Your screen or your knife?

An essential quality of technology, from the spear to Skype, is action at a distance. Technology enables us to have an effect on people and things far away. In general, the more advanced the technology, the further away it is able to impose an effect. 

Doug Hill, author of Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology

Our lives cost the lives of others. That's always been true, and will be so long as we breathe.

Technology allows us to forget this.
Technology encourages us to forget this.

Experts spew on about a global community, but their hands never touch the blood and feces of the life around them. They barely touch their own.

You want every child "connected"? So do I.
It's what's at the other end of the connection that matters.

I have killed other living things, deliberately, but not slowly.
I have slaughtered animals with stones, with knives, with awareness.

We pretend the machines bring us knowledge.
We confound information with awareness.

I wish we spent as much time teaching a child how to use a knife as we do a Chromebook.

I could live without my computer a lot easier than living without my knife.
Modified from a few years ago.

Trumped up pedagogy

"No, no, no, I am not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed." 

January 14, 2018

President Trump gets under my skin; if you're here, he probably gets under yours, too.

Many teachers mumble to themselves, and occasionally to each other, how gullible "those" people must be to support him. How can anyone believe what the man says when the evidence screams otherwise?

And then we shuffle off to our classrooms, arms full of papers and books, pockets full of markers, and do what we do. We teach using the best, the very best research education has to offer. And we do it wrong.

We cater to learning styles, we worship the learning pyramid, we tell kids to go figure out this world on their own.

All of it nonsense, but belief (or pretending to believe) is part of the American cult of pedagogy.

Every week or so I immerse myself in the Trump radio universe--I listen to the hosts, I listen to the callers, listen to the myths and the closed loops of reasoning, and it starts to generate an internal rhythm that makes sense. Throw the sense of community in it (and make no mistake, the nationalist/racist movement deep in our bowels depends on this) and this stuff is like cocaine to caged rats.

We do the same thing in education.

A little self awareness goes a long way.

Of course he's a racist....but you might be, too.

Bugs, children, and compliance

"Disobedience is not an issue
if obedience is not the goal."

Daron Quinlan via Teacher Tom

The Liberty Science Center was crowded this past Tuesday--tribes of human larvae were running, laughing, pushing through the exhibits, while other organisms prowled and stewed in their tiny glass homes.

I stumbled upon a small glass cage teeming with Australian spiny leaf insects. Most were munching  leaves on twigs, a few were just hanging out, but one was standing on the topmost twig, stretching upwards as though trying to reach the sky.

Photo by Thomas Bresson, CC 3.0

I like watching critters, and this one looked interesting, so I sat down on the small bench next to the terrarium to watch.

The top of the terrarium was covered with a transparent plate, probably acrylic, clearly solid. I could see this one tapping the acrylic.

And then I realized what this critter was doing. After each tap, it moved its foot slightly over, tapped, moved again, tapped, then again, tap, along a line perpendicular to its body. When it reached across as far as it could, the critter then stretched a little more, and started tapping another line.

By the time I left, the insect was fully stretched out, precariously clinging to the twig by just three legs, reaching, searching, aware of something beyond the cramped cage.

I got kids like this in school. Not many. Most have stopped trying to find the gaps, because we knock them down pretty much every time they try. Look at your procedures, look at your school policies, look at your schedule, look at what you are asking your students to do day after day after day.

If one of my lambs keeps tapping the glass, no need to ask why. I'd rather know why the others have stopped trying.

Yes, I am romanticizing and anthropomorphizing a bug.

Maybe it's time we anthropomorphize our students as well.

High tech clamming, or why it's OK to reject the latest edugadgets

I went clamming yesterday, a dreary mid-April day, wearing shorts and sandals, while bundled up above the waist in multiple layers, anchored by an Irish sweater knit on the Aran Islands, made for weather like this.

I used a simple clam rake that has worked well for years, designed to scritch the bay's muck, allowing me to get enough clams to feed a few folks for a day or two.

A bit after I started, soon after the tide had turned, another clammer showed up in a full neoprene wetsuit, sporting a commercial bull rake.

