annual Readamatic Pacer Award

2011-12-26T19:23:00.002-05:00

My board certification in pediatrics expires in a few days--I renewed it less than a year before I started my student teaching, and haven't looked back (much). Still, I spent most of my adult life assessing child development, and I know a little bit about learning.

I do not pretend to know a lot about anything, especially matters of the mind, but education glamorizes snake oil salesmen. I spent part of today looking through the research on Accelerated Reader, and hereby awards its promotion department with my 1st Annual Readamatic Pacer Award.

The "research" pushed by the company demonstrating the value of the AR program fails to tease out the effects of implementing sustained reading practice in a classroom (already known to increase reading) from the high tech monitoring that comes with the program.

It gets worse--there is no consistent evidence that the monitoring and reward part of Accelerated Reader add any benefit beyond that gained through the sustained reading.

Here's some evidence-based reasoning for you--if you spend less money on nonsense, you have more money available to buy books the kids might want to read. Here's another: the less time spent "monitoring" a child's progress (done via multiple computerized assessments), the more time a child has to get back to Charlotte's Web.

Don't even get me started on Marzano's research....

Image by via Retro Thing--well worth a visit!

Clam up, Arne

2011-12-26T13:04:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow I am going on an adventure!

Despite predictions of a 30 knot breeze with rain tossed in, I plan to grab my rake and wander out to a mudflat to grab a handful of clams for tomorrow's dinner, and when I'm done, I'll be glad I did.

I have yet to regret a single moment outdoors. I have yet to regret an adventure.

***

I won't be adding much to the nation's economy. The license only cost $10, which averages to less than a nickel a day. The money for the rake exchanged hands two generations ago, though I did spend about a buck on hardware to sturdy up the tines. My pail was headed for recycling anyway before I drilled a few holes in the bottom and called it a clam bucket.

Unless I manage to impale myself, have a heart attack, or drown, the only thing I'm contributing to the GDP tomorrow will be the 80 cents worth of gas I'll need to get there and back.

I dream of teaching my students how to clam. It's a local activity that will never be part of the national standards because it's a local activity. That may sound innocuous enough, but it gets to the heart of the sickness in education today, our love of the abstract.

We teach to what few love, the few with the money, the few with the power to dictate what matters.

***

McNuggets are abstractions, fresh-killed pheasant are not.
A dressed whole chicken falls in-between.
Our source of food has become abstract.

Electronic calculators are abstract, abacuses are not.
Slide rules fall in-between.
Our sense of quantities has become abstract.

Digital clocks are abstractions, sun dials are not.
Analog clocks fall in-between.
Our notion of time has become abstract.

There is no in-between on a late December mudflat.
There is no in-between watching a honeybee work her way among dandelions in your neighborhood.
There is no in-between when an elementary teacher takes her students to a local nursing home, to hear the particular and peculiar stories of their aged neighbors, stories that may have a universal theme, true, but stories that matter because of the particulars.

I want my children to grow up in a world they believe matters to them, the one in their neighborhood.I want my students to know the world, the one outside the door. I want my students to be happy, and to contribute to the American experiment, an experiment that starts at Town Hall.

***

Arne Duncan wants to use my children to better the economy, to improve our international economic competitiveness--he says so over and over again. He awards hundreds of millions of dollars to states who share his views.

Arne and I have a fundamental difference of opinion in what matters, why children matter, and what it means to live a good life.

Mr. Duncan's vision of the world is fundamentally flawed, as are his attempts to manipulate education away from serving the public good. I suppose he'd think the same about me if he had any idea I exist. Individual lives are an inconvenience to abstract views, and Arne Duncan does not tolerate inconveniences.

Still, if Arne happens to be in North Cape May tomorrow, he's welcome to stop by for the freshest batch of clams he'll ever taste, local ones scratched up and eaten before the next high tide rises. Nothing abstract, just good food and decent home brew.

I promise I won't talk shop, Arne--I'll let the clams do all the talking. Then you can go back to your more important business telling children what matters more than the grace of God right here under our noses. And I'll go back to teaching children about quahogs, democracy, and yes, the real American way.

Yep, I played the America and the God card--the America of local neighborhoods and the God of grace.

Last photo is of Dave Keeney's boots, a slide guitarist extraordinaire--but I have no idea who took the photo.

Dagnabit! Looking like an inch of rain in the newest forecast--which means runoff, which means closed beds. I use 1/2" as my guideline. *sigh*

A Christmas Tale

2011-12-25T09:53:00.001-05:00

I love the Christmas Story, the lights, the glitter, the love. I love that the day coincides with the first glimmer of the rising sun. I love the madness that reminds us how tenuous our grip is.

Here's a photo from the latest Vatican nativity scene. It's a lovely crèche, just unveiled on Christmas Eve, and as tradition mandates, the Magi are there, bearing their gifts.

Only problem, the wise men didn't show up until a year or two after the birth, at least according to the Holy Bible.

I'm not looking for a fight on Christmas Day. I was raised Irish Catholic, grew up with various crèches as much a part of today as our tree and our Santa, and put faith in The Gospels (while recognizing humans told these stories long after the Crucifixion).

But here's the rub--just asking a practicing Christian when the Wise Men finally got to Bethlehem often brings an incredulous stare with a hint of hostility.

If the Vatican sanctions the bastardized story that the Magi were present the night of Jesus' birth, a story the Holy See must know to be corrupt, what hope does a science teacher have of sharing stories that do not fit a child's preconceptions of the universe?

None, actually, but my goals are far less grandiose. I just want a child to learn to see, and to question inconsistencies in our stories based on the natural world.

If a child happens to question the inconsistencies in other parts of her life--sustainable economic "growth," Peacekeeper missiles, and a nuclear submarine named the USS Corpus Christi ("the body of Christ")--she has a chance to change a human world that needs a bit of changing, a world that is worth saving.

The Corpus Christi insignia is from Bluejacket.com.

Yes, I know the official name is USS City of Corpus Christi--heck, I even lived there when I was still a Marine brat--but it's original name was Corpus Christi, changed under pressure by the Church, despite objections by the Navy Secretary John Lehman.

The nativity scene by Max Rossi (Reuters) via Indonesia Katakami.

Are you Sirious?

2011-12-24T17:38:00.000-05:00

Tuesday I'll grab the clam rake for the last time this year. Late Tuesday afternoon I'll wander over to an exposed tidal flat, and pull food out of the muck.

I do not know who crafted the tines of my rake, but I know how it was done.
I do not know where the tree grew that gave me the handle, but I know how it was done.
I do know how the mead I'll drink was brewed--I watched it ferment for months.

***

Tomorrow a lot of people will get an iPhone 4S, and adopt Siri as their personal assistant. We have taken false idols to a higher level.

Our sophistication now dwarfs our humanity.

Talk to Siri as you would to a person. Say something like “Tell my wife I’m running late.”

The machine says she's not capable of love, but we are not capable of discernment. We create our own Sirens, who call us away from the world.

The world either matters, or it does not. We say that it does, but act as though it does not.

Owners of the iPhone 4S talk of how well it snuggles in the hand--perhaps it does, but I doubt it nestles quite as well as a quahog. Probably doesn't taste as good either.

Tell my wife I'm running late.

If I'm running late Tuesday, my wife will hear it directly from me. I may have to wander into the Firehouse Tavern to find a phone, but chances are pretty good she knows exactly where I am anyway. No need to wander too far on a clam bed, they don't move much.

The woman's voice I hear on the other side will be a voice I've known for 35 years. And unlike Siri, she is capable of love. We all are.

Merry Christmas!

If you're talking to a phone, you're using it wrong.

Cerf the oceanographer

2011-12-23T06:43:00.001-05:00

New Jersey got a piece of the Race to the Top action yesterday. Given Arne's track record in reform, this may not bode well, but there's a glimmer of hope:

“This award today will help us to accelerate the tide of reform across New Jersey.”
Chris Cerf, NJ Acting Commissioner of Ed, another portentous sound bite

I'm a clammer, and know a little bit about tides. They go up, they go down, about twice a day, every day. And every clammer knows, a receding tide can bring joy.

So here's hoping he meant a new moon ebb tide with a stiff northwest breeze, a blowout tide, the kind that blows away the muddy water, exposing the detritus on the tidal flats.

Mr. Cerf introduced me to a former state ed commish as an "ankle biter."
I'm hoping to advance to a shin-kicker.

One more thing--Cerf is the Ed Commish because the prior one made the mistake of pointing out
Christie's gaff wth the last application for these funds.

Pigeons, primates, and privilege

2011-12-22T21:30:00.002-05:00

Science and that old time religion do share a common link--the tendency to put H. sapiens on a pedestal with "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth."

We may have to scratch pigeons off the list.

19th century biology made a case for a mechanistic universe. The case is unraveling.

Given their aim, I suspect they may have a handle on rudimentary calculus.

Pigeon pic from Neon Lite.

12:30 A.M

2011-12-21T20:17:00.004-05:00

Yep, the annual winter solstice news--the tinge of sadness I felt late June now reflects back as a tige of joy.
The sun is dead. Long live the sun.

12:30 A.M. tonight the sun will stand still for an instant, ~~shift its mass~~^*, and head back north.

6 months ago, when we sat on the opposite side of the sun, I celebrated the summer solstice, a joy tinged with the weight of knowing the sun would start its slow, long course southward.

Winter is just beginning, and winters can be brutal here. The light, however is returning.

When I was a child, winter meant cold, summer heat. I did not, could not, grasp why the elders got so excited late December, at the cusp of winter, when we faced long wintry days.

I get it now.

***

I stood outside last night in the chill with my youngest, now a quarter century old, watching our shadow drift across the moon, a wavering copper-gold washing in from the moon's left.

My mom used to tell me she could see me as an infant even as I stood before her as a man. I laughed, of course. I am big--over 200# big.

I get it now.

***

I still give tests, more out of habit than sense now. Performance on science tests a few days before the Christmas break follow a predictable pattern, and my students did not fail to fail.

We do a lot of things because we do them. If mastery's the goal, then a class average of low 70's with a bell-shaped curve, a science teacher's dream a generation ago, marks my failure.

On my board today two-foot numbers announced the time of the solstice--12:30 A.M. Solstice literally means the sun stands still.

Very few students notice how far the sun has shifted since class started just 3 1/2 months ago. There's no need. Food comes in boxes, heat in radiators. The whole world of technique is magic to them.

In Ireland this morning, the sun rose, as it has, as it will. A shaft of sunlight flashed through a chamber in Newgrange built thousands of years ago, before the Great Pyramids, before the Celts arrived, before Stone Henge.

We will not study this in science, nor will our students study this in history class. We will create a class ready for the 21st century, for the abstract, for a culture that confuses bank profits with economy.

***

If children owned the winter solstice, the dying light, knowing what waits for each of us before a 100 winter solstices pass, would they come to school?

Would you?

I believe schools can be worth the time children invest in them. I am not convinced we're there yet.

At least not as long as I keep practicing education as religion, using a script written generations before me.

*The sun may indeed change direction if we use Earth as the reference point, but "shifted its mass" is, of course, incorrect, since it implies uneven forces were applied to it. Since I have yet to find a better explanation for "mass" beyond "the amount of inertia stuff has," even a poetic license does not give me permission to spew such nonsense.

Not a good reason to learn science....

2011-12-21T01:19:00.004-05:00

There are few good reasons to learn science, but if you want to know the universe outside the nutty human sphere wrapped around most of us in this part of the world, that should be reason enough.

I hear a lot of educated people give inane reasons for learning science. No, you do not need to know science in order to get through life--plenty on folks keep themselves and their bank accounts quite full knowing nothing about the natural world, and a few of them are running for President. (Anyone who advocates sustained economic "growth" needs to stick their head in the sand and get reacquainted with the Earth....)

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, however, offers up one of the lamest (and, alas, most common) reasons why children should study science--jobs.

The sad fact is, most new jobs being generated now require little more than a passing acquaintance with a keyboard, and evolving voice technologies will make even that minimal requirement obsolete within a decade.

If more parents had access to real jobs that provide living wages and enough spare time to spend time with their families, time to learn more about the world outside electronic screens, we would create a more scientifically literate culture.

If we ever did manage to do that, the economy as we know it, an economy that depends on churning consumption feeding insatiable desires, would collapse. Every minute a child spends at the edge of a pond watching a wriggler wend it way through its wet universe is a minute that contributes nothing to the gross domestic product.

That's fine with me. Not sure it's what Dr. Tyson had in mind.

Sustained exponential growth is simply not physically possible.
Anyone with an 8th grade knowledge of arithmetic can figure out that much....

Mr. Cerf's Christmas List

2011-12-18T07:59:00.008-05:00

An old-fashioned gum eraser ($0.45)

New Jersey, like several other states, has an eraser problem--children in some districts have a bad habit of changing just about all their wrong answers into right ones. We're just clumsy that way.

Mr. Cerf understands this--in fact, has already stated that these erasures do not in any way implicate a school district in wrong-doing whatsoever. He tried to block the names of the districts from the reports of 2008, 2009, and 2010, claiming his department planned to investigate this, um, someday.

The Asbury Park Press reminded Mr. Cerf of the law, with the help of a lawsuit, and the names were released. The state had to pay the legal fees incurred by the press.

$40,290.80 buys a lot of erasers.

You can see the original document for free right here.

