Stealing the souls of children

"People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead."

James Baldwin 

My hand holding a creature from the bay

In the end, it's the ground that will save us, if we are, or even want, to be saved.

We're of the mud, of the air, of the water, of the sun. We diminish the folks before us on this once fine land when we "honor" these as metaphors.

We diminish our ancestors from our homelands who spoke of the spirits and the blurring of the lines between the living and the dead as autumn darkness presses on our souls.

Cliffs of Moher, County Clare (Aaron Logan via Wikimedia)

These are not simply metaphors or myths or models. They are ways to understand the world.

You cannot grasp a fistful of earth through a screen.
Augmented reality is neither.
We are stripping the souls from our children.

We become who we deserve to become.
But we should let our children decide whether a soul is worth keeping.

Winter is coming, again.

November dusk

It's mid-November and the shadows are long--the sun slips over the horizon less than 10 hours a day now here in these parts.

It's near dark when I walk home, crossing our town green, as I do several hundred times a year.

Woodland ground cover 2 (owned by maxTextures)

There's mystery in the shadows. Our ancestors saw spirits, and so will you if you lurk outside during dusk. The animals are aware of you, and so, I suspect, are the trees.

As winter looms, I watch the light change under my feet. (I look down a bit more now that I am getting older--the roots of the sycamore are determined to get me.)

But here is where words fail--when you walk at dusk over the fallen leaves, when it's not quite light enough to see colors yet not so dark you cannot sense the colors, the edges of each leaf appear to glow as long as you keep moving.

No doubt there is some neuro-evolutionary advantage to this, some physiological explanation, some modern means of dispelling any reference to magic.

But there it is.

(Science ruins magic again....)

Natural selection and the battle for your child's soul

I get why folks want to ban the teaching of natural selection as the driving force behind the evolution of all living things on Earth. A child who grasps natural selection faces a fundamental challenge to her place in the universe.

While some folks might encourage a child's quest to seek awareness of her place in the universe, most parents (in this part of the world, anyway) already have a pretty good idea what they want their children to believe, and usually because they believe that they are looking out for the child's best interests.

No one wants their baby to go to Hell, so kneel before the Tabernacle.
No one wants their child batting last in Little League, so keep the back elbow up.

Much of what passes for understanding evolution in this country is, well, just another form of religion. You pick a side, you wave a banner, you demonize the others. We cannot help ourselves--our tendency to religiosity may be built into our genes.

Natural selection is a simple model to grasp (though the vastness of geologic time it takes extends beyond my imagination). Its ramifications blow the mind. 

Humans were not, it turns out, inevitable. The earthworm is as evolved as you. The countless other living beings among us do not exist for us, they exist with us, likely for the same unfathomable (though explainable) reasons we exist.

I still find comfort making the Sign of the Cross, and if you push, yes, a big part of who I am believes that it matters beyond whatever psychological relief it brings. I doubt I would believe that if I were raised Hindu, but I wasn't, and my beliefs are strong and deeply ingrained, if (perhaps) irrational.

Natural selection rubs up against my less than rational beliefs. Natural selection will do the same to a thinking child, no matter what her religion.

Teachers want a child to use her mind. Her parents fear for her soul. I do not know what either "mind" or "soul" means, but I do know that if you believe that the mind and soul are competing entities, evolution by natural selection is going to be perceived as a fundamental threat to your child's well-being.

I am a science teacher; I teach biology; I will share the fundamental "tenet" central to understanding the diversity of life on Earth.

I am not going to ask a child to "believe in" evolution--there is nothing to "believe in" in science beyond  the acceptance of the observable natural world as the premise for the models and explanations used in science, trust in rational thought, and a willingness to alter or abandon prior understandings when new contradictory evidence emerges.

I sympathize with the parents who believe that they are fighting for their child's soul, but I am an American living in a republic dependent on a thinking citizenry bound by our Constitution. If you want a public education system that favors religion over rational thought, there are plenty of theocracies around the globe doing just that.

Glad I teach in New Jersey.....

Solstice graduation

"The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was."