"How many you'd get," amiably asked.
"Enough."

He wasn't satisfied with that, and ambled over to my bucket to see. He let me know he got five in the short time he was there. His bull rake did work faster. It requires a bit more strength, and does a bit more damage. If "enough" is your goal, the bull will get you there faster, but since my goal is clamming, something I love to do, I have no need to save time.

"Aren't you cold?"
"No--a bit warmer than February."

He looked at me askew, looked down at his full neoprene wetsuit, then looked back at me and unzipped the top. "Come to think of it, I'm a bit too warm."

Now there have been days when I would have envied his fancy clamming clothes, but today was not one of them. My old wool sweater was made for days like this.

I wished him luck, put back the smallest and the largest clams I had  back into the mud at the edge of the bay (a practice I started years ago--that way I know there will always be clams), and walked away.

***

"i" in iPad does not stand for "infant."
Image by Steve Paine via Flickr

Before I adopt any new technology (and clam rakes and neoprene both count), I want to know if adopting it will, in any way, reduce increase overall happiness or well-being, for me, and perhaps even more importantly, everybody else.

Not my efficiency.
Not my net worth.
Not my students' test scores.
Not my attractiveness.
Not my credit score.

Not anything beyond a very basic question first:

Will this tool improve joy?

The question is a difficult one for many of us, not so much because our limited imaginations do not foresee the consequences to both us and others down the line, though that is an issue--rather, too many of us no longer allow ourselves to live for joy.

Or even know what joy means anymore.

If you know what you want, you're a lot more likely to find it.

Dayeinu

13th century Seder, via Treehugger

I went to a Seder this week, my first one. I was a little bit nervous, at first--I was raised Irish (OK, Roman) Catholic culture that will not share Holy Communion with outsiders

I was welcomed by all, not unexpected, but still nice.

I read (and learned) from the Haggadah, something I did not know even existed a week ago.

Turns out Judaism (at least my brief exposure to it) values questioning (the Haggadah) over education (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine), and (dare I say) kids over priests.

I think I am now a better teacher for it...

(Oh, and one more thing--turns out I love gefilte fish and matzoh stuffing.)

Virtual reality, virtual republic

The technical side of virtual reality is catching up with a small but powerful culture of humans that has long been disconnected from the world. The word "grounded" has lost meaning. 

It is hard to demonize people you do not know, hard to steal from your neighbors, hard to poison a well we all share, because, at heart, it is hard to be unkind. It's hard-wired in our DNA.

For many of us, the last conscious remnants of our connection to the earth, to our natural cycles, is found where we worship. Religions, for the most part, are tied to the cycles of seasons and sun. The ancient stories remind us we eat, we breathe, we age, we die. Dust to dust.

The ancient stories only work if you remember we are tied to the earth,the air, and the water, and that everything alive is tied to each other.

Words make sense only when words retain their meaning. Words retain their meaning when we retain our senses. We need to feel the warmth of the sun and our clan, taste and smell the foods made by grandma's hands, shared it with the youngest, hear the music of our voices, see the light in each other's eyes.

Connecting to the world bring us joy--just watch a young child plain a May puddle. Words without a connection to this world literally make no sense.

And yet here we are, worshiping false idols who spew words with no meaning, playing to deep, unfounded fears, promising to return us to a world that never existed.

Take a good look (and sniff) around--get grounded again.
Continue the joyful (and hard) work of being human.

AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti, via SiliconBeat

Dear (White) Teachers, revisited

If you want a handle on all this, read Jose Vilson's This Is Not A Test.

A couple of days ago I was asked by Valerie Strauss if she could share my previous post with a link back, and I said sure, while joking to Leslie that we better be ready for a brick through the window.

It has not been my most read piece by a long shot, but it has hit a nerve, as it was meant to, but not the right one.

Part of the problem of removing a blog post from its crib is that it loses context. The WaPo article uses a different photo than I did--leading off a post meant to push the discussion of race with a young man wearing scowling at the reader pushes a few of us off the ledge of reason, which I suspect is pretty much the point.