A nice book summarizing research on how to teach science to children: How Students Learn: Science in the Classroom ($34.95, free online)

While Bill Gates has a lot of money, and Michelle Rhee has a lot of sass, and Chris Cerf has a lot of connections, they all show about as much respect for research as does Emperor Arne.

There's a lot of good stuff out there on how to improve learning in our schools; turns out encouraging school officials to erase wrong answers on expensive "standardized" tests does not improve a child's grasp of the world.

Mr. Cerf, here's a piece of anecdotal evidence, the kind you seem to love--I have yet to meet a teacher who would not stand on his head wearing an "I Love Ed Reform " tee shirt while yodeling the theme to Romper Room if he believed it would help his children learn.

New Jersey map (~$4)

Global Education Advisers, now led by Rajeev Bajaj, listed Mr. Cerf's home address as its own address. The company received a half million dollars from the Facebook money given to Newark.

Mr. Cerf says he left the company before the money was received, and that he got none of it and I have no reason to doubt him. A good map, though, might show him why a few folks get a little upset when he says he left a company that was founded at his home address. (Maybe he has a line painted in his home separating the company from his living quarters--but I'll leave that the Montclair Zoning Board .)

World globe, education model (~$45)

At least Global Education Advisers is based in New Jersey--if we're going to toss Zuckerberg's monies around to friends, at least some of it will be spent locally. The ol' trickle down theory of economics holds a special place in North Jersey.

Cerf's crony Larrie Reynolds, a superintendent, serves as a consultant for GEMS Education, a private company owned by a Dubai businessman. Here's the idea:

GEMS Education... would recruit outside students for the program, hire teachers privately for lower-than-contract salaries and provide supplies for a "pathways" program run independently of, but under contract to the district. The private company would split the additional state aid coming into the district as a result of its status as a choice district.
Bob Braun, Star Ledger, December 12

The plan ultimately requires approval from Cerf.

Before Mr. Cerf approves it, though, he could look at his brand-new globe and find Dubai--unless a dollar can hitchhike across Saudi Arabia, part the Red Sea, stagger across North Africa, swim across the Atlantic, then get through customs at Port Newark, we're never going to see the money here in Jersey.

And Dubai sounds all Middle Easterny, not a problem for me, but could well be a problem for Governor Christie when he runs as second banana during Romney's bid to unseat Obama. Just sayin'....

~~A real title~~ [I retracted this--the more I read about Rice's reasons, the more I appreciate his Quixotic battle--see below.]

Please, Mr. Rice, stop the silliness of the senatorial courtesy, drop the "Acting" from his title.We get back our judges (the Governor has reciprocated with his own snit fit, blocking our new judge appointments), and he gets back some dignity.

And I get to finish my Christmas list for Mr. Cerf.

Bob Braun keeps following the money. I owe him a Guinness or two for his perseverance.
I've met Mr. Cerf three times, and he's always been polite and pleasant. He's quite affable.
This is not about Mr. Cerf--this is about our children. He may just be confused, who knows, it does not matter.
Stay focused on the kids.

To be fair to Mr. Rice, he's onto something-there is a concerted effort to dismantle public education, and Cerf is part of that effort.
Rice is not blocking the judges, Chris Christie is.

27 degrees

2011-12-17T15:23:00.003-05:00

The buffleheads are here now--we saw about a dozen in the Cape May Harbor, blooping into the water as they chased whatever it is that buffleheads chase.

The bright white clown heads of the males clashes with the oblique shadows of the late year. We're in the darkest 10 days of the year now. Even the marigolds have given up the ghost.

(The rosemary bush continues to flower, as do a few dandelions, their blue and yellow colors taunting the failing sun.)

I know the sun will return. I know the sun is almost as close this time of year as it will be. I know the Earth turns. I know all this, and believe none of it.

I saw the sun creep up over the horizon as the half moon hung overhead at dawn. I saw it struggle to climb--a flight that peaked just barely 27 degrees above horizon--and it's sulking back down towards the horizon.

I know the sun will return. I'll believe it when it happens.

There's a disconnect between what I know and what I believe, a disconnect we're too quick to dismiss in the classroom, to dismiss in our lives.

Top four gifts for your favorite science teacher

2011-12-17T11:43:00.010-05:00

Here are a few inexpensive "toys" that can make your favorite biology teacher a hero in her classroom!

Crookes radiometer (~$8):

Mesmerizing, and the science is just incomplete enough to keep everyone guessing how it works. Turns out it won't work in a complete vacuum, nor at normal air pressure.

I use it to show the transformation of light energy into kinetic energy, cool enough, but for the true wackadoodles in your classroom, challenge them to figure out how to make it spin "backwards."

I'm so in love with my radiometers I keep one at home, too.

Class set of magnifying glasses (~$20):

Pictures in textbooks pale compared to a dead bug found on the windowsill, which pales next to a live slug under a magnifying glass!

Magnifying glasses are ridiculously easy to use, and double the complexity of the visual world as soon as a child starts using one.

Large empty pretzel jars ($5 but you get to eat the pretzels):

I collect these for class--they make great terrariums, as well as cheap bookshelves (just lay something flat and sturdy on a couple of pairs). They can also serve as giant stocking blocks to demonstrate endergonic reactions (energy in, more elaborate order) and exergonic reactions (knock them all down with just a little activation energy).

I also use them to carry stuff in from the outside--snakes, pill bugs, elodea, slugs, centipedes, whatever.

Autonomy (Priceless!):

Write a letter to your school board, your state Secretary of Education, and to the Emperor himself, Arne Duncan, asking them why your child can recite biochemical cycles yet has no idea what a wheat berry looks like, or why plants need water, or what causes the seasons to happen.

Demand that local, state, and federal school officials take the same standardized tests required of your children, and ask that their scores be posted publicly.

True science education takes time to observe, time to reflect, time to get things wrong before putting the pieces back together in a way that makes sense of the natural world.

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
William Blake

Your child spends a lot of time in my classroom.
Help me make it worth her time.

Crookes radiometer photo by Timeline
Pretzel jar by Princess With A Half Price Tiara

Here in New Jersey, we have an end of course biology exam, that may or may not count. Thankfully my kids did reasonably well last year--though I expect, always expect, them to do better.

Catechism in the classroom

2011-12-17T09:59:00.005-05:00

I have a lovely cross-section of an ash tree in class, about an inch thick and almost two feet wide. It makes a great sound when I rap it with my knuckle, its heft is just right, and it still smells great. Bored students count its rings, so I know it grew for about 100 years, give or take a decade.

Every biology class should have one.

We are currently wrestling with photosynthesis, akin to grappling with God and alchemy when we approach science as Show&Tell, which is how most of us approach "science" in a system that requires "objective" evidence that my lambs "know" what the state standards demand.

Sounds like catechism to me.

***

The pictures above reflect what kids are taught in elementary school--it is not wrong, but it is misleading.

The air you breathe out differs a little from the air you breathe in. Either way, it's still mostly nitrogen and oxygen. Though the expired air has over 100 times more carbon dioxide than what you take in, it's still mostly nitrogen and oxygen.

The carbon dioxide you breathe out does not come from the oxygen you breathe in--it comes from the food you eat. Most of the mass (or "stuff") you lose when ~~dieting~~ starving is lost as exhaled breath.

The oxygen given off by plants does not come from the carbon dioxide they take in--it comes from water. The oxygen you use leaves your body as water.

And, for the love of Newton, plants do not convert sunshine into food. Sunlight is energy, and food is matter (or stuff)--in the Newtonian universe of high school biology, energy is energy and stuff is stuff.

***

Jan Baptist van Helmont was a nutty Flemish mystical alchemist who married rich, affording him time to dabble in all kinds of things back in the 17th century, even managing to get himself convicted during the Inquisition. He believed water and air could be transformed into just about anything, and set up a crude experiment to show that trees were made essentially of water.

He put a 5 pound willow sapling into 200 pounds of potting soil, giving the tree nothing but water (although this is quite so, a story for another day), then weighed the tree and the potting soil 5 year later.

The tree gained 164 pounds, the soil only lost 2 ounces, and van Helmont concluded, reasonably, that the tree gained its mass by transforming water. That's science--not great science, Mythbusters run better experiments--but still science. A testable hypothesis was made, the experiment run, data collected, and a reasonable conclusion was made.

And what do we do in class? We tell the van Helmont story, then tell the kids he was (mostly) wrong, something less tangible than water makes up the ash tree being passed around the room. Some write this down, some don't. No experiments will be run, no time.

That's catechism.

Van Helmont was interrogated and confined by the Spanish Inquisition for challenging catechism, spending years under house arrest for daring to question the catechism of his day. I wonder what he'd think of a nation of science teachers now presenting his work as catechism, in order to meet the demands of our own inquisition, testing madness sponsored by the DFER, Achieve, Pearson, and Arne and his wealthy cronies.

***

A lot of us teach a lot of catechism--it's easier than teaching science, pays just as well, takes much less time, and keeps those who treasure test scores over truth out of our lives.

Arne and company believe that creating a nation of little scientists will improve our nation's economy, but he's wrong. Creating a nation of little abbot consumers might, and we're headed that way, but if my students had the time to truly see how the natural world works, how we are tied to the ground, how all living things face immutable limits, I bet they'd spend more time mulling than malling.

A fellow science teacher gave the ash tree to me--it served as the setting for a wedding he attended.

Van Helmont did not realize that most of a tree's mass comes CO2 in the air, ironic given that van Helmont is credited with discovering that very same gas.

Dark

2011-12-15T19:20:00.001-05:00

Last week of the sinking sun.

The Earth hurtles closer to the sun, but my little piece of paradise edges more and more oblique to the sun, our source of light, of life. We're in the dark season.

***

The bell still rings at 7:45 in the morning. It's not a bell anymore, but we still call it that. I blew a conch shell as the bell sounded, an old shell that has been around the science wing for years. My students were as amazed by the loud bellowing of the conch shell as I am by their iPhones.

The conch was once alive. It no longer is. Neither is obvious to most of us scurrying under the fluorescent hum of December lights.

***

We're studying photosynthesis now, my absolute favorite subject in biology, except maybe quahogs, which aren't part of the curriculum.

Things are not connecting as well as I'd like, but they rarely do in mid-December. The trees are bare at the moment. We could take a lesson from them--not much happening under the sky when the sun fades away.

ATP synthase. Chemiosmosis. Electron transport chain. I mention the words, knowing that they will roll off my students cerebra as water rolls off a leaf. And that's fine with me.

Everything that burns easily in my classroom does so because of the grace of plants, capturing the energy sent forth by our sun. The plants in the back of the room continue to grow under our fluorescent lamps, trapping any carbon dioxide that wander too close to their chloroplasts, carbon dioxide that arose from the deepest cells of the few animals in the classroom.

Most of the mammals in the area are biding their time, waiting for the sun to hold still in the sky, waiting for it to turn back northward again.

The plants remind me that our breath is real, that what was once part of me is now part of another living being, communion in the classroom.

The sun hardly gets the attention it once did. Not one child in my classroom is the child of a farmer. Not one child in my classroom depends on any harvest within a hundred miles of home.

Every child, though, plants a seed. Every child is reminded what their ancestors knew. A few of them realize what has been lost. Not many, but enough.

It's the enough that carries me through the winter solstice.

Photos by us.

In honor of errant cannonballs

2011-12-11T19:27:00.002-05:00

Most folks who read science blogs probably already know this,
but the folks at Mythbusters managed to put a cannoball through both someone's home and another family's minivan.

In honor of that, here's a repost from two Decembers ago.

I love xkcd, and I love Richard Feynman. I'm fond of zombies, too. I've spent several hundred posts and perhaps a quarter million words to say what Randall Munroe dashes off in a few stick figures above.

The guy's a comic genius, he loves the Pleiades, and he happens to be a physicist, too.

Randall Munroe generously lends his creations out to the bloggers. Really.

NJEA, really?

2011-12-11T17:11:00.003-05:00

I pay good money to be in a union. I get (in both senses) what we've gained as a union, and I'm glad we have the right to organize in New Jersey.

Our Governor is a political beast, and will eventually be the second banana on the GOP 2012 ticket. In the meantime, he's managed to get our leaders so twisted in Christean logic that our union actually made the following statement in the latest NJEA Reporter:

NJEA's education reform plan will use standardized test scores as a criterion [for teacher evaluations], but recognizes and respects research demonstrating that those scores are not reliable measures of teacher effectiveness.

Just what part of "respect" does the NJEA not get? If the research shows that the tests are not reliable measures, the union should flat out refuse to consider them for that.

It doesn't help that this falls under a table labeled "Teacher Evalutation."

Get it right, NJEA, get it right....

Teaching photosynthesis

2011-12-11T09:23:00.002-05:00

I work hard to make my classroom "unscientifical." I discovered not so long ago that some students learn just enough scientifical vocabulary to throw me off their scent.

We are raising a generation of liturgists. I ask specific questions no one truly understands, I get back scientifical nonsense no one understands, and everyone pretends something was learned.

Teacher Priest: What is ATP?
Student Congregation: ATP is the main energy currency of cells.

I bet I can teach a parrot the Krebs cycle.

***

Light is light, and stuff is stuff, and never shall the twain meet. (Well, not in the Newtonian universe, anyway.)

Photosynthesis does not turn light into food. Yet almost all my lambs believe this. I suspect they believe this because that's what they've been told. It explains, logically, how trees can get so big without creating a crater around them.