Bottom, Midsummer Nights Dream

Except in June.

Just about every day this week I grabbed a few small, dark cherries from the small trees lining Liberty Street--just the right bitterness to counter the almost too rich fruitiness. The sun seems to have frozen in the north, teetering a week or two before starting our slow plunge back to darkness.

Life brims mid-June, feeding on the energy that bathes the Earth this time of year. The energy starts to dwindle tomorrow. Tonight I put my shoes away for the summer,unless, of course, there'a a wake. I took them off as I left our graduation ceremony. The ice returns in just a few months, as inevitable as the wakes that keep my shoes busy.

If you pay attention to these things, the dwindling light, the mad dancing of organisms in the June dusk, the aroma of honeysuckle drifting through your skull, the incessant buzzing of hundreds, thousands of critters aware of you, you'd go mad, of course, a Mid-Summer's Night Dream kind of insanity,

And many of us do--pay attention and go mad--mid-June, midsummer, when living requires little, as fine a time as any to toss a class of young adults out into the world.

And how many are "college and career-ready"? Not sure what that even means.

But I am sure of this--several hundred children from many different cultures, from many different lands, from many different circumstance, left our building tonight having an idea of what is possible, of what democracy can look like. A lot of them left our building "college ready" for schools they cannot afford, and "career ready" for jobs that left north Jersey a generation ago.

They are kind, they are brave, they are bright, and they are now adults entering a world the ruling class does not (or will not) recognize. As we turn inexorably to November, to darkness, to fear, I hope that a child's new-found knowledge of how the natural world gives her pause before she plunges into cynicism, or to self-loathing.

It's a beautiful world out there, but a world defined by limits imposed by our sun, our soil, or water. Our children are of this world, so long as they live. This matters more than any games imposed by wealthy gentlemen governing from hundreds of miles away.

Congratulations to our Class of 2019. This is your world, get to know it beyond the boundaries imposed by human words and limited ideas. Embrace it like you own it.

Because you do.

Teaching matters.
The print is Titania, by Joseph Noel Patton, 1850.

Peeling garlic

I read an article on how to save time peeling garlic.

There are many--just Google it and you will find almost 75 million entries. All to "save" time.

Why not enjoy the act itself? This intimate unwrapping of a clove unlike any other clove on an evening unlike any other evening with two hands unlike any other hands in the universe is a gift, given to us.

Here. Now.

Why rush? You are not starving if you are peeling garlic.

Your guests can wait, or they can help you peel, under the fading sun as the lightning bugs emerge from the shadows.

The garlic will keep.

Watch the peels drift back to earth, fluttering, shivering in silent flight, drawing out memories. The one you peeled the first time you cooked together. The one you peeled for the repast. The one you peeled last night.

Horseshoe crab love

They come up from the depths every spring, dancing with the rising tide under a rising moon, a deadly jaunt for many of them.

If I ever think I am starting to get a handle on this life thing, I stand at the edge of the bay and remember what I do not know.

Dear White Men of America

Dear White Men of America,

I’ve broken noses, both mine and others, shoveled shit off ships in Port Newark, and worked in the projects; I know the thrill of flying off a bike then feeling the heat of asphalt build up under the leather as you tumble next to your bike down the road; I’ve been knocked out several times, smoked cigars while pissing into the Atlantic, had a man die under my hands after being shot, and yes, I play fantasy football, too.

I drink too much beer, take too few vitamins, have plenty of physical scars with too little faith in the metaphorical ones, stick by my teams, love my whiskey, and slaughtered animals. I’m a white man in America.

We know each other. Or at least I thought we did.

Mr. Trump has done none of these things, has never worked a day in his life, and I doubt he could fix anything more complicated than a burned out light bulb, and even then he’d likely injure himself.

He’s the smarmy kid in class with too much money and too little sense with his crew of buddies ready to beat up the weaker among us. I know a few of you ran with that kind of crew, but I always believed most of us stood our ground when his henchmen came round.