I can argue until I'm blue in the face that what I wrote is clearly black and white--but if a post is misunderstood, I take it personally, because it is the writer's responsibility to make sure the words crafted can be understood.

To a point.

Normally I'd fine tune the post on the fly (as I have done for years)--it's just a blog, not an academic paper, and I slap up first drafts then play with them. That's not to say that I do not respect truth (or grammar), but that I blog mostly to shape up ideas swirling in my head, and I have an audience of one--the woman who sits across the table from me each morning as the sun rises.

Now to the gist of the "misunderstandings":

• The post was not an appeal to turn every teacher's classroom into America's Newsroom. Older kids of color already have a pretty good idea of how the privileged view them. I was focusing on the white adults who teach them.
• I am aware of my contractual duties to teach biology, thank you, and also aware that my salary is paid by my neighbors.  My door is always open, and pretty much anyone who wants (and has permission from my Principal) can drop in, announced or otherwise.  
•  I never said discuss the events of Ferguson in your classroom, or anywhere else. Ferguson is not the issue--institutionalized, ingrained racism is. Heck, I don't start school for another two weeks, and chances are we'll have yet another town in the national news by then. You have plenty to talk about in your town alone.
• Yes, I worked on the docks briefly; yes, I worked as a tech in a booze bottling plant as well; in both cases I was happy to have a job at all, and I enjoyed working in Port Newark. Both are briefly noted on the blog, and Ms. Strauss thought it would be interesting to include in the piece. Why this inflames folks escapes me.
• I'm entering my 9th year teaching--getting to veteran status.

Interesting (to me, anyway) is that no one challenges the one line I thought would result in new windows:

Race has been criminalized in our public spaces.

 

I was hoping that would be the sticking point, but silence on that line bothers me far more than any of the frothing comments found on the Washington Post site. 

So let me spell out my thesis:

If you accept that race has become criminalized in public spaces, and you, as a public school teacher, are an agent in public spaces, then you have a responsibility to address the issue.

Any misgivings on the WaPo piece?:

• The photo chosen by WaPo was the wrong one to use.
• My shot at Xanax was a cheap trick--I could have used any number of non-drug activities, and I suspect that Kumbaya feel-good sing-a-longs rely more on oxytocin than GABA surges.

Thanks for listening....

As much as I loved Might Mouse,  I'd much prefer Courageous Cat.

Empathy trumps tolerance

The original quote is Helen Keller's "The highest result of education is tolerance." Her message graced our school's electronic display.

I don't much like the word "tolerance," and said as much to our Principal.
He asked if I had any idea how to improve it.
I said yes, and he shared it with the rest of the town:

It's nice to know we have a voice.... 

Which apple will your child hold?

I agreed to review an iPad education app this week, which led me to thinking,
which led to all kinds of problems--the review will have to wait.

To learn something requires physical changes in the brain--this is not metaphorical. If your neurons don't get more spiky growing more dendrites, then not a whole lot is happening. This costs materials and free energy. Learning, at some level, hurts, much as athletic training does, and both lead to observable physical changes.

Every organism alive today exists because its ancestors were clever enough to conserve their energy for things that mattered, Algebra II be damned.

A carrot from our classroom.

Saying learning should be enjoyable is like saying wind sprints with full pads on should be fun--there are good reasons to do either, but both require bucking a few eons' worth of evolution. Wouldn't know it from some of the nonsense floating around the ed world, though.

***

Turns out that the physical changes that occur appear to only occur on the relatively few neurons needed to master the task at hand.

"I think it’s fair to say that in the past it was generally believed that a whole cortical region would change when learning occurred in that region, that a large group of neurons would show a fairly modest change in overall structure.

Our findings show that this is not the case. Instead, a very small number of neurons specifically activated by learning show an expansion of structure that’s both surprisingly extensive – there’s a dramatic increase in the size and complexity of the affected neurons – and yet highly restricted to a small subset of cells."

