Planting time

May.
May light.
May life.

This morning I brushed my hair, as I do every morning--on the brush was the usual mix of my hair and Leslie's. We have been together a long time.

When I pull the roots of a live plant, there's is a resilience, a resistance. Dead roots rip like paper.

The hair on our brush feels more like paper these days--gray paper. Science is about what we can know. Getting older is about recognizing what we cannot know.

***

I planted today, and a wizened robin watched me as I dug holes for tomatoes and basil. The robin feasted on the worms I shoved to the surface. The pale blue eggs in its nest are now insatiable mouths, begging to be fed. The worm dies so the babies may live.

I saw two gulls peck at a freshly dead horseshoe crab today, less than an hour ago. She was huge, perhaps a couple of decades old. She had lain millions of eggs in her lifetime, and now she's dead.

I saw an angler pull up a horseshoe crab today, less than two hours ago. He spoke, I think, Russian, and a little English. His daughter splashed in the bay as he untangled the horseshoe crab in his line.

"OK eat?"
Alas, no--tastes muddy....

I doubt he understood my words, but he knew my tone. I returned the creature to the bay, but not before I showed his daughter it could not hurt me, nor her.

***

Tonight we will eat the flesh of fluke, caught last year. The last thing it tasted was a killie fish, dying on a hook.

We will eat last year's basil, now pesto, grown in soil fed by the compost.

We keep eating and living and loving, but our hair keeps graying, becoming more brittle, as we wander to our eventual end. All of us. So others may live.

How do you teach biology and remain silent?

Bloomfield's sidewalk astronomers catch a galaxy

I advise the Bloomfield High School Astronomy Club--we are sidewalk warriors, fighting the glare of streetlights, security beacons, and gaudy church steeples. A few times each night flashing emergency lights roar past us a few feet away.

We live under 3 runway lengths from Newark Liberty International Airport. (To be fair, runway 4L/22R is about two miles long.) One of our games is called "catch the plane"--students attempt to get the plane in the telescope's field of view, not as easy as it sounds when you're just a few miles from the airport.

I get a handful of kids every clear Tuesday night, chasing Jupiter and the few stars we can see naked eye. Even with the light pollution, though, a peek through an 8" scope changes their view of their universe.

We finally caught the Andromeda Galaxy a few days ago, using an 8" telescope on a manual mount. We have a computerized mount somewhere, but I keep pretending I don't know how to use it. The budding astronomers are getting to know the sky the old-fashioned way, which is to say, they are getting to know the sky.

***

I've been covering cell energetics the past few weeks. How does life get its energy, its "stuff"? I have a time-line in the classroom, a meter for ever billion years.

(OK, the time-line stops at 4.5 billion years ago, just short of Earth's birthday, but I've swept along the imaginary portion of the time-line so many times I'd bet you'd get a dozen kids to testify times that we have a time-line that goes back 14 billion years or so. I really need to get another roll of paper.)

I start at the beginning. I call it our creation story, and it is a story. It has a name--Big Bang model. I'm careful not to call it a theory.

How do we know, Dr. D?

Well, we know this much. The visible galaxies around us keep going farther and farther away. Where will they be next week?

Farther.... (It's amazing to hear kids roll their eyes with their voices)

Where were they last week?

Well, doh, closer

Last year?
A thousand years ago?
A billion years ago?

And they get it, at least they get the impetus for the model. It's our creation story.

I speak carefully, but the words are the right ones--it is a creation story. It's a model. It's a good one, but by acknowledging that we cannot know as a fact (apparently the gold standard in sophomore debate) the origins of our universe keeps their own creation myths safe.

For most of my students, Genesis is the myth they believe in, but most of them could tell you as much about Genesis as they could the Big Bang model. I've taught both, but never in the same place. They're both useful stories. They're both human stories.

Neither explains why an apple tastes so good.

***

The Andromeda galaxy is the only object beyond our galaxy we can see naked eye.

First time I saw it without glass was a week before Hallowe'en, many years ago, right after we took our two youngsters on a haunted hay ride in the Jersey skylands. It hung out there even beyond the stars, a puff of fine mist hovering beyond my known universe.

You will not see Andromeda without a scope in Bloomfield.

When we did find it, we saw an oval smudge. I worried that the kids may feel let down, and started to pontificate about how long it took the light to go from that smudge to our eyes.

I should have stayed quiet--they thought it was cool. They kept going back to look at it.

Besides, turns out I couldn't remember exactly how far the galaxy is--I thought it was a bit over 3 million light years away, but the experts changed their minds and calculated it to be "only" 2.5 million light years away.

And that's the point.

My grandfather was in his late 20's before Edwin Hubble convinced other astronomers that these blobs of stars lay outside our own galaxy. That wasn't so long ago.

And it's hubris to think any of us can know the difference between 2.5 and 3.2 million light years.

***

Cosmology rests on light. Cosmologists study light in its various forms, but unlike biologists, have no need for their noses, for their skin. Cosmologists work with the intangible.