And I was wrong.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Yours,

Your fellow white American male

"'Dock stevedore at the Fulton Fish Market holding giant lobster claws.'
Photo by Gordon Parks for the Office of War Information" via Shorpy

Beltaine, again

Liked it 7 years ago.

Still do.

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

Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle

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

But I am, and it is.

Bealtaine again.

Staying ahead of the curve....

SatChat question, April 13, 2019

Staying ahead of the curve is adspeak used by an industry that needs you to keep turning over tools. The ed tech business runs on perceived obsolescence--if you are not on the curve, you are an inadequate teacher.

There is no need for you to get ahead of the curve (whatever that means) if one has the tools to do what is needed doing here and now.

Every tool has a learning curve. Every tool has limitations. Every tool used by humans is crafted by human imagination.

In anatomy, a few pieces of colored chalk are better than markers when using subtle shades to show specific structures. I no longer use chalk because I no longer have a chalk board--our administratos removed them years ago, perhaps to save themselves the embarrassment of falling behind the curve. Whatever that means.

Found in Honfleur last summer (2018)

I miss using chalk. This is not some romantic notion getting maudlin over days when I had more energy (and more hair). I can get by with more expensive Expo markers using a more expensive white board.

I clam with a fairly new (about 10 years old) rake with a wooden handle that replaced one about 50 years older. The style hasn't changed much, but to be fair, neither have clams. There are bigger rakes, there are rakes with baskets, there are rakes with Fiberglas handles, and for all I know there may be rakes with built-in GPS systems.

March clams

I could pluck clams from the mud by hand, I suppose, and some days I do just that. There is joy in clamming by hand, even if it lacks the efficiency of a commercial clam dredge.

I traded that curve years ago for the arc of the sun settling on the edge of the bay and the feeling of the arched back of a quahog in my hand.

If you’re ahead of the curve, drop a comment and let me know what I am missing 

Bad science: fruit batteries

" But, you can actually use chemical energy stored in a lemon and two metals to make a current and light up a small LED. It’s true and we’ll show you exactly how it’s done." 
Steve Spangler Science 

Et tu, Steve?

There are many ways to get to the free energy available in a fruit.

The simplest is to eat it. You have a few billions years worth of living behind you, and animals are pretty good at using the energy found in the chemical bonds of foodstuff to recombine phosphate and adenosine diphoshate, giving your cells an abundant supply of their basic energy currency, ATP.

You could dry it out until it's kindling then light it on fire.

You could mix it with yeast and let it ferment. The yeast will reward you with a wine that will warm you up. If that's not enough you could distill the wine, concentrating the ethanol enough to make a flammable liquid that can be used for heating your home or powering your car.

You cannot, however, get free energy from a fruit to power a battery. This is bad science. The fruit simply acts as a bridge for the electrons of one metal to travel to the other, different metal.

There's a reason you do not find most metals in a pure state in nature. If you want iron, you dig up iron ore, then smelt it. That, of course, requires free energy. When you connect copper and zinc together with some sort of liquid bridge. (Acids work, so does salt water--the salty vinegar dripping from your chips would work great.)

Fruits have tremendous stores of free energy, and animals, fungi, and bacteria take advantage of this--you want to eat the fruit before it rots, but rotting is just another organism beating you to the rich deliciousness of fruit.

If you want its energy, eat it, don't waste it jamming metals into it. If you want to show that fruit can serve as connection bridge in a battery, because it's cool and gets kids interested in science, go for it!

Just don't tell them that the fruit is powering the battery.

The whitewashing of Dr. King

When I die, I hope nobody mistakes my kindness for niceness. I am not a nice man.
Dr. King's life profoundly affected mine.

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"

***

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,

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 Mike Pences, the innumerable talking heads that will piously bow today.

Take a walk, 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.
This is a repost.

5:23 P.M.

5:23 P.M. here--the sun stands still, shifts its mass^*, and heads 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 only hours old, 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--5:23 P.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.

But I spew it anyway....

A Christmas comet story

Another comet hangs in the sky. Here's a story from years ago.

Philipp Salzgeber, CC

She was a kid.