Photosynthesis, of course, bangs together the atoms of CO₂ and H₂O to form a bigger, far less stable organic molecule. (We pretend that it's glucose, but it's really not... we simply cannot tell even simple truths to children.)

I am an educational professional--I can train most children to "know" the photosynthesis equation:

CO₂ + H₂O → C₆H₁₂O₆ + O₂

I can train the same students the respiration equation:

C₆H₁₂O₆ + O₂ → CO₂ + H₂O

And yet when I combust an organic compound, they are dumbstruck that water--the kind that comes out of faucets--"comes out" of the reaction, not internalizing that H₂O is indeed the same thing as, well, water.

I don't want to be an educational professional. I want to be a teacher.

So tomorrow I light up the propane torch once again, and show them water from "fire." We'll discuss fire and energy and stuff.

I'll shine a bright light through my homemade chloroplast solution--just let some spinach leaves sit in alcohol for an hour or two--and let the children see the transparent green solution fluoresce an opaque deep red, as though transformed into blood, and we'll talk about excited electrons bouncing up, then back down. What is light? What is energy?

And they'll leave the class confused, because they'll think what they saw is magic.

It's not magic; I will not allow magic in my classroom. Magical thinking destroys our connections to the earth. We owe it to children to tell the truth.

I don't want to be an educational professional. I just want to teach.

The skeleton photo was right before my first back to school night ever!

Lunar (yawn) eclipse

2011-12-10T09:32:00.002-05:00

In a few moments the Earth's shadow will start to creep across the full moon. While it gives the science news folks something to squawk about, and they do, I suspect events like this turn more than a few children off to astronomy.

Oh, it makes for a nice rusty moon (blood red's a bit of hyperbole), but it takes a bit of time to develop, and shoving children out the door into the chilly December night to see a moon that still looks like a moon hardly sparks a lifelong love of the skies.

A passing meteor might, though....

***

Here's a piece of astronomical news I can chew on. The sun sets a few seconds later today than it did yesterday. We have less sunlight today than yesterday, and will until the solstice on the 22nd, but the sunsets are hanging around 4:29 P.M. in these parts, and won't get any earlier.

It's a nice little puzzle for those who think they get the seasons, an amalgam of our elliptical orbit, our artificial noon, and our fixation on a day exactly 24 hours long. They're not, at least not if you use the sun as your guide.

If you spend most of your time indoors however, and have not noticed the lengthening shadows and the sinking noon sun, then dwelling on why the sun sets earlier today than it will tomorrow becomes a mere mental gymnastic, performed to amuse oneself or others like a dog-and-pony show.

The few kids that do notice these things are often the same kids who crash and burn in high school. If a child even notices these things, what adults around her could even begin to answer them?

***

The sun is never directly overhead here in New Jersey, full moons do not cause aberrant behavior, and the Earth is not farther away from the sun during winters here (it's actually closest in January). That surprises many adults, some who are licensed to teach.

It took me several years of teaching to realize how deeply "science" myths are entrenched in the sulci of our students. What we think is true frames how we perceive the world, literally shaping our reality.

Every minute a child spends under fluorescent lights, every moment she stares at a monitor, every iTune song that threads through her auditory cortex distracts a child from the finite time she has to develop a true relationship with the natural world.

Science is based on observable phenomena of the natural world. If we want to create more scientists, we need to nourish our children's connection to the rhythms of the natural world. The spectacle of reddish moon once every couple of years makes for good copy, but cannot replace the rhythms of its phases.

Dear public school teachers,
Stop making stuff up,
kthnks

Lunar eclipse sequence from BBC news.

The woodcut is from The Book of the Moon website.

Bill Gates can't dance

2011-12-08T20:38:00.012-05:00

In my previous life, I once found myself lounging on a raft in the middle of someone's very large swimming pool. Its owner stuck wires up the femoral arteries of babies, and got paid well to do that.

She sighed the deep sigh of the eternally malcontent before her pronouncement: My gardeners are so lucky! They look happy! They have so little to worry about....

Rich folk long for something, and, like all of us, often misplace their longings.

Back when I still played doctor in real life, I heard wealthy physicians complain over and over again:

I have so much responsibility. I care. I worry. I have something to lose.

Oh, look at those people [dancing/singing/drinking/tossing the shit/fishing/dawdling/rapping] like they don't have a care in the world.

Thank God for us responsible folk or they'd know real poverty.

The few docs I meet occasionally confess they're jealous that I escaped the profession. I tell them they could, too, if that's what they wanted. They continue practicing medicine, I continue to teach.

***

I am not particularly religious, but Genesis 2:7* resonates with me. It's a story, of course, but the stories we choose define who we are.

You lose something in the process of getting professionalized. Some call it soul, some call it "down to earth"--both come from the same idea.

God's breath mingled with dirt created us, living souls. When you turn away from God, whatever God is, you sin, no matter how powerful you are. I have no idea what the longterm price of sin is, though a lot of sleek folks will tell you wild tales while picking your pockets.

I know the immediate consequences, though--you lose a piece of nefesh, a few crumbs of your soul, this tangible mesh of clay and life's spirit. No need to toss in eternal damnation, this moment is all any of us ever have, and I prefer to keep nefesh as whole as I possibly can in a culure that would strip the clay out of my children if it could.

We are intimately tied to the earth. We cannot separate the soul from the shit.

***

The extreme rich are different. Their boundaries are human ones, cleansed of the clay that kept our link to the divine. The rich are the immortals. The rich have their own gods made of power and platinum. They lose touch with the earth.

Dancing doesn't cost anything, and anyone who has a higher opinion of life than he does of himself can learn to dance. I've never seen a normal toddler not dance well to the rhythm.

You don't learn rhythm, you're born with it. You have to beat it out of a normal H. sapiens. You can replace it with a series of complicated, coordinated steps that follow a prescribed pattern, but that's prancing, not dancing.

Education means a lot of things to a lot of people, but if being educated means knocking the dancing gene out of commission, save the sheepskin for the lambs. I'm going clamming on a patch of mud Bill Gates will never touch, and will wash them down with mead made by yeast fed honey and blueberries in my kitchen.

Teaching allows me to share a world Bill Gates does not know exists. Until Bill Gates gets back in touch with the world that matters, what he thinks matters matters not.

I would never impose a hint of my religious beliefs in a public school classroom. I'd be much obliged if those in power would keep Mr. Gates' version of heaven out of my classroom as well.

*And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. KJV

New worlds

2011-12-07T22:21:00.001-05:00

As various factions wrestle with various standards for various (and occasionally dubious) reasons, I find myself in a classroom with a couple dozen young humans at various stages of cognitive development, learning about the world.

A drop of pond water sits on a slide now projected on the screen. A creature, too small to see naked eye, wraps itself around an even smaller one. Other critters scoot, slither, slide, and wiggle by.

My charges can "draw" mitochondria--the NJCCCS expect the children to "know' the major cell organelles by 6th grade, to "model and explain ways in which organelles work together to meet the cell’s needs." A few can tell an amoeba from a paramecium without my help. This impresses some people.

It shouldn't.

A child looks at the slide on the microscope, back up at the screen, then back at the slide again.

A single drop of water holds a world of life. The slide warms up from the lamp below. The critters under the cover glass start to fade as the oxygen level drops.

I could, of course, pontificate about aerobic respiration and diffusion and concentration gradients; I could give the children boxes to fill and diagrams to label; I could drag out one of our myriad models telling the kids what they can't quite see. And on many days I do just that.

But not when a child see the world open a bit wider than it was just moments ago. There will be time, maybe enough, maybe not, to learn the human language that describes this new world to the satisfaction of the state of New Jersey.

The class remains mostly silent as the children take in what they cannot yet grasp.This impresses me.

As it should.

The video is from YouTube--our critter was not an amoeba, and truth be told, I did not know what it was.

In the you cannot make this stuff up department....

2011-12-04T21:58:00.000-05:00

"When using and choosing technology for children teachers should let children pretend with the types of gadgets they see their parents using. Stock the dramatic play area with a non-working mouse and keyboard, cell phone and/or electronic music device."
from the New Jersey Technology Standards

Or maybe just give them a box of crayons and let them draw a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head.

Photo from Buffet O' Blog.

Seasonal affective disorder is not

2011-12-04T14:24:00.001-05:00

Yep, this one again--I trot it out pretty much every year now for those who wonder why I'm such a crab in the winter....

Every year the Earth orbits around the sun, and every year, the shadows lengthen as the days shorten. While this may be news to those living in a linear world, a few of us still revel in the cycles of life.

Several orbits ago, while folks at the more extreme latitudes again fell into their annual funk, a few shrinks noted a pattern. Enough people became distressed by the coming winter that they bought an entry into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fourth Edition, and now had a diagnosis--seasonal affective disorder--justifying the use of expensive psychotropic agents to make them "happy."

Winter time blues is now a psychiatric disorder.

As more and more of us become naturalized citizens of Prozac nation, a few cranky souls remain prescription-drug¹ free, titrating the available OTC medicines with caffeine, alcohol, and herbs, surviving yet another winter.

What symptoms make the diagnosis of SAD?

(1) increased rather than decreased sleep;
(2) increased rather than decreased appetite and food intake with carbohydrate craving;
(3) marked increase in weight;
(4) irritability;
(5) interpersonal difficulties (especially rejection sensitivity), and
(6) leaden paralysis (a heavy, leaden feeling in the arms or legs).

Surveys estimate that 4 to 6 percent of the general population experience winter depression, and another 10 to 20 percent have subsyndromal features.²

To summarize, about a quarter of otherwise normal human beings sleep more, eat more, gain weight, and get irritable in the winter, just like any other self-respecting mammal that wandered too far from the Equator since the last Ice Age.

Let me review the annual cataclysmic events that should shake anybody's sense of complacency in this wonderful and truly terrifying world of ours:

1) Every winter, most plants either die or go into suspended animation. The vast majority of our crops die here. In my garden, half ripe eggplants hang like bruised egos in the dying light of December. My tomato vines are black, gnarled skeletons. The basil plants are but a memory.

If the crops fail in the spring, we could starve. Instead of worrying all winter, a few of us choose to stuff our bellies as full as we can with last year's surplus, then sleep.

2) The air becomes so dry that mild patches of eczema and psoriasis turn into vast swaths of reptilian skin, repulsing friends and family, who are all just as irritable as you.

Now I'm flaky, fat, and fearful, living under forced solitude--feeling happy just upsets the natural order of things.

3) In New Jersey, the sun rose at 5:26 AM on June 21, 2008, and set at 8:32 PM., over 15 hours of sweet, summer rays. On December 21, the sun will rise at 7:18 AM, barely peek over the horizon, then plunge back down at 4:32 PM--just over 9 hours of dull winter light. That depresses me. If you are paying any attention, it will depress you, too.

4) Look at those bills! Paying for the juice of long dead ferns to keep my home heated condemns me to long hours at work. I know air-conditioning is expensive, too, but AC is a luxury. Heat keeps you alive. You have no choice.

Sleeping late under a cozy comforter lets me keep the heat turned down longer, and saves money.

5) The local roads freeze, and the December demolition derby begins; debt-ridden SUV owners try to justify their monstrous credit-eating over-sized sedans by driving like crazed maniacs in icy conditions.

I can hardly blame them--if I plunked 35 grand after watching commercials in which the SUV climbed perpendicularly up a snow-covered mountain, I'd expect my car to handle a level road. They do go nicely perpendicular into ditches, though.

What is a rational person to do? Seems like crawling into the bed under a comforter with a huge bag of Doritos while others careen to work on icy highways makes perfect sense.

Feeling down? Little wonder. I just don't think that it is a disorder. Nor do I think my annual spring fever is a problem. Watching the Earth spring back to life deserves some manic dancing. Come April, I'll look at this post and wonder how I could ever have been so grumpy. Until then, I am going to bed.

¹This is not a diatribe against drugs, just a cranky diatribe in general. Proper use of the appropriate drugs can be quite beneficial.
²S. Atezaz Saeed, M.D., and Timothy J. Bruce, Ph.D., American Family Physician, March 15, 1998.

December shadows

2011-12-03T18:52:00.002-05:00

It's dark again, a reminder of what we mostly ignore.

Life depends on light, depends on combining simpler particles into larger, less stable ones. We juggle these unstable particles in every one of our cells every day, and every day they fall apart.

We eat to get those particles inside, we breathe in order to break them down back to their more stable pieces, so that we can do the things we need to do.

We lose ourselves as carbon dioxide in the breath we exhale.

Every year the CO₂ levels rise in these parts, as the plants pause over the winter. We could learn something from the plants.

***

I do not know many people well, and the number diminishes as my December comes. I saw a honeybee land on a dandelion today. I saw a grasshopper sitting in the sun. The days are short for both of them.

The days are short for us, too.

***

Our guidance department has a flyer that asks "If you knew you could not fail, what would you do?"

In December, it's the wrong question. We all eventually fail. I'd rather ask a child this: "If you truly understood that you were mortal, what would you do?"

Would that wise child take an AP course just to improve her transcript? Would that wise child sit in my class?

We cannot expect a child to have that kind of wisdom, and even if she had it, we have all kinds of social tools to get her to do our bidding anyway. We should, however, expect it from the adults.

If you truly believed you were mortal, that your students were mortal, that this H. sapiens species experiment will likely flame out just as every other species eventually has, what would you teach?

I'm a science teacher. I share what we know about the universe to children who did not exist less than two decades ago. This is all still new to them.

And it's still all new to me.