Our modern creation story has been written by a very few men with very big brains who trust their eyes more than their tongues. It is thus written.

The Big Bang model, like Genesis, is ultimately incomprehensible. It's important that my kids know this, at least about the cosmological models. I leave Genesis to their parents.

Once science becomes known "as a fact", once it becomes frozen in mythology, it becomes useless.

Even worse, it becomes boring.

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.

The big bang as mythology

For all the noise about Darwin's descent with modification, a deep understanding of evolution provides a delightful way to hold together just about everything we know in biology without referring to supernatural concepts.

(In my best sotto voce I will happily admit that evolution does not help us at all in grasping how life came to be, and that the cell theory's weakness is that it cannot explain the original cell.)

You don't need to "believe in it"--there's no leap of faith needed--it works well, and unless some as yet fantastic empirical data gets revealed, it's not going to need major tweaking.

(Again in my sotto voce, I gleefully admit such unimaginably fantastic observations may indeed arise, which is why science is so much fun!)

Meanwhile, kids get drilled on the Big Bang Theory with little complaint in these parts, a model which purports to explain the origins of our universe (or at least everything since after the first 30 seconds, when the universe got to be a few millimeters in diameter, which, of course, makes no sense without a reference).

Look in a textbook and read about it--about 14 billion years ago or so (give or take a billion here or there), the universe was a singularity, a point. Something happened--and space started to expand, to exist.

Too many times I have seen this pictured as an explosion--the event is being viewed from the outside by the illustrator. The textbook I've used the past three years has a picture of an explosion among the stars:

The big bang theory says that 12 to 15 billion years ago, an event called the big bang sent matter in all directions. This matter eventually formed the galaxies and planets.

(Holt Science and Technology: Physical Science, 2006, p. 21)

Big problem--there was no outside, there were no directions-- at least according to the model. So who is looking at the "explosion"? God?

The model too often gets oversimplified, taught by folks with insufficient understanding (and I put myself in that category), and as a result we create myths instead of a scientific model.

When viewed this way, the Big Bang model becomes a religious one. Yes, I know the picture is just to help students imagine the event, and yes, I know that the textbooks are not pushing the God thing, but the result is the same. It's bad science.

What do I do? I hedge.

If we accept that the universe is expanding (and we do little in class to show this is so), then it makes sense to think that the universe was "smaller" or "more dense" in the past.

And that's as far as I can take it with "low level" freshmen, without getting into religious (by my understanding) grounds. My kids may leave 9th grade knowing a little less about the common scientific myths we thrust on 14 year old children in our schools, but I think they might have a better grasp on what science means.

I am a science teacher--I teach science.

The artwork is from NASA.

Shucking is a shellfish act

Oysters don't make a lot of decisions, but they do make some. While still larvae the oysters can walk, and do. They can see (well, tell dark from light, anyway). A baby oyster ("spat") finds a spot it likes, ideally snuggled on top of another oyster, then stakes its claim.

Still not impressed?

If the spat doesn't like its new home, it can change its mind, at least for a few days. It detaches and moves.

Soon after it finds its home, the spat loses its foot and its eye, and life becomes much less complicated. Either open the shell and feed, or clam up.

A few years ago, some spats settled on our local jetty. Saturday I gathered a couple dozen grown-up oysters (and a few crabs and mussels as well), shucked them, and ate them. (A tiny, assertive crab no larger than my thumbnail was returned alive to the sea by Leslie.)

My left hand is a bit chewed up from the sharp shells. I bled a bit on the jetty, and a little bit more when shucking them. A couple of the tiny lacerations are slightly inflamed--my white cells will take care of the invaders.

The more I learn about oysters, the harder they are to eat, and the more delicious they become. We have both evolved from common ancestors. We both need oxygen. We both need to eat in order to live.

This oyster connection gets complicated, too complicated to understand. We both are here (well, were here) together. I will join the critters that were in less than a lifetime.

This morning I returned the shells to the bay--a few still held remnants of the sweet (though now rotting) flesh of my meal. That flesh has already been consumed, maybe by a crab, maybe by a lethargic striper just off the beach.

No way to know the particulars. 14 billion years ago something happened. It's still happening.

I don't know why I am part of it, and science won't (can't) tell me. Still, I'm happy to be part of it.

Slurping down live creatures is an abomination in a civilized world, but it makes me feel more alive.

My hope as a science teacher is to get a child as passionate about anything alive as I am about oysters, alive but not human. We think we are special, and we are.

But so is the oyster.

Photo by Leslie, who sees things I can't.

Mr. Spock, please call home....

The New Jersey Board of Education may adopt requirements mandating that all high school students pass Algebra II and Chemistry in order to get their sheepskin.

On Monday, a few high voltage proponents of the change spoke to the NJ Assembly Education Committee.

"We are no longer at the forward front here."

Lucille E. Davy, Commissioner

Ms. Davy is the Commissioner of Education for New Jersey. She majored in mathematics as an undergrad. I assume she once had a handle on Algebra II.