She was dying.
Everyone knew, and yet no one would say it.

Her mother asked that no one tell her child what was going on.
I saw her after her surgery, her head wrapped like a genie, sitting on her bed.

Her mother wanted me to promise I would not tell her.
I told the mother I would not lie if asked.

The comet hung in the sky like a jewel that summer 20 years ago.

It was evening.
I was tired.
The mother was tired
The child was dying.

I asked the other if I could take her child to a room where the comet was visible.
The mother said OK.
She did not come along.

I knew what I would say if the child asked.
The mother knew as well.

And the child never asked.

But she saw the comet.
The last one she saw.
Not the last one I saw.

And Hale-Bopp makes me sad every time I see a photo.

She never asked so she could protect the adults around her.

The pursuit of happiness

I took a walk barefoot along the edge of the bay today.
It's December, so I am re-posting this.

A rose hip in December.

The dark days. Again.

My imagination fails me, as it will, surrounded by human light, human sounds, human smells. I cannot remember the smell of honeysuckle or the soft glow of lightning bugs or the warmth that wrapped around me in early summer.

I keep a small jar of rich soil dug from my compost pile on my desk in school. Now and then, in the middle of class, I take a whiff. The children see my joy I get from the earthy aroma.

My lambs know by December that I want them to have happy, useful lives. They know I want this for every one of them.

Why else bother teaching?

***

Thomas Jefferson got the tone just right when he penned "the pursuit of happiness." It is not an idle phrase, though it does sound a bit embarrassing in context of the modern classroom, the modern office, the modern mall.

Jefferson lived before we learned how to distract ourselves with twisted visions of immortality. We have become our own gods. Mortal illness comes as a surprise, dismissed as an inconvenience. Our cultural psychosis belittles those among us who dare to expose our mortality--if they only believed hard enough, they would be cured.

Ironically, the generation closest to achieving immortality is least equipped to deal with it. Time spent on-line chasing zombies or aliens or a Nazi nation long since quelled hardly seems worth all the fuss.

We no longer seek a life worth living. We'd just rather avoid death.

Death is inevitable. Pursuing happiness is not.

***

Yesterday one of my students came running up to me with a pot of tiny basil plants she had sowed a few weeks before.

"Smell it! Smell it!"

I did. And I glowed. Growing a plant in a classroom fits in the curriculum. A child sharing her joy at its sensuousness is not.

The seed, no larger than the head of a pin, darker than a cloudy December night, grew in a pot of peat. Shiny green leaves erupted from the seeds, now effusively shedding aromatic molecules that made me grin in December.

Something from nothing, at least nothing we could see. The poets have something to say, but so do the biologists. The aroma released from the leafs was made of carbon captured from the breaths of the same student clutching the pot.

If you've never sown a seed before, this is a big deal. If you've sown seeds for much of your life, it's still a big deal.

A hundred years from now, the human world may be very different, but seeds will still grow when planted.

(I am having pesto for dinner tonight from last summer's garden.)

None of us know what this world is all about. A few among us will tell you to live a certain way in order to reach worlds that no one has seen. A few among us will tell our children to live a certain way to strengthen abstract concepts like country, or economy, or success.

Success is a slippery word, but happiness is not. You know when you're happy, even when you're not sure how you got there.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--how many of these fit into your district's curriculum? How many fit in your classroom?

If we continue to raise our kids for a better economy, a better nation, a better world while neglecting their inalienable right to their pursuit of happiness, we risk the "blood-dimmed tide" Yeats spoke of.

Happiness is not happenstance, nor is it trivial.
Mortality is not happenstance, nor is it trivial.

Why did you walk into your classroom today? Did you give your lambs at least as good as reason?

Photos are mine, and yours (CC, yadda yadda)....

A monarch and a meteor

It's a mid-30's chilly, a bright Venus, dawn sliding up over the east, Sirius fading over the bay just west of us.

Most of the of the stars have faded out, deferring to the early light.

 A little late to be searching for meteors. And then a spine-chilling, brilliant flash, streaking west. A Leonid.