Mark H. Tuszynski, MD, PhD, Professor of Neurosciences
University of California, San Diego School of Medicine

This has profound consequences. Staring at a screen will create plenty of dendritic spikes, but, I suspect, in a very narrow range of cells.

What can a toddler learn from a screen? Which causes more wide-spread dendritic development, staring at a picture of a leaf, or holding one?

No one ever got rich packaging maple leaves for classrooms, though plenty of teachers, to their credit, continue to bring them into classrooms.

You want children to learn about the natural world? Toss the computers until they get to a place in abstract thinking when they can distinguish what's real from the tools that shape their world.

Steve Jobs and his cult of human design be damned.

Top Five Predictions for Edumacation, 2013

M.C. Escher

Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and Arne Duncan will pose in spandex as Edumacation Superheroes, spouting off aphorisms for the ages-- Every Toddler's a Tool! Glorify the Global Economy! Truth, Justice, And The American Corporate Way! They will launch an action figure line--each figurine will include a bleaching kit and testosterone injections, so you, too, can look like a real human.

Teachers will continue to contribute millions to national union leadership who will remind us how much we love evaluations and testing, because getting a seat at the table is all that matters, especially a table with century old Reed and Barton flatware and rich white men eager to disseminate their, um, ideas.

Hungry kids stressed by frequent midnight gunplay as they shiver themselves to sleep will be saved by an ambitious, cute pale woman, and teachers will be required to take voice training to mimic her soothing, reaffirming voice.

Teacher will be told, in various conferences, to place their student desks in neat rows of 5 while grouping them in three's, making a big community circle of love and empowerment, until next week, when desks are banned, and then unbanned 3 weeks later.



The latest Marzano study will show that if you stack desks in the shape of a pyramid, your school's Scoville Heat scores will rise 37% when adjusted using the Marzano Research Laboratory's Creating An Aligned Desk System (and he'll even send someone to your district and demo it for just a few thousand dollars).

***

John Spencer added one:
In the name of being "brain-based," schools will take an Oxford University study about electric shock impulses and memory retention to heart and teachers will be armed with tazers and shock centers. Kids who fail to learn will be shocked harder. Those who question the practice will be accused of low expectations.

Feel free to join the Pernicious Prognosticators!

We'll check our results in a year!

Fear of flying

Dell has a disturbing new ad out, and even more disturbing has been its response--"[t]he Dell ad makes its technology feel human."

I just spent a wonderful week as a Siemens STEM Institute fellow,where at Discovery Education  Hall Davidson and others showed us how to manipulate images just like this girl did. Most of my kids will love this, for a few moments, anyway, then on to something else. (Dopamine's half-life is about two minutes.)

But it's not science. Beyond knowing a few keystrokes and where to find the software, it's not learning.*

***

During this same week, we got to spend some time behind the scenes at the Smithsonian Institute, where we saw passion and joy as scientists described what they do. Turns out real live scientists like to hold things--skulls, nuggets of gold, dead fish, apples. Their passion was palpable, but even more notable was their joy!

Here's an exercise we picked up, one worth doing as a department.

Take an apple or two, real ones, pretend you've never encountered one before, and describe it. List as many of its qualities as you can in a few minutes. You will likely scribble down dozens.

Now observe an apple model--you can use one of the plastic ones, which wholesale around 35 cents a piece. Scratch off all the qualities you listed about the real apple that can't be found of the fake one. The list gets dramatically smaller.

Northern spyes, my choice for hard cider, via Village Voice.

Now do the same thing with a photograph of an apple. You're down to a few words, maybe red, oblong, with a stem attached.

And finally, this:

Apple

To most of us, the word conjures up vivid memories of what we know of "appleness"--but the word itself means nothing to someone who has never seen an apple.

***

What is the purpose of public schooling?

If it is to produce "career and college ready" corporatizens, then mastering manipulation of the digital world becomes the goal. Virtual flying becomes meaningful, and an apple's visual appeal matters more than its taste--how else explain the dominance of the ironically named Red Delicious over the plain looking Roxbury Russet?**

If it is to produce joyful citizens in a community, with all its human warts, well, then, Bloomfield and thousands of towns like us are trying to hang in there with our gardens and plays, our cooking and sewing classes, our wood shop and photography classes, our bands and choirs, our art shows, our sense of community.