She subsequently went to law school, and is now the New Jersey Commissioner of Education.

Commissioner, when was the last time you needed advanced algebra to tackle your duties?

Requiring all students to take increasingly complex courses simply because we're embarrassed that another state might have more rigorous requirements does not explain why it should be mandatory.

(I could take a cheap ad hominem shot at the redundancy in "forward front" but I fear it might lead to a mandated courses in Rhetoric 101.)

Here's a stunning mathematical fact: one out of five of our high school students are less intelligent than 80% of our student population! About 1 in 2 are below average. You could look it up.

"Business needs this. . . . Business is not
seeing the employees that it needs."

Chris Emigholz
Director of Education Policy, NJBIA

Mr. Emigholz is a lobbyist, a registered governmental affairs agent for New Jersey--Number 49-14 if you're interested. He works for the New Jersey Business and Industry Association.

He talks a lot. He processes numbers. He politics. He gets things done.

Let's look in his briefcase. Notepads, yes, fancy pen or two, lots of documents, a few scattered CD's, maybe even a laptop computer (or two), business cards, a Blackberry Gold, and, oh look, some mints, and, whoops...how'd did that get in there?

What you won't find, however, is a TI-83 Plus Graphing Calculator.

He doesn't need one.

Yes, Mr. Emigholz, business is not "seeing the employees that it needs"--hard to find folks who can afford to work minimum wage and raise a family here in the Garden State--but jamming every child with algorithms isn't going to make them more likely to work for less than a liveable wage.


Now, before my education friends jump all over me, I am all for pushing kids to their limits, encouraging them to explore all kinds of worlds that can only be seen through mathematics. (I must be getting strident, I keep italicizing words.) I've been accused of holding my lambs to standards, and I growl a lot in the classroom. We get things done.

Still, I managed to get through several jobs (stevedore, lab tech, warehouse checker, pediatrician, and, by golly, science teacher) and not once have I ever needed to whip out Algebra II for work. I will sometimes play with it for fun, though....shhhh.


(I did use a little chemistry when working at Laird and Company bottling apple jack and other bottled pleaures, but I took chemistry in high school because I loved it.)

If you want a child to study something perceived as irrelevant, something most adults, even successful ones, cannot do, simply to increase a potential pool of engineers who will compete with each other and keep labor costs down, then shame on you.

Here's some math for you--there are over 1.1 billion Indians alive today. China has over 1.3 billion people.

India has over 340 million kids under 15 years old. As of 2000, the United States had less than 60 million in the same age bracket. Unless you accept eugenics, the only way we're going to catch up with absolute Indian brainpower is start a Swiftian campaign of pregnancy early and often. (It would put a whole new spin on sex education.)

Would that be acceptable, Mr. Emigholz?

I have a better idea--let's mandate a logic course. Maybe then our children will make better choices than we did on who to empower in government, and no longer tolerate what passes for "reasonable" discourse in politics today.

Quotes are from "An official call for tougher curricula" in yesterday's
Philadephia Inquirer, written by Rita Giordano

Clams and corpses

Last night we met an old friend. His dead brother lay in an open casket just a few feet away. He was a brilliant, and more important, a kind man.

I had an observation today--I was not in my best shape, wakes rattle me a bit (as they should), but the kids, perhaps not as brilliant, were every bit as kind, and we muddled through.

Kindness won't make you wealthy, and it won't make you powerful.



I've never heard a teacher say "Get good grades, or else you won't be as kind!"
I have heard teachers say get good grades or you won't be rich.

I never heard a teacher say "Go grab a rake and harvest some clams. The seas will provide."
I have heard teachers use clammers as examples of what happens to bad students.
I misinterpreted their advice, and worked hard to be a good student.

***

I like to clam. The more I learn about these critters, the closer I become to them, and each clam I pull from the mud now tells me a story.

Slaughtering critters with stories to tell is hard, but I do it anyway. They might even taste better now that I hear their stories.

I count their rings.
This one is four, that one forty. The tide rises, the tide falls.

I search for their scars.
Anything alive for a decade or more will have scars, scars I never saw just a year ago.

I stare at the impossibly purple marking inside their shells, a rich purple deeper than the thickness of the shell, swirling patterns of beauty never meant to be seen.

If we learned about clams at all, it was measured in tons of imports or exports, noted in dull grey tables found in old social studies textbooks measuring the wealth of a nation by how quickly it can convert its resources into trinkets.

Manhattan was bought for $24 from a people who used wampum to barter, the shells of quahogs, and we were young children, so we believed we earned the land because we were smart and educated and not Indian. We used paper, not shells.

The inside of a quahog shell is mesmerizing in its beauty; the flesh is high in protein, iron, and calcium. Fresh clams taste as sweet as June honeysuckle.

Knowing that, though, won't make you more employable. It might even make you less.

***

What is the purpose of public education? How does the happiness of a reasonably successful clammer compare to the wealth of a Wall Street trader?