As the sun fades away to the south, the question becomes urgent. What matters?

Pics taken today.

On misconceptions

2011-11-27T07:55:00.003-05:00

The deeper I dig into how much a child understands a particular idea, the more I realize persistent misconceptions can be.

We have plenty of places for magical thinking in our culture: horoscopes, good luck charms, religious incantations, and the stock market take up a good chunk of our time. So long as your magic does little harm, and horoscopes and talismans fall into that category, blessed be.

Alas, much of our magical thinking has disastrous consequences. Each morning I grab my wand and recite incantations, hoping to teach science. Before I teach science, I have to unteach the magic.

If you teach young children, and you do not quite grasp something, do not preach it as Gospel. I can teach a child who knows nothing a whole lot more than I can teach a child that knows everything.

We are starting cell energetics this week, the soul of biology. After a few years of doing this, I now know what I must have them "unknow":

Plants make food from sunlight.
The "stuff" of plants mostly comes from the ground.
Plants have no need to respire.

Pretty much all of science gets down to the Conservation of MassEnergy, and in high school biology, where a Newtonian view of the universe is usually sufficient, it gets down to this:

Stuff (matter) is stuff, and energy is energy,
and never the twain shall meet.

These misconceptions run deep, deeper than I realized until the past couple of years. I've gotten better at working through them, but misconceptions are tenacious, and, I think, comforting--children want to grasp the world, and a science teacher running through a laundry list of vocabulary words and biochemical cycles cannot replace the comfort of knowing, even if the knowing is wrong.

This week I'll grab my propane torch, as I have done multiple times, and again show children that water comes from combustion. I'll blow into bromothymol blue solution and again give evidence that CO₂ leaves us with each breath.

My stories have to be better than the ones they heard before. My stories have to make as much sense to them as the ones they already believe. My stories must be more true than the ones that define their universe.

My stories need to become their stories, or I've taught them nothing.

Grab David Rudel's books on science myths. Should be mandatory reading for any teacher at any grade that teaches science.

Last Saturday of November

2011-11-26T18:45:00.003-05:00

Raked some leaves, then some clams, then some charcoals to cook the clams. New moon tide in late November on a spectacular day makes for good living, at least for me. Can't say the same for the clams now in my belly.

In between the leaves and the clams, Leslie and I kayaked up a local creek. The cormorants are still here, soon to be replaced by the loons. The osprey are gone. We say a flock of surf scoters--a sure sign winter is coming.

The zinnias now put up tiny flowers, so little energy now available from the sun, but they're still trying.

I saw a few lazy bees hang onto the cosmos flowers--they were pretending to scoop up what little nectar remains, but they were mostly slumming in the sun. The only animals in these parts that cannot see the obvious are the H. sapiens sort.

The sun is dying. Long live the sun.

We can pretend to thrive under the fluorescent hum of madness, or we can settle into the patterns of the seasons. Biology is all about available sunlight.

If my lambs get that much, it will be enough.

Grace.

Ditching digital time

2011-11-25T11:10:00.007-05:00

We're in the last few weeks of the dying sun, our days defined by our shadows. I know the sun will return, but I don't believe it.

The digital clock on my classroom wall leaves no shadows. It defines little. It just assigns a number to now. 9:27, 9:27, 9:27, stuck in a moment. Suddenly the clock announces 9:28.

The sun barely moves, but it moves perceptibly, a fluid sliver of time marking an infinite number of instants, and the long shadows move with it.

My analog clock moves with the sun, its second hand kissing the minute hand every 61 seconds, the minute hand kissing the hour hand every 65 minutes, the three hands uniting every 12 hours, then resuming the dance.

***

We spent a lot of money for fancy electronic whiteboards to replace the melamine boards that replaced the blackboards that replaced the slate. As fancy as the new board is, it has not fundamentally changed anything.

The images are fancier, they move, they tweet, they change colors, they can be saved to amuse another classroom full of children, but they do not alter the way children look at the world in any meaningful way. (They do, however, allow us to continue to cultivate the magical thinking that pervades our culture--another topic for another day.)

A digital clock ~~alters~~ obliterates our sense of time. It tells us of now only, a discrete now at that. An exact now. 9:29.

***

"I'm not late, it's still 9:30."
The bell rang a half minute ago.

I used to think the kids were just playing with me, confounding the instant after 9:30 started with the instant before 9:30 ends. But it really is all the same to many of my students. And to much of our staff.

***

My analog clock moves inexorably. It divvies up time into visible chunks of pie--this is where you are, this is how long you've been there, this is how long you will be there. The hands sweep over marked swaths of clock face.

The large hourglass that marked Dorothy's inevitable destruction in Oz terrified me--the tangible flow of sand ebbing through its glass womb made even young viewers feel mortal.

Time flows both ways from the ever-present moment. The digital clock hides this from us, and we're glad not to know.

***

A bored child stares at the clock, eyelids hovering just over the pupils. When will this class ever ennnddddd...? 9:34...9:34...9:34....

Our class clock is covered with a large file card with the words "Tempus fugit" scribbled over it. (Sophomores love to say fuggit.) Time flees.

In front o the class I have a large analog clock, rescued from among the Great Clock Massacre of 2004, when we opened a new science wing at our high school.

Yes, children still get bored. Yes, eyelids still droop, But the droopy-eyed now stare at an analog clock, watching the seconds drip by, and, eventually, they see the barely perceptible movement of the minute hand as well. They learn the exact moment the bell will ring as the second hand sweeps past the 43rd tick on the clock's face. They see that 9:45 is a quarter of an hour from 10 (not 10:00), and three quarters away from 9.

***

I am not aware of any studies that looked at this, but I'd be willing to bet a carboy's worth of home-brewed mead that children learn more about time from an analog clock than from a block of blinking digital numerals masquerading as a time piece.

I pretend to teach high school biology, but what I focus on is teaching children how to see patterns, how to recognize the patterns as patterns, then how to describe the patterns in order to predict future patterns. Some folks call that science.

Everything that I can control in my classroom should be working toward those goals.

The digital clock does not, so it's covered up. If you want to know what time it is in Room B362, you're going to have to know how to read an analog clock.

Yes, we have a sundial, too--but it's only good for a few hours in the afternoon.
We have west windows.
The hourglass is obviously from The Wizard of Oz--
I got it from Julie Hedlund's website Write Up My Life

Thanksgiving redux

2011-11-24T08:05:00.005-05:00

I liked this 3 years ago.
I still like it....Happy Thanksgiving!

This week's The New Yorker magazine cover highlights a turkey sitting on a ledge with a few pigeons. It's the classic turkey any schoolkid would draw--blue head, red wattle, and a lovely banded tail.

Most turkeys destined for tables tomorrow, broad-breasted whites, never looked like this. Commercial growers prefer a bird whose feathers do not betray a less than perfect plucking job, a bird with a chest so broad it cannot reproduce without a few humans involved, a bird which does not taste like the one your grandmother ate.

Today I asked the kids to describe the turkey they planned to eat. Many refused to believe it has white feathers.

At least kids still have some connection between the critter and the cooked carcass.

***

Sean Nash has started a wonderful conversation on his blog, a chat initiated by a question asked by one of his students--where are the seeds in an orange?

Detachment.

Oranges without seeds. Flour without bran. Imitation crab.

None of this need be a big deal, and they may never know what they're missing. At my age, I cannot remember what I am missing. All I can do is taste the difference between a Brandywine tomato picked an hour ago, and whatever F1 hybrid tomato A&P is carrying. That is enough.

And what if a child today prefers the illusion of safety cocooned in a womb of technology? So what if she prefers WoW to the edge of a pond? What is lost?

And here is where old folk sputter and spew, because we know something's missing, right? By the time we're done sputtering, the earbuds are back in, thumbs waving like antennae, and the child's back in her universe.

What is lost?
Complexity beyond imagination.

If a child is not exposed to the incomprehensible, she will start to believe she understands the world, that the world is truly safe, that humans are truly superior creatures, that humans can fix any problem nature has to offer, not realizing that she and nature cannot be separated.

Enough of the rich and powerful adults among us grew up in cocoons, and seem genuinely puzzled by what has happened here in the States.

Those of us with toes in the mud know better, because we know we know almost nothing.

We know this much, though. The sun, a gift, only shines so much in a year. Plants, all gifts, only bear so much fruit in a year. There are only so many animals available to eat in a year. All economics, or at least all economics of value, ultimately comes down to how much the soil and the sun can yield--not in a year, not even in lifetime, but indefinitely. There are limits to what we know, to what we can know.

There are also limits to what we ought to know; I'm a heretic among science teachers. Wes Jackson, a farmer and founder of the Land Institute, is also a heretic:

For a half century now I have had the opportunity to witness the mind of religious fundamentalists at work.... We usually think of it as associated with certain religious denominations but it is now more rampant in the scientific community than religion. Fundamentalism is worrisome, wherever it is found, because it takes over where thought ends. It is so rampant in science now, that we plunge ahead with biotechnology faster than we can develop the intellectual framework and imagination for evaluating the possible risks.

The curriculum demands I teach my students about transgenic bacteria just a few years after they traced their hands and drew the spectacularly colored turkeys they thought they were eating.

I bet most of them still don't believe that turkeys are white.

***

I was going to show a brief video today of how turkeys are inseminated, but thankfully the school filters worked better than my frontal lobe. I still may have done just enough to make Thanksgiving a little more interesting tomorrow for some of our families.

Your science teacher did what?

He gobbled like a turkey, picked up a desk, pretended it was his chest, then tried to, er, you know, do it with a pretend girl turkey, and he couldn't, so now humans do turkeys. I found a video on YouTube...want to see it?

I'm calling the school first thing Monday!

Food, from the ground to our gut, has become taboo.

How many of us dare to show how animals are raised? Butchered? Processed? Even when done humanely, we hide it from the kids.

***

I gave every one of my freshmen a wheat berry today. I told them it was part of something they would stuff inside their turkey. Only one child guessed what it was.

Just about every town around here has a "Mill Street" dating back to when flour was only fresh for a few days, back when flour had enough oil to turn rancid. Refined flour, however, has a much longer shelf life. We don't need local mills anymore.

Crushed wheat berries are brown, not white.
Crushed wheat berries have a complex, wonderful flavor that makes bread come alive.
Crushed wheat berries can keep you alive without being fortified with folic acid, niacin, and riboflavin--they're already in there.

I have fallen out of the habit of making bread--I need to start again. My time would be better spend grinding wheat berries and baking bread than sitting in front of this monitor.

On the other hand, if I keep talking turkey in class, it might not be too long before I have a whole lot more time on my hands.

I lifted the orange from Sean Nash's site, who borrowed it from
Weil, Gyorgy. “wguri’s photostream.” oranges. 17 MAY 2007. Flickr. 24 Nov 2008

The wheat berry came from the University of Arkansas.

The New Yorker cover came, natch, from the New Yorker site.

The bread comes courtesy of Jessica Pierce, the bunny lady.
She creates wonderful things regularly. If you're ever in Atlanta, stop by and try her cake!

November nirvana

2011-11-24T03:08:00.001-05:00

There are mornings when the mind is flying, neurons remapping as I try to put things together. Rapid leaps of thought spin hypotheses rapidly ground down to nubbins. Whole theses are created (and often dismantled) during the mile or so walk to school.

Then there are mornings like today, a drizzly November morning, shades of gray broken up by crazy patches of yellow and orange leaves scattered on the ground, the hickory smoke smell of fall wrapping around everything.

It was cheerfully gloomy. I managed to forget everything and, briefly (though time was oddly suspended), felt everything. We were mammals long before words made us something else.

Science is interesting because the world is interesting, not the other way round.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Little Scientists, Inc.

2011-11-20T17:40:00.000-05:00

fet·ish/ˈfetiSH/
Noun:
An inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.
A course of action to which one has an excessive and irrational commitment.


Guess the goggles aren't needed for the pre-pubescent crew. That looks suspiciously like a carboy of homebrew sitting on the scientist's right.

Unless you give a child a reason to want to know something, to know the world, then getting them all gooey-eyed thinking that they love what passes for science in order to please mama is just cultivating a fetish.

If we continue to push science as a religion, a cult with idolized props--the lab coat, the goggles, the geek 'tude--used to induce awe through glorious displays, well, we'll keep getting what we've been getting. Before we can hope to create more scientists, we ought to focus on creating more thinkers.

I'd like to keep our fetishes in the boardroom and the chapel--both indoor places defined by humans, where magical attachment to objects (flow charts and holy books) enhances our worlds of magical thinking. Our magic worlds follow an internally consistent blend of logic and lust, that allows us to makes some sense of the universe on our terms.

Nature don't play that way.

While many of us have been vicariously living through Natalie and Justin and Prince Harry, a few have stumbled on amazing stuff. Photons erupting out of nothingness, neutrinos defying basic laws of the universe-- a very few among us giving us knowledge we'll probably misuse, again and again.

***

Science for children, for anyone, starts with the flick of a minnow's tail, a dragon fly cocking its head in a child's direction, with a mud pie that falls apart if too wet or if too dry. Before you can learn how to predict, you need to learn how to see.

You don't need iPads or Vernier probes or simulated computer programs. You don't need fancy "scientifical" equipment.You just need curious children (a redundancy), a door that lets children out as easily as it lets them in, and an interested adult or two to guide them..