Our motto is generations old, and can be found on the floor of the foyer as you walk in:

Learn to live

If you want to fly, you need to build something that will let you do just that. You need to risk failure, ridicule, broken bones and even death--Orville Wright himself was involved in the first fatal airplane crash (which he barely survived--Lt. Thomas Selfridge did not).

The girl who jumped off the roof with an umbrella in the Dell ad will not be satisfied with a green screen fantasy--she likely will lead a happy and productive life despite the casts and sutures she'll accumulate along the way. Not all dreams need be so risky--but dreams should not be avoided because of the risks.

Green screen lives are safer in some ways--hard to fracture a femur playing Angry Birds--but, it turns out, are far more dangerous in the long run.

Our sedentary screen lives are literally killing us--when we require children to sit still, when we ask them to watch a screen, we are shortening their lives.

From Advanced ICU Care newsletter, Spring, 2009

Beyond that, deferring life to virtual reality kills living long before a heart stops beating. Technology can keep that same heart beating a little longer, in a small cubicle surrounded with screens whose job it is to keep that heart going--a heart that stopped working long, long ago.

 *It's a great tool for story-telling, and story-telling belongs in science class--Hall Davidson is a master story-teller and gets this. Dell, at least in the ad, does not.
**Yes, I know, hardiness and ability to survive shipping also matter. If you're going to make cider, though, I strongly recommend Northern spies.

Action pseudo-research

 
My district's recent incursions into action research have been interesting. I have the extreme fortune of sharing my prep room with a retired bench research scientist, published in multiple peer-reviewed science journals. We are tackling a specific method of inquiry, but quickly realized getting any reasonable data will require far bigger numbers than we will likely generate in our classes.

Our administration responded reasonably, explaining that the process of looking at data generated in our classrooms will encourage teachers to look critically at specific classroom practices. No one is pretending that will will develop statistically significant findings (p <0.05).

In education, a field where Marzano's and Gardner's "research" cause real (and possibly destructive) changes in the classroom, the lack of concern for the validity of the studies used to measure effective outcomes scares the crap out of me. Charismatic personalities trample over available evidence.

On Twitter I stumbled onto a group of ed folks setting up an action research project. At least one university professor was involved, someone I've met, so I figured I'd jump in on the open invitation.

I wondered aloud about how we might generate statistical significance from our work; to be fair I wasn't clear if that was even the goal. I was told that my medical background imposed a biased logical positivistic view, one too narrow for endeavors such as this one, and that I need consider other ways of viewing the world, including "intentional observation," which is, ironically, exactly how science works.

Experiment is in fact intelligent and intentional observation.

Robert Boyle, Epoch Men, 1868

(I also happened to major in philosophy, leaving Michigan with a B.S. in philosophy back in 1982--logical positivism was declared dead back in the 1970's. *sigh*)

***

Medicine and education have scary parallels. Medicine only recently advanced beyond the snake oil stage, with doctors kicking and screaming every step of the way.

Docs like to treat things. Patients like to be treated. Docs like to get paid. Patients are not quite as happy to pay. Our motto is primum non nocere--"Above all, do no harm"--which is a whole lot different than "Make them better!"

Snake oil is (mostly) harmless for self-limited illnesses, it makes patients feel like they're getting something, and docs make money. You don't need antibiotics for the vast majority of cases of sinusitis. Most docs will prescribe it anyway.

Medicine started looking at itself back in the 1970s, around the same time logical positivism was declared dead by professional philosophers. I was in medical school when evidence-based medicine starting taking a hold, and it was both liberating and frightening--most of what we did we did because, well, that's the way it's always been done. Sound familiar?

Education also finds snake oil useful--and it is for those selling it. Lots of folks make lots of money selling snake oil.