Accumulating wealth matters to the immortal. Last night, again face to face with death, a gray corpse tried to tell me something. I can pretend I did not hear what he had to say.

I have 48 minutes a day to spend with each child, in a classroom filled with other children.
I have 48 minutes a day to make a difference.

If I knew I only had a few weeks left with my students, what would I teach them about the clam?

(He said you are not special, you will die too.)

Destodgifying science

The holidays are approaching--this is a plug for a book that may change your young scientist's view of science. It may wreak havoc on her ambitions in high school, but I think it is healthy in the long run.

And it's not written for kids. It's a grown up book written by grown ups for grown ups.




Nature may be the finest science journal in the English speaking world.

Darwin, Einstein, Francis and Crick hung out there. Stories about the generosity of urchins compete with tales of the follies of man. It refuses to sanitize science, leaving in the warts and foibles as we (an inclusive "we" for anyone with functioning sense organs and curiosity) stumble upon patterns in our universe.


The first issue back in November, 1869 opened with a William Wordsworth quote:

To the solid ground Of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye.

In 1941, Einstein gives jumps in when he contrasts science and religion:

It would not be difficult to come to an agreement as to what we understand by science. Science is the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thorough-going an association as possible. To put it boldly, it is the attempt at the posterior reconstruction of existence by the process of conceptualization.

It condemns high falutin' language, insisting from its inception in the language of science be intelligible:

"The Priests of Science," he [Philosophus] said, "must consent to use the vernacular, before they will ever make a profound impression upon the heart of humanity."

[Philosophus was a young man who loved science in a fable penned by a Nature editor back in 1869]

Last Christmas I got A Bedside Nature: Genius and Eccentricity in Science 1869-1953 from Leslie with the note "this looks like fun."

It's a collection of articles, essays, reviews, letters, illustrations and whatever other form of thought found in Nature put together by Walter Gratzer, and it belongs on your bookshelf.

Turns out it's big fun. Cheap fun. You can get the softcover version (easier to read in the bathtub) for less than $10 including shipping.

And if you're feeling too cheap for that, wander over to the Nature site, where they are giving away knowledge for free.

Yep, free. You don't even have to give them an email address.

Who says the Victorian era is dead?

The Queen Victoria photo is from the London Borough of Richmond Upon Thames;
the logo is from the Nature home of the journal linked above.

I do not earn any money from any clicks to anywhere--go find yourself a copy of this before it disappears.

What I know now....

If I am going to pretend to be an edublogger, I need to toss an explicit post on teaching now and again.

I've been observed 3 times this past week; either I'm wowing them or they're looking for the bodies. This is my third year. I'm up for tenure.

One of the tragicomedies of American education is the tenure system. This year an innocent comment misinterpreted by a 14 year old can get me looking for a commercial clamming license. Next year, once tenured, anything short of a felony in the classroom (and even then it's even odds) won't warrant the time needed to get me booted.

So I enjoy the parade. Worst comes to worst, I sling a stethoscope around my neck and start succoring the afflicted again.

So, a list. Bloggers love lists.

Here's what I know as a 3rd year teacher I could not possibly have known as a greenhorn.


1. No matter how much you sweat you put into a lesson, it is not the students' obligation to appreciate it.

We've all been there. We put together the lesson of the century, a lesson that would make John Dewey misty eyed.

You spent $126 on the materials.
You have an anticipatory set that could waken your long-dead great grandmother.
You spent 27 hours preparing the lesson, the glow of the monitor highlighting your maniacal grin as you fantasize about the anticipated eagerness of your lambs eating up your lesson.

You forego tickets to the 7th game of the Rangers/Devils Stanley Cup playoffs.
You turn down Willie's invitation to travel for a week on the Honeysuckle Rose.
You even stop playing solitaire.

You are a freakin' professional!

And the kids yawn. In your face.

Welcome to teaching. It's not about you.

2. Stay out of the teacher's lounge.

No, really. It's a trap. If you need to complain, you need to get out.

It's a great field. You get to teach children. You mold future citizens. You get to see a side of children even parents never see.

It's a gift, an honor, a raison d'etre. ( Feel free to add the circonflexe--I'm a Luddite.)

It's easy to complain about the hours (no longer than a laborer picking grapes) or the respect (no less than the security guard sitting in the lobby of your school) or the students (you want to work with humans, you're going to get human behavior) or the pay (hey, I make more per hour as a teacher than I did as a doc).

The lounge kills hope. You need hope to teach.

3. Textbooks are like crutches...wonderful if you need them

Textbooks can save your life (but not your soul) that first year, when even the mere act of micturition requires three weeks of planning.

It gets better by the third year. Really. So much better you can now pee without consulting your calendar.

Textbooks are written by committees. Students don't need committees. They need you. Wean yourself.

If you don't believe this, go join a committee.

(A confession: I still spend too much time using textbooks--I'm working on it.)

4. Teach to the child, not the test.

Turns out the test just isn't that good, at least not around here. And I hear from other bloggers, it's not so go around there, either.