We keep shoving kids in concrete buildings, away from their clan, away from Grandma's stories, earlier and earlier and earlier. Away from sunburn and skinned knees and bruises and tears, away from the air, the sky, the sun, the puddles teeming with life, away from the only laboratory that matters in science--the natural world.

***

Science starts with a child outdoors, it starts within the sulci of the convoluted mush of nerve tissue sitting in our skulls, it starts with our senses.

You cannot see a whole world in a drop of pond water if you've never seen to see the world you live in. We don't need Junior Scientists© donning their fetish garb to impress adults whose understanding of the universe goes no farther than The Big Bang Theory sitcom.

Children are ~~just as~~ more likely to get there reading W.B. Yeats than they are watching a rocket launch on a monitor. They're even more likely to get there if they're allowed to wander around this fine world of ours, chasing whatever interests their souls outdoors, becoming part of the world so many adults no longer realize even exists as they slowly dissolve in front of their huge television screens, inanimate objects inhabited with the spirits of the famous and the fictitious, the fetish in the living room.

Every time I walk home in the dark, seeing the eerie blue manic light leaking through drawn shades, I wonder how we hope to create anything resembling scientists, or even human.

The photo was by Matt Stamey for the Gainesville Sun found here.

The definition of fetish came from dictionary.com.

A November Treet

2011-11-16T21:37:00.001-05:00

I rambled on about cell communication to my AP Biology class--they're bright, they're young, but they're not clamoring to know about G-protein-linked receptors, despite my cartwheels (good for kinesthetic learners, no?)

Even the College Board recognizes that the course is, well, receptive to the rush of air particles from a surrounding area of high pressure.

I walked home on a gorgeous November dusk, and then I saw it.

Across the street from the school is a tree with a streetlight buried in its nether-lands. The tree is bare, except for a patch of leaves around the lamp.

A block away, a barren tree broken by our freak storm two weeks ago has three large boughs still hanging from it--classic widow makers. On each bough, and only on these broken boughs, cling clusters of leaves, days after the leaves of the still living branches fell away.

How can I teach of G-protein-linked receptors to children who do not see the leaves still grasping onto the dead limbs that no longer talk to them?

And why would I want to?

Next dry day I'm taking my lambs out for a walk. Not sure they'll be any fonder of G-protein-linked receptors, but they might be a little fonder of trees.

Hey, we're not so different from trees and bacteria after all....
Snowstorm photo by Ed Murray, NJ Star-Ledger

Clamming and competency

2011-11-14T21:20:00.002-05:00

A former student dropped by today to tell me she just got her pilot's license.
She worked on it for over 4 years, and openly admits to being a little jittery first time she soloed'.
This post is now 3 years old--but I need a reminder now and again.

By the time you hit your 5th or 6th decade, you're mostly competent at what you do. You've long abandoned the things you're incompetent at, and mortality precludes starting a whole lot of new things.

As a result, most older folk forget what it means to learn new things, forget what it means to be a decade or two old, when everything requires climbing a wall to gain mastery.

"Potential" becomes an albatross around the neck of the young. (Go read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner if you have not. Yes, it's Coleridge; yes, he can be onerous; yes, it's worth your time.)

***

I got a clam rake last spring. It's an old rake, and a good one.

I can only imagine how many clams ended up in a pot after being pried out of their homes before I got it. The tines are rusted brown, the handle oiled by the sweat of others before me.

Still, as good a rake as it is, it was almost useless in my hands last June.

***

Can you remember when you first drove a car? When every twitch of the wheel required thought?

Just about every 17 year old Homo sapiens on the planet has faster reflexes than me. Just about every Homo sapiens in the western hemisphere has more facility with technology than me. Still, All State Insurance charges me a bucketload less for auto insurance than any 17 year old I teach.

Teachers need to remember how hard it is to drive the first time.

Or else go clamming.

***

Back in June, the rake was a weapon--plow through the mud, rip out whatever it hit, say a prayer for another unfortunate creature impaled by its tines. Horseshoe crabs, whelks, worms--but very few clams.

These days the rake is an extension of my arm, its tines tickling the mud beneath the water. I can feel shapes, I can feel density. A tine or two bump against a clam, my sympathetic system reacts. Against a stone, nothing.

The horseshoe crabs are safe again. The clams are not.

***

I like clams.
I really, really like clams.

I practiced and practiced and practiced because I like clams, and slowly my brutal assault against any critter large enough to suffer from misguided tines evolved to a gentle prodding of the mud.

My students like driving.
Really, really like driving.

They practice and practice because they like driving, and slowly their jagged starts and turns evolve to hugging the road unconsciously.

***

Here's my plea to anyone of us arrogant enough to presume we have something to offer to the young. Try something new.

Try to master something you suck at but like to do anyway.

Now imagine trying to master something you suck at and don't really care for.

Welcome to high school.

Photo mine.

Another year goes by, and the apple trees are bare again

2011-11-12T12:47:00.002-05:00

Today marks the anniversary of my sister's death, when a self-described Christian missionary ran her off the road, left the scene, then wrote to me (after being apprehended by the police a day later), that this was God's will.

Apparently some modern day apostles have the power to know these things.

I'm not an apostle, and I'm hardly a fan of what passes for Chrisianity these days (not sure Jesus Himself would be welcome at some of His more popular franchises), but I do enjoy the Gospels, which are at least as wise as, say Who Moved My Cheese, though actually practicing any of that ol' time kindness (in its finest sense of the word) would get you kicked off most corporate boards.

I take my solace from knowing what's left of her is in our hearts and in the now leafless limbs of some apple trees in Tipton, Michigan, her ashes overlooking Irish Hills.

Here is a story about her, told by a friend of hers, and I'm stealing it verbatim:

Twenty years ago today, Mary Beth and I arrived in the fabled Hunza Valley, the model for Shangri-La, in northern Pakistan. We stayed in a town on a cliff 4,000 feet above the valley floor, in a hotel that cost about 5 bucks with a view of 4-mile-tall Himalayan peaks. The poplars lining irrigation canals – brimming with pearly and opalescent glacier runoff, feeding stone terraces of apricot wheat, mulberry, grapes – had just come to full flame. An orange and yellow hearth fire lapping at the feet of the mountains 18,000 feet high, capped in blue glaciers.The altitude started getting to me. So, Mary Beth took a walk.

A few hours later, she came back, her fancy scarf from the Sindh – the one with real silver threads, presented to her by relatives of the mayor of the town of Khaipur – traded in for one of the rough cotton veils Hunza women wear working their terraced fields.

“I traded my scarf! And got some presents!!” She was carrying a huge bunch of grapes and a loaf of bread that smelled like a fire place and was so dense, huge, and nutritious it took us a week to finish off.

“I met some farmers! Check it out!” She’d spent the afternoon in the compound of a Hunza family, a rare privilege. “They all thought I was insane once I got them to understand I wasn’t lost. Kept asking ‘where’s your husband? (in this medieval world, it was just easier, and more sensible, to claim we were married) Why did he let you come here alone?’ How the fuck am I supposed to explain I’m the one who dragged my ‘husband’ to Pakistan.” (Coming here was Mary Beth’s idea. That’s another story.)

She was glowing from the encounter. Not a lot of people are served tea in the kitchens of Hunzakot matriarchs. Not a lot of people are like Mary Beth. Travel is like being a rock star in that to succeed, it takes a certain talent – the kind Mary Beth possessed in spades, wheel barrows, truck loads full.

Later, we shared this experience: that evening, Hunza was celebrating an Ismaili Muslim festival. After sundown, people scaled the surrounding mountains and set bonfires. As the peaks faded into the night, the whole valley – dozens of miles long, and thousands of feet deep – came alive with bonfires. The sight left even MB speechless. Unforgettable stuff like this made Pakistan her favorite location of the whole year we spent in Asia.

I'm going fishing in a moment, but it's not fish I'm looking for.
I miss you, Mary Beth.

"We Can Do Better" propaganda than you

2011-11-12T09:19:00.011-05:00

Update: turns one co-founder is Christine Healey DeVaull; her Dad, Bob Healey, made a fortune selling luxury boats, and now shares some of it through the Healey Philanthropic Group, whose Executive Director is~ta da~Christine. She also was the ED International Education Foundation and subsequently created the Catholic School Development Program. The communication guy is Dominic Pepper.

I was not looking for trouble this morning. Saturday mornings are for creating new ideas for class, so I was wandering around, listening to Frank Nosche, running through the AP listserve, while working on a revised syllabus for AP Biology.

An advertisement popped up while I viewed a "science" video. (OK, it was a swimming scallop.) The ad was for We Can Do Better New Jersey, a coalition of "various educational and philanthropic groups and individuals" who support NJ's proposed New Jersey Opportunity Scholarship Act, essentially a voucher system that would allow educational scholarships to private schools for low income students.

That's a complicated issue, and not what got me roiling. I can see how well-meaning, reasonable folks can take contrary positions on an issue deeply entwined in history, in culture, and in economics, an issue with profound effects on children.

What got me roiling was the propaganda.

***

Unlike vouchers, the program is funded by corporate tax credits....[T]here’s no added burden to taxpayers.
Um, do the math--states must maintain balanced budgets. Tax credits mean less revenue from the corporation toward the state's general fund.

That's an added burden to the taxpayer--we're either hit for more revenue or we get less services.

You might believe that reducing services is the right thing to do--bully for you. Just don't hide under patently contradictory claims.

If a company wants to give a child, any child, scholarship to go anywhere, anywhere, no one is stopping them....

Because businesses bear a huge burden of having to train unprepared workers who are the products of failed educational experiences, it is only logical that these businesses should have the opportunity to direct their tax liabilities to a source which they feel will improve the educational quality of graduating students (potential employees).

I had a huge burden raising my two children--it's only logical that I should have the opportunity to direct my tax liabilities to my family. Oh, and I'm not paying for roads anymore except the ones I use. If your house is on fire, you pay for the firefighters. It's only logical.

If you believe that public education exists to provide prepared workers for private enterpise, then it's only logical to have the businesses pay for all educational costs. To be fair, a lot of corporations are giving children an education in life--a child working for Apple or Nike learns early on what Hobbesian means.

Is this a voucher bill? No.
Yes.

Depends on how you define "voucher," I suppose, but let's keep the argument honest. Public money ("tax credits") directed by private interests will be used to help support private schools. As I said up top, rational people can hold contrary views.

Blatantly misdirecting the argument makes for great sophistry, but I expect more from a website that claims it takes the high ground here:

By leveraging the support of schools and local communities, we hope to convince legislators of the value of this bill for the school children of New Jersey and for all New Jersey citizens fiscally, philosophically, and ethically.

Oh, and one more thing. Asking for donations is a cute touch, gives the site a grass roots feel. I'm betting that the "philanthropists" involved have got the bills covered.

I'd be much obliged if anyone could direct me to a list of donors.

The astroturf badge is from SourceWatch, used under CC 3.0
The girl stitching a soccer ball is from Oxfam Australia.
The bold purple quotes all from the We Can Do Better NJ website.

Clamming in November

2011-11-11T19:51:00.001-05:00

The shadows are long, now, even at noon. We know why, of course, and pretend otherwise, living under electric lights, listening to electric voices, staring at electric screens.

The wind is blowing over 20 knots from the northwest, in November, and the tidal flats call like Sirens. No one out there but me, a gull, a few scoters, and the clams.

I teach in an urban district, where the few guns around tend to be snubby, designed to be used at close range on humans. I spend most of my free moments in Cape May, where guns are more prevalent, tend to be longer, and more often used on game other than H. sapiens.

I hunt with a rake and a hook, not quite bloodless, and unlikely to raise my testosterone cred, but it does connect me with this life business more than the folks who never kill their prey.

I'd rather be a wolf than a vulture, no matter how fancy the store. We have a lot to learn from the hunters.

***

Even vegetarians kill. Plants are every bit as alive as you and me. We place high regard on sentience, and no one has yet shown that plants give a damn about anything, but every living animal must take lives in order to stay living.

Tonight we munched on quahogs and Brussels sprout sprouts. The clams are dead, the Brussels still alive, so a vegetarian could claim some moral superiority.

Even so, the clams tasted pretty good.

***

I put three back, the largest I caught. Each was a couple of decades old, each had done nothing to earn the wrath of my rake.

They are sitting within a few inches of each other, their collective age older than mine, and I hope they spawn.

Their fellow quahogs are in my belly now.

And so it goes.....

Photo taken along Richadson Sound by us.

Fond of bonds

2011-11-11T09:58:00.004-05:00

Les Trois Danseuses, Picasso, 1925

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

W.B. Yeats, from "Among School Children"

***

I teach biology, or try to, anyway. What I mostly teach, I think, is a way to look at the world, a way labeled "science."

Through a series of events mostly inexplicable to me, as much related to the state biology exit exam as to the retrograde motion of Mercury, my sophomores have had essentially no chemistry before coming to my class. None...

I get to expose them to chemistry. I love chemistry. To grasp chemistry, you need to grasp bonds.

Trouble is, there is nothing to grasp--in a sense, they do no exist.

***

I had a lot of trouble with the concept of potential energy when I was in high school. A teacher would lift an object, the pontificate about how this object now had "potential" energy.

Where, I wondered (and eventually learned not to ask), was the energy?

It's like trying to "see" the energy in the water at the top of a waterfall. The water itself is exactly the same at the top as it is at the bottom. I could see that a waterfall could do work, I am not stupid, but where was it before the molecules cascaded over the dam?

