A late December walk

'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.

Top four gifts for your favorite science teacher

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.

Tomato seedlings

That a tiny tomato seed grows at all still amazes me, in a cerebral, Robert Frost kind of way.

The first time I brush against the new leaves, though, the earthy aroma swirling around my limbic system, Frost will no longer do.

William Blake gets close, Galway Kinnell closer still, but the words only get in the way, and what I know, or think I know, float like motes in a ray of sun, perceptible, for the moment, before sliding into the darkness that defines the edge of the light.

Tomato, just recently sprouted, sitting in the basement....

Wanton wilderness

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.

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.

William Blake, from "Auguries of Innocence"

We fear wilderness, and understandably so. We prefer edged lawns to thistle, Lord Byron Tennyson to William Blake, textbooks to open and changeable sources.

A wild child fails in our culture. Thankfully, we do a pretty good job at school, curing our children of natural impulses, of wanton behavior.

***

Wanton is an old word, now infused with ill will. It comes from wan, or lack (as in "for want of"), and togen, or pull. The roots literally mean "unpulled." To be wanton means to be unbridled. The word used to mean "sportive or frolicsome, as children or young animals."

As we dive deeper and deeper into a culture of efficiency, a culture dependent on artificial standards and goals, a culture that defines joy on its terms, we have less tolerance for the wild ones.

***

The wild ones got us here:

Isaac Newton (the same man who predicted the Apocalypse may fall as early as 2060, a man obsessed with alchemy and the Bible) "seem[ed] to have shown little promise in academic work. His school reports described him as 'idle' and 'inattentive'."



Einstein, an excellent math and science student despite the myths, believed that “it is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."

The history of science is littered with bright folks sticking things into places where they don't belong, just to see what happens. At this moment, deep underground in Europe, we are trying to find the "God particle" as the Large Hadron Collider bangs together particles at ungodly speeds.

If you already know what's going to happen, what's the point? School is designed to protect the order of things, to keep us safe, to tell us what is going to happen.

Except for science class.

Sparks fly, test tubes erupt and spew off foam and flames, white flies spontaneously generate among rows of peas and carrots that look so incongruous in a government building. Occasionally our high school gets evacuated because of our lambs wandered into the occasionally unpredictable world of science lab.

Stains on the ceiling, cracks in the world, and incident reports in central administration remind us that wilderness exists, even in a building where young lives are pre-planned, curricula set, protocols enforced.

If you teach, guide your lambs to the ledge:

• If you teach language arts, push the wilderness. Read Blake with passion; you grasp that all this is miraculous, and that all this will end. Let your children see you bleed.
  
• If you teach history, let the smells and sounds of battle waft into your room, let fear and hope swirl in your room as it swirls around us in the world. Let your children taste the blood that has spilled.
  
• If you teach physical education, push a child to feel what reckless abandon feels like, when the body is allowed to break from the human forms of chairs and desks and burst into motion. Let the children fall and bleed.

We do not shed enough blood in the classroom, and there are good reasons for that. We fear lawsuits, we fear unruly classrooms, we fear chaos.

I think we most fear the wilderness. Order is seductive, civilization seduces us all. Schools produce the graduates we deserve.

Civilization matters, of course. I like my hot showers, my iPod, my tap water, my clothes. I like order and the daily insulation from death and entropy. I do not plan to paint anarchistic slogans on my walls.

I do hope, though, that I am a little bit more courageous sharing the wild with my students this coming year.

Yes, I know, we adore Blake now--he is safely dead, tucked in a dead and long ago age we call Romanticism. If you can read Blake without wanting to scream and run off naked into a July thunderstorm on the edge of the ocean, you're missing the point.

The Newton page predicting 2060 as our end is from, fittingly, Armageddon Online here.

William Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Beast From the Sea found here.

Thank you to Josie Holford for helping me out with the poets.

Melomel, cosmos, and teaching biology

Yes, I know, same old same old...I write for Leslie.
When I walk, I walk with Leslie.
When I eat, I eat with Leslie.
When I sleep, I sleep with Leslie.
When I share melomel, I share it with Leslie.

This morning I watched a couple of bees trying to suck nectar from pink cosmos flowers. The breeze was topping 25 mph. I suspect the bees were spending more calories than they were getting, but they keep trying to get to the flowers, because that's what bees do.


And now I am writing stories about the bees, because that's what humans do.

And it's all good.

***

I'm drinking peach melomel--peaches from 2009 fermented with honey made from flowers in Michigan. A few dormant yeast rest in the bottom of the bottle, poisoned by the ethanol they created.




I took a walk on the today--October beaches have more carcasses than life. The light is fading, and life fades with it. We forget this when we pal around with modern 21st century humans. Except when we don't, and make a formalized ritual out of dying. Which is OK, I guess, but I think I can manage it on my own. I hope I die under the sun, and I hope I'm alone. But we don't talk about this in polite company.