Ben Wildeboer (Sustainably Digital) notes that lousy tests "perhaps do serve a valuable purpose...."

When I start to feel myself get stressed about falling behind and not going over all the required content, remembering that the standardized tests will be poorly written and not do a great job of assessing the standards makes me feel better about not covering everything I’m “supposed” to.
Ben Wildeboer

The child will remain reasonably intact for the next few decades, barring a motor vehicle accident or HIV, or one of the amazingly rare reasons young adults die (but get great press when they do).

Tests, on the other hand, change all the time.

New superintendent? Reform.
New governor? Reform.
New President? Reform.

Kids are fairly stable--a couple of billion years of evolution are not influenced by the thoughts of the newest Administrator in Charge. Keep things in perspective.

5. Use what works, ignore what doesn't.

During my formative years, I had a couple of diametrically opposed adjunct professors. One was an elementary school teacher by day, the other a principal.

(Despite having a career in the "real world", I didn't go the alternate route. I took education classes before I tortured young adults as a student teacher. Nothing--and I say that without apologies--nothing can replace the student teaching experience for folks arrogant enough to believe they can teach.)

The principal had the proper accent and a better command of the language. She preened, she preached.

The teacher knew her stuff, but was not nearly as polished. Here's what she said.

If it works, use it. Put posters over the door to prevent snoopy administrators from peeking in, play the game, but teach your students. That's why you're there.

Never forget you matter.

Not all folks grasping the administrative brass ring are in it for themselves, but enough of them are that you need to interpret motives.

So I teach.

I see what works, and (painfully) dissect what doesn't. Tomorrow is another day. Keep plugging, keep analyzing, keep working, and keep your sense of perspective next to your Excedrin.

6. Keep your educational philosophy within an arm's distance.

I was warned.

There will be days when you wonder why you quit your day job to become a public school teacher position. There will be days when others wonder the same thing about you.

And there will be day's when your biggest doubter will be yourself.

So write that philosophical statement. Read it. Soak it in. Allow yourself to believe it matters. It does.

Keep it handy.

Read it again in November, when the words are blurred by tears, by sweat.

The day you stop believing what you do matters is the day you should quit.

7. Goal directed exhaustion is OK at times (if you don't make it a habit).

You chose this field.
Your field matters.
A hundred years from now, what you do today can matter.
Make it matter.

A few colleagues (usually found in the lounge) may tell you that you are working too hard, that you will learn the hard way, that you will burn out. A (very) few will even brag about never bringing home work as they physically fly out the door 10 minutes after the last bell, a door they flew out of spiritually years ago.

They're right--a lot of us will flame out. Honeybees work themselves to death, but they do worthwhile work.

You are going to die, too. Might as well do something special while you're here.

The Honeysuckle Rose shot is from an avid Willie fan, Linda, innkeeper of the
Stillisstillmoving blog. Wonderful pictures there!

The smoking teacher, the crutch factory, and tired doc pics are from the Life photo collection available at Google.

Don't be a stranger

Pretty good chance I'm going to be there!

Anyone else here going?

Teaching tides

Slate gray sky above, slate gray water to my knees. The water's still warm enough to wade in, and the tide was creeping in over the clam bed.

The few splashes of color--a jumping bluefish, a few scoters scooting by--looked pixellated against the dull light.

I scratched up enough clams for dinner,and a few more for my Auntie Beth, then paddled a longer route home.

It was a gorgeous morning.

***

Clamming lets you see things you forget you care about. Clams are in no hurry to escape; the only urgency is the rising tide.

Humans are very good at assimilating information, finding patterns, creating a more perfect vision of the world. Tide heights vary over a 19 year period, depending on where the moon and sun happen to be, and you can find nice graphs with smooth, curves that even supermodel Heidi Klum could envy.

We teach about tides in school, of course. Understanding tides requires grasping geography and gravity, winds and water, mathematics and models (of a different sort).

I confess I do not fully "get" tides, despite a decent education, but I'm going to talk about them anyway.

***

Tides around here happen about twice a day. Tides change fastest between the peak highs and lows, or mid-tide.

You can watch the tides rise and fall. Literally. And while the tidal flow does, indeed, peak around mid-tide, it does not rise as smoothly as your textbook might suggest.

I clam at the edge of water. The edge rises perceptibly as I work. The edge's personality changes over the couple of hours I rake.

It creeps up stealthily, smoothly, for a few minutes, then takes tiny staccato steps for a few more. It pauses. It retreats for an instant, then surges a bit more.

The edge does not define the tide. It's jerky journey up towards the debris left by the last high tide reminds me what we cannot know.

In school we teach the big ideas, the grand illusions, and we lose touch with the local.

Humans define the tide on a grander scale than a sandy patch of Richardson Sound lying next to an abandoned railroad. We can know averages, we can know tendencies, and we can make wonderful predictions based on our grand scheme of things. People who can make good predictions can make a lot of money.