I was told the energy was in the object until I finally got my first real science teacher, Ms. Lehman, a wonderful woman with a wonderfully twisted view of reality (any honest view will be twisted) and the patience of Job, who explained to me that the energy was in the position. Over and over again until I got it.

Once I internalized this, I shot through chemistry and never looked back.

It is really a simple, simple idea.

***

The waterfall analogy suffers from a major flaw--rearranged atoms do form new substances. Still, you end up with exactly the same atoms that started the reaction, just scrambled up differently.)

Every time.

If you hope to get kids (or other forms of humans) to understand chemistry, they must also internalize the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy. This can take months, even years, especially if our children demand evidence. (Alas, we beat the snot out of the curious very early on in public education...)

We don't have that kind of time--so we (students, teachers, districts, states, with Arne's approval) fake it.

I suspect that's a major reason so many despise stoichiometry, a shame--stoichiometry is the Mikhail Baryshnikov (or Michael Jackson) of science, an intricate choreographer of seemingly impossible moves as energy flows through matter.

The moves of Michael Jackson do not "exist"--they represent the relative positions of pieces of Michael Jackson.

***

Many of us "teach" the photosynthesis/respiration equation this way:

C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂ ⇒ 6CO₂ + 6H₂O + energy

Kids see "energy" the same way they see everything else there, if they see it at all. Energy is hanging out there just like the other "stuff"--heck, they've been told since kindergarten that plants convert sunlight into food.

Plant do not do any such thing--they simply rearrange the stuff around into more complex, less stable forms.

We tell the more sophisticated students that plants put energy is "in" the bonds, and they nod sagely, writing down like ancient Irish monks bent over their vellum, recopying wisdom passed down through the ages.

I'm not here to tell you the Irish copied bunk--I do not need my Granny's leathery yellowed hand breaking through the earth, grabbing my ankle. I will tell you, though, that our student do.

***

Here's what I do.

Every time I mention a reaction that requires a net input of enery to build a bigger, less stable molecule, I stack a lab stool on top of a desk. It takes exertion. When I'm done, I have the same stuff--a desk and a stool, but I have a larger, less stable object.

If I want to break it down, I still need to put in a little bit of energy to nudge the structure. This is not a trivial matter. If a few atoms are clustered together in a non-random position, there's something about that position that allows them to "stick" together. Every reaction requires breaking up that something.

We call this activation energy.

I love watching the stool cascade off the desk, loudly bouncing along the floor until it comes to rest in a more stable position. The kinetic and sound energy are obvious, the bump up in temperature where the stool collided with the floor a little less so. ( I've been know to touch the floor at the spot of impact and pretend it is hot.)

Energy released.

The stool lying sideways on the floor is pretty darn stable, and its position pretty darn strong. This may be counter-intuitive--students confound strength of bonds with the energy released as substances break down from less stable to more stable arrangements.

This is, of course, a bit of a simplification, but unlike the concept of bond as some thing betweeen atoms, it allows for growth of a more accurate model. It also makes visible the idea of potential energy as a consequence of position, of the dance, as opposed to the stuff itself, or the dancer.

The Michael Jackson photo is from Spilled Mind, without attribution.

You cannot appreciate MJ's genius from a still.

Science for non-science majors

2011-11-07T21:44:00.000-05:00

If a child has an insatiable appetite to learn about the world, to pursue patterns and rhythms in the swirl of sensations slipping into her consciousness each day, then it makes sense to teach her the vocabulary of the trade.

If a child chases the rational world with her eyes alit, then it makes sense to teach her the finer points of microscopy, of calculus, of stoichiometry.

We all love those kids in our classes, because we glow in their light.

That's not why I teach science, though. She doesn't need me, she needs a real scientist. I'm just a teacher.

***

Most kids do not wake up in the morning yearning for more science. Most kids would not set their alarm clocks just to make sure they do not miss a single moment of class. Most kids are still more mammal than machine. These are the kids I teach.

We live in a fantasy world, a culture cocooned from reality by Zoloft, Zelda, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, a culture where astrology rules over astronomy, where more people believe in Eva Lonoria than evolution.

So where do I start?

Start with a "miracle"--have a child plant a seed, see water fly from flame, listen to his own heart. Have a child stand at the sea's edge as the tide rises over her feet, an ancient arachnid creeping a few yards away from her. Have a child see the moon, see Jupiter, see a falling star.

Then tell science as it developed, stories of greed as humans tried to make gold but made urine glow instead, stories of wonder as humans tried to explain the light of stars and galaxies above, stories of power as humans realized that their models made accurate predictions possible.

Whatever you do, never let a class go by without a few moments of observation that defy intuition, without a story or two about what we thought then, what we think now.

Science is not all flash, but it is all wonder.

We really know nothing at all about what the all is all about. Recognize our children as the magnificent mammals they are, and we'll have more scientists in this generation. Keep treating them as machines, well, we'll get more of what we have, faces reflected in screens, exchanging life, bit by bit, becoming the ghosts in the machine.

Pad baby by umpcportal, used under CC.

What hour?

2011-11-06T07:37:00.001-05:00

Yesterday the sun hung in the sky for 10 hours and 24 minutes in these parts.
Today the sun cheats us out of two minutes, only hanging around for 10 hours and 22 minutes.

Way I figure it, I lost two minutes of Ra time as he travels on his night-barque.
The eggplants, now barren, cast long November shadows as the world dims.

What possible hour do we think we wrought last night?

If I must chose betwen the sun and hubris, I choose the sun.

We had it right over a century ago....

2011-11-05T18:10:00.001-04:00

"Not geography, nor nature-study, nor history, but the child; not the adult, nor adult theories, nor Froebel himself, but the child, is the center and source of the kindergarten.

To see children as they really are and not according to our preconceptions; to live with them instead of making them live with us; to become as little children ourselves instead of forcing them to be wizened adults--this is our present ideal.

In the past we have over-emphasized the oak that lay hid in the acorn. True, the acorn may become a tree, but not without a long process of growth, with much kindly nurture from sun and water and soil, and he who merely emphasizes the unity of seed and plant is falling into a mysticism where distinctions become useless and the incentive to action and effort is lost.

The transformation of the one into the other; the growth process, the development from relative simplicity to complexity, is the fascinating and meaningful thing."

Amy E. Tanner
Kindergarten Review, 1911

Friedrich Froebel came up with the idea of kindergarten. He was dead for over 50 years when this was written.
I added the whitespace--we're addicted to white space.

Life on a limb

2011-11-05T10:56:00.003-04:00

We got smacked last week--I still step over a downed line when walking to school, and the curbs are lined with life-like tree limbs. Just seeing all these leafy zombie branches edging the asphalt gives me an odd joy.

I wonder if other biology teachers feel the same way.

The storm was a great reminder why trees scurry to drop their leaves in the fall. Trees that dropped their leaves before the storm, ceding the dying sunshine to their leafy neighbors, stand smugly over the debris of their neighbors.

A couple of mornings ago, on a gray morning so still I felt like an intruder, I stopped to watch a leaf slowly wobble its way to the ground, silently rocking to a lullaby, as though choreographed by a Great Designer.

Watching the leaf fall, its season done, was an obvious reminder of what awaits, but it did not fall for me. The leaves littering the ground suggest that leaves fall all the time without my awareness.

It was the day after the Day of the Dead.

The idea that a leaf's gentle fall cold be choreographed by some Great Designer is a comforting conceit, and could serve (for some) as evidence of אהיה אשר אהיה --as gentle and powerful a description of whatever this whole whatever is.

But all that's unknowable, and I only have so many hours to play, so my mind wanders back to the biology, to what we do know, enough for me. More than enough.

***

There is much to be learned from observing a leaf. A young child can easily discern the thickening at the base of the stem, the veins traveling through the leaf, the various shapes of leaves, the similarity of leaves from a given tree.

That same child can see that some trees give up leaves before others, and that some never seem to give them up at all.

To do this, though, the child needs time to do what looks like nothing. Untestable nothing. Not a whole lot of money can be made from children doing nothing.

***

If you look at the end of the stem of a fallen leaf, it will be smooth, as though the leaf were designed to be sliced off.

As the light fades and the leaf no longer has the energy it needs to make new chlorophyll, the green pigment that catches light, cells actively work to prepare for a leaf's end. The break is not accidental. The leaf remains attached to its twig by the remnants of its main veins. That the vessels are called xylem, and that we require children to memorize xylem, tells us nothing about life, nor biology.

What might interest a child is that cells actively prepare for their own death. What might amaze the same child is that our cells do the same thing--it's part of how we develop fingers.

I happened to be walking by a tree on a still day when the thin threads of xylem finally gave way, at an age when death feels more real than it did decades ago.

A child walking by the same tree might rather run through the leaves already fallen, rustling through the warm leaf smell that reminds her of Halloween, of Thanksgiving, of Grandma--but not death.

However a leaf affects a child, she must first be aware it exists.

Last time I looked, there was not a hint of a leaf's leafiness in our textbook.

The fetal hand is from the Gerontology Research Group--they got it from an IMAX movie "The Human Body" produced by BBC et al.

"Show me the money!"

2011-11-02T06:40:00.001-04:00

Quote from today's Star-Ledger.

"There are schools all over the country, hundreds of schools where 90 percent of students receive free or reduced-price lunch, and 90 percent are going math and reading at proficiency.There are core things they do very well. And I find that very hopeful."
Cami AndersonSuperintendent, Newark Public Schools

"Show me the money! Show me the money!"

Photo of Cuba Gooding, Jr., from Star-Ledger as well....

Life in a drop of water

2011-11-01T11:38:00.004-04:00

I wandered into school despite our Hallowe'en snow day, to prep for lab. I brought in some pond water I foolishly (and joyously) collected in the middle of the storm.

I took a drop, put it on a slide. I never know what I expect to see, and I'm never disappointed.

I saw some critters I had not seen before--first a few translucent "turtles" grazing through strands of algae, then lollygagging off to other pastures.

A few moments later I saw what looked like two flowers on springs slowly uncoiling, getting longer and longer, then undulating in the micro-currents. *snap!* Their stalks coiled back into springs, too quick for my eye to follow. I watched them unravel again, spooling out their stalks, then a minute later, *snap!*

After a session with a drop of pond water, a single drop, I do my best to get the critters off the slide.

Every drop of my pond water is full of life. Watch one or two protozoa go about their business for a few minutes, and the possibility they're sentient creeps in.

We live in an amazing world we do not, cannot, understand.

***

Today marks the anniversary of our first detonation of the hydrogen bomb, "Ivy Mike," obliterating part of the Enewetak atoll. People lived on the atoll before we started testing nuclear bombs on it four years earlier.

People had lived on it since the time of Christ, perhaps even longer. They were forced to leave.

On November 1^st, 1952, we unleashed a blast that was over 400 times stronger than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

What responsibility do teachers have when we share secrets ancients would have held sacred and silent?

What responsibility do teachers have as we give children the tools to manipulate the world as engineers, as scientists, as policymakers?

The atoll is again "safe for habitation," according to the same government that blasted it over 60 years ago.

In a few months, some of my students will be transforming bacteria, literally manipulating the code of life, sliding pieces of jellyfish DNA into the bacteria so that the bacteria will glow green under fluorescent light. We do this in high school without thinking twice, because it's biology, because it's technology, because it's flashy, because we can.

Humans are naturally empathic--our culture bleeds it out of our children at our own peril. If we continue to treat children as economic tools, as bits of data, we will continue to have a culture where machines matter at least as much as people. [Almost a quarter (22.8%) of women ages 40-59 years old take anti-depressant medicines!]

President Obama claims that “nations with the most educated workers will prevail."

Prevail at what? We got enough nuclear tonnage to put this planet out, including my lackadaisical pond critters munching away at this moment in a jar on my windowsill. We're pretty good at prevailing.

Maybe it's time we spent more time learning how to live.

Criminy, the zombies are winning.

The YouTube is by zaster79,credits are at the end--the good stuff starts at 0:45.

What is the highest result of education?

2011-10-31T15:00:00.004-04:00

With all the dashing about, pretending that we can make leaders of us all, make scientists of us all, pretending that the whole point of education is test score and "college and career readiness," well, it's no small joy to be working under a Principal who puts up in the hallway a large poster quoting Helen Keller:

"The highest result of education is tolerance."

Not bad, and most teachers would appreciate the thoughtfulness (I did) and move on (I didn't).

The word "tolerance" sticks in my craw--it's not a bad word, but just the hint that it requires the tolerant to endure people not of the same ilk bothers me. OK, I can't tolerate the word.

I mentioned this to the Principal, even suggesting that "love" might be a better fit, fully understanding that even the most tolerant Principal can't have a quote like this:

"The highest result of education is love."

That's too Kumbayesque even for me, and that's saying something.

Leslie, who keeps me sane, suggested "empathy"--which I really liked, and I mentioned it to our Principal.

And today I saw this on our school message board outside:

Amen. And thank you.

Oh, yes, that white stuff is snow. I'm not very tolerant of that, either.

Scorecard

2011-10-31T10:02:00.004-04:00

Rajeev Bajaj runs Global Education Advisors, originally a "one person" company with grammar issues founded using Chris Cerf's home address. Hey, Steve Jobs started in his own garage, why not? GEA has gotten (so far) almost $2 million dollars of the Facebook money.

Eli Broad, a philanthropist in its current sense (though maybe not quite so heavy on the "philo-" side), founded the Broad Foundation, a private "school" that converts business folks into education wizards, then feeds them into various urban school districts around country. Cerf is a graduate (2004), Bajaj is a current fellow.