I had almost given up, except the early morning light itself was wonderful, and I had forgotten (because it is easy for modern humans to forget these things) how deep a joy the early dawn sky brings.

My son and I once waited a long, long time on a very chilly November night, 16 years ago, to see the Leonids, and at dawn we were rewarded--several brilliant Leonids every minute, a spectacular light.show. We were seeing dust left from a comet's pass back in 1866.

Yesterday, Leslie and I took a walk along the edge of the Atlantic at Two Mile Beach. The long light of late autumn drenches everything in gold.

I was bumbling around looking for sand dollars, which I rarely find, when I saw a fluttering flash of orange. A monarch butterfly, soaked, wings flattened against the sand, its antennae twisted together like a cartoon.

It was alive, so I picked it up. It grasped my finger and tried to unfurl its wings. The edge of one wing was lined with sand.

We walked it back to the dunes, found a starthistle bathed in sunlight, and (after a bit of resistance) managed to get the monarch off my finger onto the plant.

We took our walk, and when we returned, the monarch was still there, but in a better position, its wings and antennae in better shape. It might still be there now.

And we might be here now, when we choose to be...

Both photos by Leslie.

Abrogation of the Big K

"It follows from the new definition of the SI described above that, effective from 20 May 2019...the definition of the kilogram in force since 1889 (1st meeting of the CGPM, 1889, 3rd meeting of the CGPM, 1901) based upon the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram is abrogated."

General Conferenceon Weights and Measures (26th meeting) 2018

A reminder from 1889 that the world was once real.

A small cylinder of  metal, mostly platinum with some iridium, sits inside a bell jar, which sits inside another, which sits inside a third, like some illustration from a Dr. Seuss book.

To get to it, you need three keys, each key carried by a gnome--well, no, people,not gnomes.

Le Grand K (the Big K), the kilogram, the operational definition of the kilogram, a hunk of metal crafted by human hands in 1889, sitting in a basement just outside Paris.

Electrons had yet to be discovered. the current model of the atom inconceivable.

In less than two weeks the General Conference on Weights and Measures, the Olympics of metrology (and like the Olympics, meet only every 4 years) will gather together and change the standard for the kilogram.

The new standards will be based on "the present theoretical description of nature at the highest level," and the last vestiges of measurement still tied to our direct relationships with the natural world will be severed.

And the Big K? It will be "abrogated," a perfect word for our imperfect behavior, eliminating by decree of something real for something perfect, perhaps the tragic flaw of humanism.

This Luddite prefers imperfect reality to the world we've created.

I get why redefining the kilogram matters, and feeling sad about it borders on the sentimental.
The human world has long drifted away from the natural world.

Samhain, again

I have spent, in the basest sense of that word, hours
of my God-given life working on a document required of teachers here in Jersey.
That I do these things speaks to a cultural insanity, and mine as well.

And here it is a year later, and I'm doing it again.

Do ghosts exist?

I've lived  long enough to know that they don't.
I've lived long enough to know that they do.

That odd, inexplicable events happen, and happen daily, is evident to anyone paying attention. The shame is that so few of us are paying attention to the natural world, we miss the rhythms and the mysteries that  envelop our modern minds every moment.

Today is All Saints Day, to celebrate the sanctified among us, as though following some moral order could save us from the coming dark, a world in which wasp larvae eat hornworms alive, from the inside out, and humans die monstrous deaths lying in ICUs with multiple tubes pierced into the body, hoping that like St. Sebastian, we will miraculously recover.

If you need a video to be convinced ghosts exist, you don't truly know what it means to know that the dead are among us.

The question of ghosts is not an idle one. We follow spirits of our own making all the time. We follow rules and rhythms of our own making now, wrapping ourselves in a sad cocoon of  hubris, wiling away our hours fulfilling nothing more than deadlines upon deadlines without a hint of irony.

I'm headed out to a mudflat tomorrow, under a wet and wild early winter sky, to rake up a few clams, alive as I am, and as alive as I am, I will be as dead as those clams will be tonight in less than a lifetime.