We started farming about 10,000 years ago. It's why I can sit in a permanent structure sipping wine made from cultured peaches and cultured yeast.

I get a little sad when I reflect on the culture we pretend can be sated. It cannot. I get a little sad when I think about my death, too. Contemplating either, however, reflects an ingrained narcissistic and very human attitude contrary to this life thing.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
Without ever having felt sorry for itself.

-- D.H. Lawrence

***

I like being outside. Even when I think I won't, I always do. I have never regretted a single moment outside. And yet I teach my lambs inside.

I like walking barefoot. I am barefoot almost always, except when in school. I have rarely regretted a moment barefoot (though I have had the occasional spectacular bleed). And yet I wear shoes when I teach.

I like making bread, making beer, growing plants, singing, dancing. I have been sneaking parts of all of those into class. That I have to sneak them into the curriculum instead of trumpeting their presence in my classroom speaks to my cowardice and to my role as a government agent. It also speaks to a very weird social situation where I may talk more to a particular child than her parents.

I teach biology. It's messy. Always has been. It's wet, and chaotic, and real, and scary, and, ultimately, about death.

And life.

***

And what do I do?

I wear shoes in class.
I avoid death so I do not disturb my lambs.

But each and every one of us grows plants.
And every day, every day, I remind my students that the plants make stuff from their breath.
And in a few months, we will eat the fruit from the plants.

I do not, of course, call it communion, and would not for a whole lot of reasons.

But I will say this much. Though I have long given up on the Transubstantiation of the Host (but not the miracle of CO₂ and water to food), and though I will teach what I am hired to teach, I am closer to death than birth, and I will not lie to my students.

Ever.

You want a biology teacher? Someone who will put the logos (λέγω) of life in the classroom?

I'll do it.

A good biology course will change your child. If your child has not changed in my classroom, I've wasted her time.

The photos were taken today in North Cape May.
The cosmos were as alive as I'll ever be, and the crab as dead.

Berries

She wrote, simply, "hi mike."

I assumed I was the Michael she meant, but it does not matter, berries are for all of us, so I am using the photo. The hand belongs to Jessica Pierce, the berries to whichever mouth gets them first.

***

Along my walk to school are several cherry trees--the cherries are ripe now. I get to school with a tongue stained purple.

I found two blueberry bushes three blocks away yesterday. The mulberry trees are about to give up ripe fruit in the next week or two. It's a great time to be a mammal (or a bird).

The cherries are small and dark, full of bitter tannins countering their ridiculous cherriness.

When I eat a cherry, I believe in God. Not the wordy omega John God--I keep Him in my pocket in late autumn. I mean the atavistic, prehistoric sun god, the Ra, the one who sets off week-long dancing and unpardonable ecstasy. The mysterious one. The unknowable one. The one found in a June-warmed cherry.

Most of the year, I can talk myself into anything. In June, I simply cannot talk. No need. Life is bursting around us.

***

When I was still young, I feared dying in spring or summer, feared missing what was to come, dying in the midst of plenty.

Now I fear dying in winter. I do not wish to die, few of us do, but when I do, I want to be surrounded by possibility, by sunlight, by berries.

I want to be the bee found nestled in the flower at dusk, her last day spent exhausted and resting on clover petal, a life well spent. I do not want to die in the hive. Even a 5 star accredited hive full of well-intentioned bees trained to transition me to the next life.

I am not transitioning anywhere. In June I am here, and no other "here's" exist. In June William Blake makes sense. W.B. Yeats makes sense. Even death makes sense.

***

The school year is winding down. And what have we learned?

I live in a good town. I teach in the same town. I am paid through taxes given up by my neighbors. I work hard, and so do they.

The least I can do is teach their children the ecstasy of June berries, pursuing the happiness of sweet stained lips instead of the demands of a petulant man-child dictating education policy several hundred miles away.

The least I can do is show them our local lichen and hawks and bees, instead of just words in books written by strangers who know nothing about the pair of mallard ducks who slumber on the Bloomfield Green.

The least I can do is show children why I still get excited when the sun rises over our town, our gardens, our homes, and why so many of us choose to stay here. The sun worth knowing is not the one in the textbooks, the one of fusion and distance and solar storms.

The sun worth knowing is the one that keeps us alive, the one that we can feel on our faces, the one that pulls the bay over my clams, the one that blesses the cherries with sugar.

If you want to teach science, start with joy. If you cannot tie joy to wild berries, go play on Wall Street or Pennsylvania Avenue. Real education starts on Bloomfield Avenue.

"There is No Natural Religion"

"Then the Lord God formed the man (of) dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living soul."

Dust. Dirt. Matter.