Still, to know the tide, to understand something about it, you need to watch it push the edge of the sea, washing away the footprints of your feet.

Graph and photo lifted from NOAA; the caption for the photo reads:
"Taking boat for a walk over the mudflats. If the tide goes out and you anchor high, you might have to do this."

Capitalism and biology class

Last spring I was approached by a very enthusiastic history teacher about collaborating on a short essay questioning whether capitalism can be used to "save" the environment.

"Capitalism" is one of those words that evoke as much emotion as sense, and the word limit precluded us from adequately defining capitalism, but if (a huge if) you think that the sign of a healthy economy is an ever-increasing gross domestic product, and this growth is dependent on expanding use of natural resources, well, then maintaining a healthy environment is a pipe dream.

An aside: the concept of GDP was developed by Simon Kuznets in the 1930's; it was not designed to be used as a measure of economic health:

Even Mr. Kuznets, the inventor of the GDP, forewarned the U.S. Congress in the 1930s of the inherent flaws and weaknesses of GDP figures. Among other things, he stated that "the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income as defined by the GDP."

My part in the paper was simply to acknowledge that the land base has a limit of sustainable extraction.

Now I happen to like Adam Smith, but what we call "free market" today represents Smith the way Gitmo represents the Constitution. When Adam Smith talked about the "invisible hand," he didn't mean dumping waste in the dead of night.

So what does this have to do with teaching science?

Ultimately anything of real value to humans depends on biology, and more specifically on the land. You can't eat gold, and oil is just a delayed gratification version of photosynthesis.

Splicing genes is cool, fun, and economically lucrative, but ultimately even the super-duper efficient plant produced depends on sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide.

***

When we wrote the piece together, I had a tiny bit of trepidation--too many people confuse an economic philosophy (capitalism) with our form of government, a republic.

Not espousing capitalism (in its practiced form here) is not tantamount to espousing communism. (A pre-1940s essentially agrarian economy worked in the past--call it agrarian capitalism if it makes you twitch less.)

***

We talk about Thomas Malthus in biology class--understanding Malthus helps us grasp Darwin. As it turns out, industrialized populations do not continue to expand in population, but our use of natural resources appears insatiable.

The result? Take a look around.

• Global warming ('nuff said)
  
• Ocean acidification could lead to disastrous consequences
• Biological magnification resulting in toxins in human breast milk: "DDT (the banned but stubbornly persistent pesticide famous for nearly wiping out the bald eagle), PCB's, dioxin, trichloroethylene, perchlorate, mercury, lead, benzene, arsenic."

I do not want to frighten our students into numb complacency--we have Madison Avenue for that.

What do I want?
Connections.

Sun + dirt + water + carbon dioxide = food.

Plants serve as the intermediaries, of course, but once you get the connections, you realize you have a vested interest in the pieces.

Global economics is all about controlling the dirt and the water.

Got to give the global capitalists credit, though--we got more carbon dioxide than we know what to do with.

(And, of course, any of us participating in the economy plays a role.)

Our school has nearly 2000 students from all walks of life, with families from all over the globe. (One of our problems with the NCLB is that no matter how fine our institution might be, a child who arrived from Greece 2 months ago is not going to ace a test written in English.)

But even a child who has just a rudimentary grasp of English is connected to the earth. At some level we all know this.

Basic science lets a child believe what he already knows in a culture that rewards people for believing otherwise.

Did I mention that this history teacher happens to have an Arabic name? It's nice when folks
at least a generation younger than me show me
how to behave.

Photos: coral reef from the NOAA, the Adam Smith drawing floating around all over the place, the Constitution, well, no one is going to bother me about that. And credit Wendell Berry for agrarianism. If you believe in prophets, and even if you don't, Wendell Berry is the closest thing to a living prophet we have in this hemisphere.

William Blake, J. S. Bach, and science

This post is in flux. Every time I read William Blake, my whole universe is in flux.

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, opening of Auguries of Innocence

I may open the school year with this. "Heaven" is one of those words that can get science teachers in trouble, though the truly religious parts are "infinity" and "eternity".

It fits the curriculum test--

STANDARD 5.1 (SCIENTIFIC PROCESSES)
Descriptive Statement: Students best learn science by doing science. Science is not merely a collection of facts and theories but a process, a way of thinking about and investigating the world in which we live. This standard addresses those skills that are used by scientists as they discover and explain the physical universe-skills that are an essential and ongoing part of learning science.

NJ Core Curriculum Standards

If get called to defend it, I'll call Richard Feynman to the bench. He starts at 0:25. I've been pushing this video on the science staff at our high school (though not terribly successfully):



Science leads to awe.

I am nominally a Methodist, though raised a Catholic. I know the awe felt when the senses are heightened by incense and music, by Communion, by a community's search for something beyond what we can describe.

(Play "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" and I'm ready to worship the sun, the earth, even a freakin' Doritos corn chip.)

My problem with "awe" in the organized religious sense is its artificiality, in the truest sense of the word--awe induced by an act of man.