Cory Booker is the mayor of Newark. His city got $100 million from Mark Zuckerberg--almost $2 million has gone into Bajaj's Global Education Advisors group. He also enjoys the support of Cerf. Booker, hypothetically, has little say over Newark Public Schools because the state currently runs them. I made him the figurehead for the distribution of the Facebook money--hey, he posed with Mark and Oprah when the announcement was made.

And Mark? Can't really blame him for anything here. Give a kid obscene amounts of money and he's going to make a mistake here and there.

The ACLU is making a stink about all this because, well, something stinks. Government should be transparent.
I was going to toss in Cami Anderson, the Newark Superintendent, but I could only take so much MS Paint.
You can fill her in yourself, then draw arrows from Cerf and Booker (she was a paid consultant for him before this super gig) to her.

Zuckerberg Friends Cerf

2011-10-30T21:11:00.009-04:00

Mark Zuckerberg donated a huge chunk of money, $100 million, to Newark, to help education. A few other people kicked in $48 million more.

According to the Star-Ledger, ~$11,700,000 has been spent so far. Less than 65% of that money has gone to "school-based programs." Over 15% has gone to Global Education Advisors, "a company started by Christopher Cerf before he became the state's acting education commissioner," a company that used Cerf's home address as its own, an "entirely ministerial" relationship according to Cerf.

Yep, almost 1 in every 6 dollars spent so far has gone to a company intimately associated with our current Acting Commissioner of Education.

Sources:
Star-Ledger, February 24, 2011
Star-Ledger, October 28, 201

As Leslie pointed out, I had a shot at a chunk of that money.
At least I sleep well....

May well just be a misunderstanding, maybe nothing nefarious--just keep the money visible...

Cerf photo is official one from NJ

Doritos and daphnia

2011-10-30T10:34:00.003-04:00

In the middle of the snowstorm yesterday, I scrambled out to my tiny pond, a mud puddle, really, to fetch as much elodea as I could for school. Elodea is a lovely water plant that plays well with microscopes. I also scooped up about 5 gallons of pond water full of critters about as ill-prepared for the storm as I was.

Two buckets of pond water now sit in the kitchen--some will overwinter in the basement under fluorescent lights, some in the windowsill of our classroom. (One year I had mayflies in January.)

The classroom pond water has been there for years now. I should really start it over--as the years go by, the evaporating water leaves behind traces of salts, and eventually it will be too salty for pond life. For now, though, the water fleas still dance among a few translucent snails and the knolls of blue-green algae covering the bottom. All sorts of microscopic critters flit through the duckweed.

I could start over, dumping my windowsill pond down into the drain, starting fresh. Starting over without consequences, though, is a tricky thing, possibly impossible, in life, human or otherwise. Everything we do has consequences.

So I work with what I have, and what I have includes the great-great-great-great offspring of daphnia from my backyard summers ago.

***

The metaphysical (or at least the anti-reality folks, or ARFs as I shall call them) crowd has me worried. The Daily Show ran a piece with an ARF, Noelle Nikpour, yipping away against science:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Weathering Fights - Science: What's It Up To?

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

I have several children who know more about the Mayan calendar than they do about evolution. I have more than several children who do not know their connection to the earth. We tell children that our planet is round, and that Doritos are junk food, without offering a shred of evidence for either.

I'll concede that the Earth is round. Took me awhile to believe it, but after years of looking at boats disappear over the edge of the sea, shadows change over the seasons, and photos from satellites, it's easier believing it's round than flat.

Doritos, however, are miracles, a sophisticated blend of complex organic molecules fused together by plants using the energy emanating from the sun, itself a miracle, fusing hydrogen into helium. They're food, and pretty good food at that--and all food is biology at its gory best.

I get one shot to teach children biology--for most of my kids, this is the last time they will study biology in any formal sense, ill prepared to face years of propaganda via the Noelle Nikpours, Rick Perrys, and Rick Warren (what is it with Ricks?) of the world.

Tomorrow I will haul a couple of gallons of water almost a mile, as my ancestors did (though for a different reason), to bring more "real" life to my biology classroom. In the end, I cannot hope to compete with the propaganda fed both inside and out the school by the monied interests who know more about demographics than democracy, more about profit than people.

My hope is to give children a taste of just how large this universe is, how wonderful, how deeply ingrained we are with it, and it with us.

A bucket of pond water holds more life than most of us can imagine.

It starts with a single drop.

Or I could just teach to the state test, and put the microscopes away.

Exploding trees

2011-10-29T18:27:00.003-04:00

The trees are exploding.

We're getting a wet, heavy snowfall, and the broad leaves of our deciduous trees are catching snowflakes as well as they catch photons.

Their vessels are still swollen with sap, carrying nutrients back into the ground, stored in the massive roots of the underground world we fear.

Water starts to expand as it nears its freezing point--that's why ice floats. Still, I've never seen trees explode because of an early frost, so I'll blame the snow.

I stood out in the snow watching my daughter play football. The scene was surreal--several players had dressed up for Hallowe'en, dinosaurs chasing ninjas, Goldilocks chased by a pirate. Some players wore overcoats, a few dressed only in shorts. The snow was blowing sideways.

*CRACK*--a large limb fell from a massive tree just a few feet from me.

Had my brain caught the branch, I would have regretted not finishing a few things, but that's the way it goes. I worked for years in hospitals. Massive trauma, tempered by unconsciousness and ungodly jolts of endorphins, is about as good as it gets for one's final moments.

Now, a few hours later, my numb feet warm again, my skin dry, a few thoughts:

*My daughter turns 29 tomorrow. My son will be 26 in December. Watching her intensity playing football, hearing her laughter across the field, reminds me my biggest job is done.
*Had I been brained, the last thing anyone (I cared about) would have worried about would be an unfinished curriculum being written just to meet the demands of some acronym (QSAC) emanating from Trenton.
*We're finite, focus on what matters.

It continues to snow, I continue to breathe. But I appreciate the reminder.

Photo via Baristanet.

A jelly story

2011-10-25T22:11:00.006-04:00

When looking at a jelly lying at the sea's edge, a critter that uses the same genetic code as pretty much anything that has suffered the indignity of DNA analysis, it's hard to get worked up over nonsense.

A physicist says that we, like the jellyfish, are mostly empty space.

A priest says we have dominion this dying jelly, over all that lives.

A chemist says that the orderly appearance of this critter, and us, does not deny entropy--the sun's slow collapse into chaos feeds our lives.

A business man says the jelly is hard to sell, and loses interest.

A poet say the jelly has a soul, and notices the cyan halo of sky around it.

The astronomer ponders the angle of the jelly's shadow, a telling sign of winter to come.

A geologist studies the angle of repose of the grains of sand, failing to see the critter at all.

The jelly faded back into the sea, now dead, its story as interesting as mine, as yours, our stories share a common end.

I almost missed this jelly, anxious as I was to catch up on something for somebody due somewhere before Monday's sunset. Now it has become part of my story.

We found the jelly a week ago, and a moment later, dolphins distracted us.
I meant to put the jelly back. I did not.
I had a chance to change the story.

Mr. President, we "learn to live"

2011-10-24T20:42:00.000-04:00

The 2nd repost today, again more for me than anything else.

"Through this plan we are setting an ambitious goal: All students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career – no matter who you are or where you come from."

President Obama, March 13, 2010

Mr. President, can we cut through the crap?

I'm a retired pediatrician. A lot of children are damaged--some by bad luck, many by bad choices made by others.

Yes, the photo is unsettling, yes, too many children have been lost because we did not acknowledge their potential, but your rhetoric is fanning a dangerous fire.

I teach healthy children, and I teach damaged children. I teach wealthy children, and I teach poor children. I teach children with fancy orthodontia, and children with rotting teeth.

I teach America, Mr. President. If you cannot see America from your perch in D.C., please spend a weekend back home in Chicago and remember the man you once were, or pretended to be.

Come to Bloomfield--our motto here is "Learn to live." Some of us have careers, some of us have jobs. Some of us went to college, some of us were apprenticed. Most of us are happy, even the good chunk of us who have neither careers nor degrees.

Focus on getting the jobs back, and towns like Bloomfield will fill them well. We send soldiers to war--our street signs carry the names of those killed and missing in action. We have young folks overseas now. We helped process uranium during World War II, and have the contaminated useless land to show for it.

Learn to live. Not learn to earn, not learn to serve Microsoft, but simply learn to live. Most of my students will leave BHS with decent academic skills and decent decency skills.

All the degrees in the world won't fix the plumbing. All the degrees in the world will not land a job that's now in Asia. All the degrees in the world will not make you a better citizen, friend, or lover.

Learn to live, Mr. President, and let us go about our business doing the same. And if you need the name of a decent carpenter, a decent bakery, a decent school, give me a call. We got them right here in Bloomfield, the America outside the Beltway.

The disturbing photo from Temple University is real, and it's human.
The classroom photo is from Bloomfield, 1914, found here, shared at the Bloomfield Historical site by David Petillo.

Teach truth, joy follows

2011-10-24T20:29:00.000-04:00

Because sometimes I forget...this one's from August, 2010--I needed to see it again.

So what do you do?

What do you do when major sources of information provided to children come from corrupt human sources?

What do you do when the adults around them believe whatever lights up their amygdalas the most?

What do you say when the actions of those in power, those with money, those that command the messages, no longer work in the best interests of our children, all of our children?

I work for the government. I get that.
I also work for your children, and others get that.
The two interests are becoming less and less compatible.

***

I overstated that.

I work for the people of Bloomfield--they pay most of my salary, and if I could remove the yoke of Arne and the Governor by rejecting the small percent of my salary covered by New Jersey and D.C., I would.

I would be a better teacher for it, I would have more class hours dedicated to sharing science with my charges, and my students would be better prepared to care for their children when the time comes.

Maybe my lambs won't act like the sheep who are training them, and will act in the best interests of their children when tough decisions are made.

Maybe they will refuse to proctor exams that ultimately harm their charges instead of just grumbling in the teacher's lounge or on Twitter.

***

What am I going to do?

I am going to teach science.

I trust the natural world, I trust my senses, I trust logic, and I trust the intelligence of my lambs. I let them know these things.

I do not hope (nor would want) to influence their "beliefs," whatever they may be. I do not proselytize, which would be near impossible anyway, since I know nothing. I do not take sides in many of the silly "science" either/or debates raging in the media, because there are no sides to take.

I want my children to think. I want my children to see. I want my children to trust themselves when they know "two and two is four," even when others scream it's "FIVE!"

The ones I reach, and I reach a few, will see the world differently when they leave in June. I leave them with power, they leave me with hope.

***

The natural world exceeds our imaginations, but our imagination exceeds its limits. Our cultural inability to grasp this leads to hubris, to dreams of infinite growth, ultimately to annihilation.

I am not going to tell children an economy dependent on ever-increasing consumption cannot be sustained for more than a few generations. I will talk about primary productivity and limits imposed by the finite sunlight that bathes the Earth.

I am not going to tell them that a lot of what they believe to be true is bunk. I will drop a huge textbook and a paper clip from the ceiling and let them see which one hits the floor first. It surprises me every time I do it.

I am not going to tell them that school is important because they're competing with the Chinese or Indians or Icelanders for the same jobs and America needs an educated work force to keep our economy strong. I will share my love of life, of the local, of the edges of knowledge we can never truly grasp. We'll study bugs and daphnia and radishes.

We occasionally have moments of joy, even in a classroom.

***

Here's the secret--once a child trusts her senses, trusts the joy she feels when exploring a world that is as much hers as Bill Gates' or Rupert Murdoch's or any of tens of thousands of strangers who want to shape her life, she becomes her own master.

She becomes autonomous in a world of automation.

She might even dance to her own tune in a culture of technique, a culture that worships men like those pictured above. See their smiles? Trust them?

I don't either.

The Bill Gates photo is from the UK Telegraph here;
the Rupert Murdoch photo is from What's Nextt: Innovations in Newspapers website.

Milking Albert Pujol's big game last night

2011-10-23T11:51:00.001-04:00

Albert Pujols hits a lot, and gets paid well to do it. He seems like an all-around decent guy, but truth be told, I know nothing about the man other than what his people want me to know.

Last night Mr. Pujols again did his thing, and many people paid money to watch him do this. All of this is fine, what folks do with their spare time and money is not my business

We have a bigger than life poster of Mr. Pujols in our cafeteria, wielding an over-sized sledge hammer and a milk mustache.

I teach. What happens in my school building is my business. And a huge poster of a sports idol promoting a food that may be potentially harmful to many of my students is bad practice.

The poster promotes drinking the bodily fluids of another species fed an artificial growth hormone (a practice banned in just about every other developed nation), fluids that do not sit well with most of the human population older than a couple of years, in order to boost the profits of companies that do not know my students.

***

The USDA, the National Dairy Council, and various corporations have a stake in promoting cow's milk consumption here in the States. They often cite an article by the American Academy of Pediatrics from October, 2006, to assert that adolescents need to drink 4 glasses of milk a day to get enough dietary calcium.

What the article states is that is how much milk children would need to drink to get that much calcium, but the authors never state that the vehicle for calcium must be milk.