Wise words from an ancient peoples, tribes that wrestled with gods almost as imperfect as humans. Our souls were not ephemeral--they were made of matter, dust from the ground, the earth itself.

I obviously cannot (and would not even if I could) rail on about the supernatural in my classroom--but there's plenty to rail about the natural. Science is about the natural world, what we can perceive, and what we can imagine based on what we observe.

You cannot learn about science--it's a mindset, a way of discerning the world, an attempt to make sense of whatever this whatever is. Our minds have a bad habit of wandering around thought to thought, evading the world that might diminish its powers.

The real dirt, the stuff under your feet, the clay that made us--how much do your children know about it?

While Arne and his cronies push the race to the top, fusing the local into a mythical national standard, I push my lambs back home, back to the earth beneath their feet.

Go get dirty.

***

"He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only."

William Blake

I wanted to get some dirt a couple of days ago to restart my amaryllis. Most of the ground is frozen now, so I dragged in a large planter. I can use the thawed earth for the bulbs.

A few critters will wake up a bit confused, not used to January basements.

Most of the organisms will remain unnoticed by me. A few weeds will start stretching themselves skyward to an imagined sun.

A simple ceramic pot holds a universe too complex for me to grasp. I don't need to grasp it, though--I just plan to borrow it for awhile. When the amaryllis is done flowering, the living earth will be returned to the ground under a July sky.

We get lost in the abstract, in races to the top, in living full lives, in reaching our full potential, in making the big bucks. The more abstract the goal, the more likely you'll walk on concrete to get there. You'll need shoes, good ones. You may need an elevator to get to your office.

The more successful you are, the more layers between you and the dust beneath the city asphalt.

Race to the top? What's the hurry?

***

I want my children to slow down, to smell loamy earth rich with life, to walk barefoot far from the sidewalk. And should they bleed, as they will, their corpuscles will feed the life beneath their feet.

We'll stroll to the bottom, to the muck, and wallow with the ocean of critters who know nothing more than there is to know.

Stemming STEM education

I am a science teacher; the STEM movement gives me job security. If I wanted job security, I would have remained a pediatrician in north Jersey--given the way we treat kids, especially poor kids, I would have always had business.

STEM, of course, stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It has its own coalition, its own journal, and has endeared the folk in power (first Bush, now Obama). It puts the sexay into nerd-dom.

But it's a farce.

People in power (Presidents, Generals, CEOs) would like to remain in power--it takes a special kind of warped person to gain that kind of power. Yes, intelligence matters, but plenty of intelligent people have opted to raise families, get involved in their communities, and resist the pull.

STEM education is all about power. There is no AHEM (Arts, History, English, Music) equivalent. We are not ruling the world with our literature or our concept of self-government or even our music--we are ruling the world with our bombs.

***

My bias is, obviously, science.

Science is not math. Math uses logic, and is rational. Science is stuck with what we can observe. It is often clunky and inelegant, leading to monstrosities like the string theory--we do the best we can, but the universe keeps burping.

Math is a closed universe, a warm school marm opening her bosom to those students who persevere--it makes sense.

Science, well, we got problems. Antimatter, Higgs bosons, cosmic rays, origins--the field is a lovely mess. If you don't like uncertainty, become a mathematician or an engineer.

***

The reason we need more technologists is because of the nearsightedness of technologists before us.

Mind you, I am a bit of a Luddite--I think the automobile has more downsides than benefits. Still, why the emphasis on STEM?

Because we want to improve the economy.
Because we want to remain a superpower.
Because we want to improve the Third World.

You won't hear things like "to become a better person" or "to promote a student's happiness."

I think anyone who has even an iota of a chance to get involved in weaponry capable of destroying lives needs to know Keats, to know Blake.

Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

I'm not playing here. Who made the technologists, the politicians, the money class the gods?
What is our goal in school?
What matters?

***

We revere technology, much more so than science. A child who chases butterflies does not do as well as a child who assumes the role of little engineer, plowing his way through elementary school math, pleasing his teachers and his parents with his adult ways.

We judge success by our grades as children, by our income as adults. We judge our nation's success by our ability to kick international ass, by our rockets, by our military.

We do not judge it by the way we treat our children--if we did, we would be ashamed.
We do not judge it by the way we treat our elderly--if we did we would be ashamed.

***

I teach science. I teach children how to see, how to question, how to predict events based on prior events.

Some of my students will go on to be mathematicians, or engineers, or technologists--a very few will go on to be professional scientists.

Still, more than a handful will spend a few moments each day pondering just what this thing called "universe" really is, pondering mystery, pondering life.

It will not result in riches; it will not result in power. It will, however, make them feel a very real part of this universe, a part of a huge, incomprehensible mystery that makes those of us paying attention joyful.

Maybe even ecstatic. Maybe even a life of sustained ecstasy.

Pure, unadulterated science can help you get there.