Not that that's such a bad thing, as long as it ends there. If I want to spend the next 17 years listening to Bach while trembling in a corner wasting away, feeling awe, that's not the worst choice I can make.

Still, it's a construct, a human construct (as is science), based strictly on culture, which science is not. If I use the awe induced by Bach to push an idea outside of man (say, um, God), well, that's hubris.

The great faith in science is that there is order, and in that sense, J.S. Bach reflects that. Science rests on empirical evidence, and try as we may, empirical evidence keeps exceeding our imagination.

The awe in science, though, goes beyond that--the order extends as far as human imagination, faithfully farther. It's why science is so frightening, no matter what kind of faith we have.

Infinity is not comprehensible, but as far as any one of us can go, the order is there.

Reductionism has its place, and no doubt my day is a bit more comfortable because of technology that owes its existence to reductionism, but science ultimately cleaves even the reductionist.

***

I went clamming yesterday on a tidal flat that stretched a few hundred yards out.

Hundreds of tide pools surrounded me, each with a different story unfolding before the tide swelled in again. I studied this one (a tiny hermit crab chasing one twice its size, perhaps after its borrowed home), I studied that one (a striped fish frantically trying to escape my grasp, burying itself completely in sand).

The stories are happening now, in the dark, a new tide arising.

"God does not play dice with the universe."

Albert Einstein

Einstein's "God"was not a personal God, though there's some confusion on this issue; that's not the point here anyway.

On the tidal flats, in a puddle outside, on your own skin, these stories are happening, an incomprehensible web of life, and if you let yourself observe it, with all your senses (and not through the someone else's eye), you will be overwhelmed.

William Blake got this. Auguries of Innocence appears paradoxical when read inside, under incandescent light, with no breeze and no sunlight.

Recite Blake outside* on a tidal mud flat in August, and the paradox dissolves. Science is religious in the lower care "r" sense--it acknowledges the mystery while trying to put things together. Not sure I can ask for a better church than the decaying mud on the Delaware bay.

*Wendell Berry uses the same point about reading the Bible--it makes a whole lot more sense reading it outside than it does inside. I'm not going to put my neck on the chopping block here taking a stance on the Bible, but Berry's right as far as he goes here.

What's life?

We open the year talking about what science means, then roll into the definition of life.

This is my third year, which means I'm up for tenure, so advertising this might not be in my best interests, but I am not sure what the words "science" or "life" mean.

High school texts will list 6 or 7 characteristics of anything alive:

• composed of one or more cells (highly organized)
  
• can reproduce
• change over time (evolve)
• respond to stimuli (boo!)
  
• maintain homeostasis (well, try to anyway--we all die eventually)
• need energy/metabolism (gobble gobble)
• growth and development

I am the only one in the department that thinks viruses should be considered alive, but they do fail the "composed of one or more cells" part. If you want to go by high school textbooks, well, I have no argument.

Tells you a thing about high school texts.

Using that kind of thinking, though, millions of Americans are not alive since they are infertile.

I think most people would consider sperm or eggs alive, though each without the other cannot reproduce either.

I'm sure it unnerves a few kids to start the year unclear what even constitutes life, but a big part of science is recognizing its limits.

***

If you accept that sperm and eggs are alive, then life does not start at conception. It just is.

If you accept the cell theory, then life, for whatever reason, started happening, and all life since then goes back to some primordial event leading to the first cell.

(Seems to me if the conditions were right for life to start at some arbitrary "here", then little reason to suppose it didn't start at some arbitrary "there" as well.)

These kinds of discussion in the classroom can be dangerous to one's teaching career, but if you're truly interested in defining life, sooner or later a wise child is going to ask the impertinent question.

Until a wise child does, I do not know how I will answer it. I hope I do not just punt.

***

Last year I spent a few moments in class discussing alive, dead, and non-living (in the sense of never alive). I facetiously argued that something is alive if it can eventually be dead, but it was 1st period (which starts at 7:45 AM), and tangents like this are (relatively) safe when most of the adolescent world is still fighting off the delta waves of sleep.

I could have brought it up in 4th period, but my frontal lobe kicked in, and I like my job. So I didn't.

This year I will.

***

Fire has a lot of characteristics of life. It doesn't have cells, true, and development is arguable, but I had fun when I asked the class to convince me fire is not alive.

The danger in these kinds of discussions is that someone goes home and complains that their idiot science teacher thinks fire is alive. (I like to play with fire.)

Still, any discussion at home about science that presents the discipline as something more than a recitation of facts makes me smile.

***

We use the Holt, Rinehart, and Winston text Modern Biology in CP science here in Bloomfield. It's nice and thick with lovely pictures, and it's not bad.

On page 13 (oooh, unlucky number), it talks about science as a process. In two paragraphs.

Two freakin' paragraphs.

Oh, it goes on to spend a few pages about the scientific method (and more on that in a future post), but science as process warrants just two paragraphs. About 150 words.