Here are a few things the authors do state [and all the bullets below are quoted verbatim]:

Although dairy products are the most common calcium-dense foods in Western diets, there are no long-term follow-up data that demonstrate that they are superior to other sources of calcium in promoting bone health.
Virtually all the data used to establish this intake level are from white children. Few data are available from other racial groups. There are data indicating that compared with white adolescents, black adolescents use dietary calcium more efficiently and may achieve comparablepeak bone masses with less calcium intake.
Orange and apple juice may be fortified to achieve a calcium concentration similar to that of milk. Limited studies of the bioavailability of the calcium in juice suggest that it is at least comparable to that of milk.
Breakfast cereals also are frequently fortified with minerals, including calcium, and this form has been shown to be very bioavailable

So if you're a white kid who gets plenty of exercise, have a source of cow's milk from well-treated cows not fed artificial growth hormone, and you can stand to drink the stuff with most of the fat removed, well, milk is one way to get the calcium you need.

For the rest of us, I suggest you do a little more research than an Albert Pujols poster....

Full disclosure: I may be a tad lactose intolerant.
Fuller disclosure: I still eat a lot of ice cream at the risk of losing friends.
Fullest disclosure: If we're going to behave like sheep anyway, I'm founding the Nat'l Sheep Milk Council. (Talk about a baaa'd joke....)

The Pujols poster came from Ehrl the Pearl's site--if there are copyright issues, I'll just take a pic of the one in our cafeteria.

How many teachers does it take to say "screw the lightbulb"?

2011-10-22T10:09:00.007-04:00

NJ World Class Standard:
8.2 Technology Education, Engineering, and Design
All students will develop an understanding of the nature and impact of technology, engineering, technological design, and the designed world, as they relate to the individual, global society, and the environment.

On this day not so long ago, Edison switched on a reasonably bright incandescent bulb using a carbon filament, and it lasted long enough to read the next evening's newspaper. (It was also the first time in history Samuel Ogden Edison, his Dad, shouted those immortal words "Shut off the damn light, Tommy, you think money grows on trees?!")

I mentioned this to class yesterday, then added that I thought Edison had done more to cause human misery than just about any other human ever born, largely because of this invention.

I said this on a dark Friday morning, with 22 pupating humans in front of me, sitting under the buzz and barely perceptible flicker of fluorescent lights, which, to be fair, were not Edison's thing (though he dabbled with them before an ex-employee made a commercially viable version.).

A couple students giggled, but I was serious, and finally one asked why. I turned the question back on them. How would life be different without articial light?

I won't betray their words here, but I will say this--if you give young'uns a tiny bit of space to call their own, they can think. Deeply.

***

We lost any real connection with what happens outside our windows generations ago, and lose any semblance of connection when we abandon our religious rituals, the last vestiges of our pastoral (OK, pagan) past. For many of us, our biggest connection to seasons is shopping and sports, both poor substitutes for living.

I can use prepackaged glossy corporate curriculum "aids" designed to mislead, I can use textbooks tamed by fear of market loss, I can use all sorts of "educational" websites sponsored by folks with a vested interest in a particular way of thinking.

Or I can tell them what I think is true.

And no, I do not claim to have any special relationship with "truth"--I do have, however, a healthy respect for it, which means looking at what we do and teach with a critical eye, using logic and love, to explore the world around us. It means being wrong a lot, too.

In science, we're used to being wrong--our goal is to be more right today than we were yesterday, but if we ever figure everything out, science would no longer exist.

When we continue to ignore truth, though, we not only lose science, we lose ourselves.

Saying Thomas Edison invented the light bulb is like saying Christopher Columbus discovered that the world is round.
They both did really cool things, and both caused a lot of damage to a lot of people.

The Edison lamp drawing is from the National Archives; the jelly taken last week at Cape May.

And we wonder why 11% of American adults are on anti-depressants....

Two neat things today

2011-10-09T20:59:00.005-04:00

We found a monarch butterfly with a tag on it--PBB 518. He hung around the zinnias for over an hour.
.
Getting to Mexico is tough enough, especially for butterflies, but getting there on unbalanced wings is well nigh impossible. I doubt PBB 518 is going to make it, but he seemed to be enjoying the nectar and the sunshine today.

And when you get down to it, today is all any of us have....

Our 1994 Dodge Caravan started today, and since we happened to have our 10 year old kayaks on top of it when it did, we drove a mile to the beach to enjoy this ridiculously beautiful day on the water.

While were out on the bay, a large pod of dolphins came by--four rose in unison so close to Leslie's boat I was sure she'd be dumped. Dolphins are really big animals, and look even bigger when you're sitting in a 16 foot long piece of plastic over a quarter mile off the beach.

I could teach science 23 hours a day for three years and not get close to awe we felt in those short moments.

ADDENDUM

A science guy commented that you need to note the location of the monarch in order for the tag "to be meaningful"--I took the liberty of posting my reply here:

Dear Ento Mike,

Oh, no worries, the location has been emailed to KU. We know the drill. 1-888-TAGGING.

Even so, the monarch tag is meaningful. It says a lot about humans, about etymologists, about adhesive technologies, about bias in studies (this critter was unusually comfortable around humans).

It made us wonder about energy costs to the butterfly, about balance about mass.

And since we are surrounded by butterflies here this time of year--sometimes seeing hundreds in an hour--finding ol' PBB 518 an hour later tells me that at least one monarch butterfly has a tendency to hang around zinnias for at least an hour, and that the zinnias must be reasonably tasty when its usual sources of food are all over the place here.

(We're talking North Cape May. We got almost as many butterflies as we do mosquitoes this time of year.)

Photo of PBB 518 coming.

Photo of the dolphins was never taken--hard to think when a ton of sea mammals heads towards your boat.

"The universe is made of stories..."

2011-10-09T11:31:00.003-04:00

"The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

Muriel Rukeyser

This is a lovely quote, and a lovely way of looking at the world, written by a brilliant poet who grew up in a world that saw the horrible consequences of reducing the world to a machine, in a world that slaughtered millions of those who shared her faith, because of their faith.

The atom has been indelibly tied to the misnamed "atom bomb" and incredible abuses of the 20th century.

I just wish she had said "machines" instead of atoms.

Atoms, in the context of science, are stories. It's taking me weeks to convince my students that the image of atom that exists in their heads, an image perpetuated by many teachers, by television (is it called that anymore?), by textbooks, does not exist.

***

If there is ever a place to teach the nature of science to children, it's in the idea of atom--a (not) tomos- (divisible)--an indivisible particle.

Democritus' early view (poo-poo'ed by Aristotle) that matter can only be divided so far before it is no longer what it is is easy enough to conceptualize. Introduce the idea in 4th grade. Here's a piece of gold. Split it in half. Split it in half again. And again.

No way to see what the smallest particle looks like, but it's easy to imagine that there may be a limit to how small gold may be divided.

No need to bother with electrons or neutrons or protons or orbits in elementary school. A child who parrots these words is no smarter than, well, a parrot.

Come 7th grade or so, after a child has played with magnets and static electricity, and has some sense of what charge means (in the observable world, not the surreal field of fields), when a child gets that opposite charges attract, then show her the Thomson experiment with the cathode ray tube.

Not a Powerpoint, not a video--show the real thing. Deflect the stream of particles with a magnet. Here's a great video showing what we should be doing in class:

Let the kids imagine what an atom looks like now--we know it has tiny particles called electrons, we know the charges of the electrons are negative, and we know the overall charge of the atom is neutral. Let the children draw their own models that fit these criteria. See what they develop.

By high school, maybe sooner, they're ready for Rutherford's experiment--he fired alpha particles at gold foil, and most passed through without deflection. About 1 in 20,000 (give or take) wildly changed direction, as though it hit a chunk of incredibly dense mass.

The atom, whatever this thing is, behaves as though it's mostly empty space, at least when hit with alpha particles.

And that only gets us to 1911. Toss in Bohr to get us to 1913, a ridiculously counter-intuitive model of reality, leading two physicists to vow "If this nonsense of Bohr should in the end prove to be right, we will quit physics!"

And yet my students scribble down this counter-intuitive "nonsense" without complaint. Why? Because we present it as facts, as some Universal Knowledge, as something they must regurgitate. Many of them believe humans have seen individual atoms just like the pseudo-Bohr models printed in textbooks.

And here's the secret that even scientists occasionally forget--our worldview, science or otherwise, rises from stories. The concept of atom is pure story, though not pure fiction--there are deep truths in the model of the atom, as there are deep truths in great poems and novels.

Literacy cuts across all disciplines--we diminish science when we fail to see the stories.

The atom is no more real, or less, than the stories that define us. We reify the abstract every waking moment, and it's how we live and work and play as we get through a day.

But it's still all stories....

g
I lifted the quote from Mary Ann Reilly's blog--which I visit regularly.

Science and the ether bunny

2011-10-08T17:25:00.000-04:00

I like the idea of ether, the idea that light needs something to travel through, but efforts to show its existence failed, and current theories do not need it.

I do, though, because it comforts me, so I have a personal relationship with ether. I can still accept other ideas about the universe, and I will even admit my belief in ether theory does little--OK, nothing--to add to my understanding of the natural world, but like Spinoza's epiphenomenological universe, it fits the facts, and gives me comfort.

But you won't hear me spout off at a physics conference about ether, because 1) it adds nothing to the conversation, and 2) I never get invited to physics conferences.

So, yeah, I accept that the natural world is ultimately unknowable, and that, in essence, the natural world is all powerful--if you want to call it God, go ahead.

Just don't go all bananas when I point out that unknowable means just that. As soon as you claim to know something about this God thing, something independent of the natural world (which is freaky enough to stun even the most staid among us), well, then, the idea of unknowable becomes bunk.

And I am tired, really tired, of bunk.

If you can attach human qualities to an unknowable God,
then I will attach lagomorph qualities to my unknowable ether--the ether bunny.

"Eyn chaya kazo"

2011-10-08T10:35:00.001-04:00

"There can be no such creature."

Daniel Shechtman, 2011 Chemistry Nobel Prize

I am attempting to teach my lambs the concept of atoms. Their concept of the atom is much like that of the adults around them--nucleus of protons and neutrons in the middle, scattered electrons zipping around the "outside."

Their misconceptions are understandable--their synapses have been wended together by a combination of bad schooling and laughable pop culture that confounds abstractions with reality.

I've only managed to get them to recede into older models--some now "believe in" the plum pudding model, which is a start, I suppose. Many were stunned to hear that our models of atoms are just that--models. How many children believe you can see atoms with a microscope? How many adults?

If I present a Rutherford model of an atom in its textbook form, ask young children to memorize its parts, and get them to internalize the concept as real before they lose their baby teeth I'm pushing religion, not science.

Their performance on the state test would likely be worse now than it would have been a month ago, but this is fine with me--I'd rather a kid be confused by reality than sure of misunderstood models.

(If any parents are reading this, it's all good--the test is still 7 months away.)

***

The quote above is by a man who played with aluminum alloys during his sabbatical and found "crystal" patterns that his field of science did not believe could exist. He had trouble believing this as well, leading to his quote.

High school students do not need to know anything about the nature of crystals to learn something about the nature of science in this tale. This is the universe--here it is. The universe has a bad habit of intruding on our models. Even professional scientists occasionally find this annoying.

We create abstract models that feel as real as the tree I see through the window, forgetting, over and over again, that our view of the world, as detailed and lovely and solid as it seems, is not the world.

Every year I tell my students the story of Erasto Mpemba, a high school student in Tanzania who (back in 1963) trusted his eyes more than his teacher. Mpemba noticed that his warm ice cream mix froze faster than cooler batches.

Aristotle apparently knew this already, and even up to Descartes' time, the cognoscenti accepted it, but part of being modern is being sensible, and Mpemba was ridiculed by his teacher and his peers.

Under certain conditions the same volume of warm water will freeze faster than cold water. This phenomenon is now known as the Mpemba effect, but no one is sure why it happens.

But it does.

And that's the point--science is about attempting to understand why the world behave as it does, and our understanding of the world will always be a bit fuzzy.

If you want the security of facts, of a concrete reality, of a world where the abstract is the reality, well, the First Amendment makes it easy to do this in these parts--we got all kinds of religions more than willing to tell you the truth.

If you want to learn something about the world, though, at some point you need to look beyond the abstract, get beyond words, abandon human conceits, and just look.

The universe is full of creatures that cannot exist, far more real than the ones in your head. It would be a lot easier to teach science if folks bothered to let the kids know this somewhere along the way....

Imagine how lonesome Newton felt when he first got it, how terrified Darwin was, how bemused Einstein must have been.
None of this makes any sense.
Enjoy the ride.

My first plug

2011-10-08T09:34:00.006-04:00

This is a preview of a review of a must-read book for any teacher who attempts to teach science in public schools.

I got a copy back in August, and have been reading (and thinking and doing and arguing and questioning and playing) with it since. It's already scribbled all over, pages dog-eared, then dog-eared again.

I do not know the author--he emailed me cold back in July, and I was wary, very wary, of taking on a review--never did one, had no idea how. I still haven't done one.

But I've changed a few classroom practices, finally have a grip on wave theory, and hope to pass the book along like a Gideon Bible. But I'll have to buy extra copies to do that--I'm not letting go of this one.

And whenever I figure out how to write a real review, I'll do just that.....

I rotate a few favorite books that I read--literally--for years.
>This one joined the rotation, the first new book in the pile in two years

I was not paid for the review other than getting a copy of the book--
since I plan on buying another copy to share, as well as buying the 1st volume,
I don't think that counts as payola.