Until you believe in the ghost you will be, you cannot truly live.
Originally posted 4 years ago. I like rhythms.

Late October and the ghosts are here

It does not take much for a human to involved in an internal  universe. Our imaginations served us well before we had written words.

The Delaware Bay in the dying light

Our stories existed in a larger, wild world.

The world is still wild and unimaginably vast; our stories no longer recognize this.And it's destroying our kids.

The world through a horseshoe crab's eyes.

Mind control works best in an environment removed from the natural world.

Look at your classroom.
Are you teaching?
Are you brainwashing?
Are you helping a child become a reasonably happy adult?

***

It's late October now, the shadows are lengthening, the nights are longer, death is winning again.

How many of us notice anymore?

I killed them, I ate them, I prayed for them.

Certainly not the kids. Possibly not even you.

You will die someday.
Sooner than you expect.

October reminds us, we ignore it.

Wheat from my classroom window.

So I walk, I sow, I rake clams, I brew, I breathe, I live.

I need to remember why I teach.

Ghost crab in October

A different fish, a different day, the same look.

October creeps forward.

The shadows, lengthening in their ominous beauty, remind those paying attention that we are of the dust, and the dust will take us back.

For a few hours each year, the world of those already taken (human and otherwise) opens to the world we know. Samhain approaches, again.

I took a walk on the edge of the bay--a stiff breeze was blowing in from the northwest, the waves a controlled fury, stark grays and whites on the water, flashes of pink on the underbelly of clouds. No one else was on the beach.

A dead bunker, flesh still clinging to its partially visible skeleton, mouth agape, washed up at my feet. Through death it looked stunned. A few minutes later a lone gull struggled to get it down its gullet.

The Jersey shore shares this same theme every fall, for anyone who cares to brave the beach breeze. But the stories change.

And today's story was about a ghost crab on the edge of both worlds.

Embed from Getty Images
Ghost crabs live in burrows on the beach. Though experts tell you that they are nocturnal, ghost crabs apparently do not read (or trust) their words, and can be seen scurrying about the beach pretty much any time of day in the warmer months.

What you won't see, however, is a ghost crab crossing a street.

When I got back to my bicycle, I found it there directly below the pedals, its eye stalks retracted, perhaps dead, perhaps not, wavering between this world and the other.

I picked it up--it barely moved--and walked back across the street, down the path to the bay, set it down by the bay's edge, and a wash of foam reached up and took it.

Maybe not a story meant for anyone else.
But it was meant for me.

The other world is meant for all of us.

Getting certified, FRS-NJ version

Awarding schools certifications for using e-tech is like Gillette awarding young adults for reaching puberty. Everybody feels good about themselves for something that was inevitable anyway, and another corporation plays the product placement game.

I am, by nature, skeptical of clubs that require certifications (including the process of credentialing teachers). Credentialing costs time and money, and, like anything involving power and people, tend to exacerbate existing cultural schisms. (Pretty fancy talk for, among other things, racism.)

I do get, however, why credentialing of some sort can be useful at times, and have participated when necessary. I have been board certified as a pediatrician, and am currently certified as a public school teacher in the state of New Jersey. I have also been certified as a SCUBA diver, youth sports coach, in CPR, and have a license to drive both a car and a motorcycle.

I know who is doing the certifying, and more important, why.

Future Ready Schools New Jersey Logo

Future Ready Schools NJ (FRSNJ) is a branch of Future Ready Schools, a national organization funded by folks who want to sell things to schools. FRSNJ even have a "vendor-agnostic" Corporate Thought Partners Collaborative. Because, well, I never fully grasped the because....

I have been learning what I can from their online sources. I wanted to learn more, but email exchange with their program coordinator started with pablum and descended from there. It didn't end well. I was called "dishonest" publicly.

Before your district dives into a certification process that gets you a nice banner and a star on a map, consider the time and resources you are using to.earn the accolades. Consider who benefits. Consider the online behavior of its members while representing the organization.

There is no charge, but among the mortal time ain't free.

Bronze, Silver, Gold levels--chasing one's tail over and again....