In those "about 150 words" it covers two major principles of faith in science. It also manages to throw in a Greek myth about Zeus and lightning.

The textbook is over 1100 pages long.

It spends about 2 inches of space on the faith in science.

Faith is a funny word--it can get you kilt in public education.

***

Kudos to Holt for at least mentioning the faith in science. The editors did not, of course, use the word "faith"--you need to sell these books in Texas, after all.

Here are the lines:

When trying to solve a puzzle from nature, all scientists...accept that there is a natural cause to solve that puzzle.

A second principle of science is uniformity. Uniformity is the idea that the fundamental laws of nature operate the same way at all places at all times.

"Natural" is a two dollar word. Really. We need to spend time I class talking about what it means.

Uniformity requires faith. Not belief--if we ever find that it's not true, scientists will drop the concept like a hot potato. But it's truly unprovable.

Science is a philosophy. Even "hard" science.

***

Some kids will scribble in their notebooks: "Science...philosophy...faith" with no more thought than I gave the mosquito that tried to suck my blood today, before I severely reduced its chances of reproduction.

Others will text their friends, electronically rolling their eyes at a madman ranting about life.

But one or two (or maybe more) will perk up. They have in the past.

I have faith in uniformity. I know a few will perk up this September as well.

All the pictures are from the National Archives--EXCEPT the sperm and egg (Wikipedia Commons) and the lightning (C. Clark, NOAA'S National Severe Storms Laboratory)--I'd be much obliged if some techo-savvy reader could show me how to get captions under photos without disrupting the text flow.

Why I Teach: modeling atoms

I teach physical science. Officially it's Precollege Preparatory Physical Science now, was Integrated Science 1 last year, and Career Options the year before that. I should start a pool on what it will be called next year.

It's really just science for freshman who have no academic aspirations, science for the "low levels." ("Just science" is the best kind.)

Two years ago I had two brilliant students in the inclusion class. Their minds moved far faster than mine, and faster than can be tolerated in a public school setting. If either survives high school, they will do fine, and I suspect they will do fine even if neither graduates.

Atoms are mostly space. We say this, but it's mostly words to students, words they will memorize long enough to fill in a bubble with a Number 2 pencil, then forget. This kind of ability will get you far today, as long as no wisdom is required (and it rarely is).

The classic textbook diagram misrepresents the space--the book would have to be the size of a football field to do the atom justice. It's also a generation or two removed from the electron cloud model (never mind quantum field theory). I learned to be careful when discussing pictures of models--some children get upset when they learn that the book "tells lies."

Science is stories framed within empiricism.

I took the class into the hallway to get a sense of how much space is in an atom. I used a wheat berry as the nucleus. Several students volunteered to carry electrons. Each was given a grain of sand from a beach in Cape May, sent to me by my cousin when sister died. I told the class this.

My electrons were buzzing around the hallway--every now and again I needed to remind a sleepy student to keep moving. We needed about 150 feet, but the hallway was too short. Still, 100 feet between a wheat berry and a grain of sand leaves a lot of space.

The brightest child in class grasped his head and asked me to stop. "This can't be science!" It was too much for him.

This is why I teach.

Big Ideas: "One Living Filament"

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

Erasmus Darwin. The Temple of Nature. 1802.

Charles Darwin thoughts descended with modification from his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a brilliant thinker with a nutty (but entertaining) edginess.

Erasmus believed E conchis omnia ("everything from shellfish") strongly enough to write it on his carriage, perhaps the first man to plaster the evolution "debate" on his vehicle.

(Putting a Darwin fish on your car's bumper is not quite the same thing--co-opting the ichthys symbol hardly advances scientific thought, and given the ichthys' history, I can understand why folks might be upset by it.)

I plan to infuse the concept of "Big Idea" throughout my lessons this year--no sense pounding away at the minutiae if come June my students still believe we descended from chimpanzees, that water is alive, and plants are not.


Today's big idea:
Everything alive here on Earth today is just as "evolved" as everything else alive. Humans are remarkably adapted to the environment, but so are earthworms, horseshoe crabs, petunias, and jelly fish. Each organism alive is the new, shiny latest model, all part of "one living filament."

But Mr. Dr. Doyle, we're more evolved than earthworms!

I'd love to toss the word "evolution", but it's the language we use, so I'm stuck. And we tell ourselves how special we are (and I agree we are), but miss the larger point of how special all life is (though to even entertain such thoughts aloud in a public classroom borders on "school sponsorship of a religious message").

So Mr. Dr. Doyle, you mean to tell me that earthworm is as intelligent as me?
No, not at all--just that the earthworm has been evolving every bit as long as you have, and that at some point you have a common ancestor.

You mean earthworms evolved from chimpanzees, too?
Um, no...

The concept of descent with modification forms the backbone of biology today--if I can get the concept across early, say by October, with a class full of 14 year old skeptics (a good thing), then maybe by February, when DNA gets tossed around a bit, a few of my kids will have the "Aha!" moments that make teaching (indeed, life) worthwhile.