But in education, snake oil is harmful. A child's education is not a self-limited illness.We need to pay more attention to what we know through our research than we know "in our hearts." We need to pay particular attention to the folks who hide behind pseudo-research, tossing out fluorescent graphs, cooked numbers, and charismatic smiles.

I'd be glad to participate in some research. Medicine abandoned leeches not so long ago. It's time we pushed some leeches out of education.

Yes, I know leeches are making a come back....

Photo of leeches from LiveScience

More evidence-based hypocrisy

Among other things, Cerf recommends the governor convene a task force to explore...whether poor students should be "presumed to be educationally at-risk."

Today's Star-Ledger

Commissioner Chris Cerf--did you really say this?

Chris Cerf is a bright man.

He's had a couple of public displays of disingenuous behavior:

Mr. Cerf, one of a number of consultants enlisted by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein in recent years to help redesign the nation’s largest school system, did not disclose to parents that he had given up his shares [of Edison, Inc., worth potentially millions]  less than 24 hours previously when he appeared yesterday before their group, the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council.

Asked by Tim Johnson, the group’s chairman, to describe his financial interest in Edison Schools, he replied, “I’d be delighted to do that,” adding: “I have no financial interest in Edison of any kind. Zero.”

When Mr. Johnson persisted, asking, “Can we ask when you divested yourself of Edison stock?” Mr. Cerf said he would be “delighted” to give Mr. Johnson a copy of financial disclosure forms he said he was required to file as a public employee. “That will answer all of your questions, and that’s what I’m prepared to say today,” he added.

NY Times, February 9, 2007

Nothing illegal, and there's a reasonable chance that Mr. Cerf would have obtained the waiver he sought for his private holdings in Edison--but I'll let his own words stand as evidence of his forthrightness.

He went on to solicit funds from Edison, in violation of the City Charter

The city’s Conflicts of Interest Board closed the matter without taking action against the deputy chancellor, Christopher Cerf. But in a letter to Mr. Cerf, the board’s chairman, Steven B. Rosenfeld, said that Mr. Cerf had used his city position to benefit the Darrow Foundation, a nonprofit group on whose board he sits. The letter also provided a “formal reminder of the importance of strict compliance with the city’s conflicts of interest law.”

NY Times, December 4, 2008

Again, nothing illegal, and again, nothing more than a public letter reminding him of his role. Still, his response to this is telling:

“If you’re asking me do I have any regrets, I will tell you absolutely not,” Mr. Cerf said. “I did absolutely what I was supposed to do. I disclosed everything; the Conflicts of Interest Board gave it the back of its hand.”

“Raising money for a not for profit, tell me, what’s wrong with that?” he added.

“There is nothing here other than an investigation that exonerated me. The only real story here is that I was put through a rather tortuous experience.”

NY Times, December 4, 2008

.

Then there's the small issue of misplaced businesses. Global Education Advisers, founded at Cerf's home address, received a half million dollars from the Facebook money given to Newark. Global Education Advisers is now led by Rajeev Bajaj, but still listed Cerf's address after his appointment as our Education Commissioner, an "entirely ministerial" relationship according to Cerf.

Mr. Cerf says he left the company before the money was received, and that he got none of it and I have no reason to doubt him. (Maybe he had a line painted in his home separating the company from his living quarters--but I'll leave that the Montclair Zoning Board .) To claim no interest in a company that shares the same address as yours does takes some chutzpah.

If nothing else, the man has mastered the art of splitting hairs, has a fine command of the language, and no doubt has some idea of the hurdles facing children in our poorest neighborhoods.

He's looked me in the eye and told me he deeply cares about the children caught in the web of poverty, and I believe he believes he cares.

Before spending a penny on convening a state task force to determine whether poverty puts a child at educational risk, take a look at the work that's already been done at the National Center For Education Statistics.

You told me you were a numbers guy--I am, too. Peak expiratory flows, lead levels, home temperature, decibel levels, NOx ppm, rate of caries, etc., all correlate with poverty, all affect a child's ability to sustain the effort needed to learn.

I know zip code does not dictate destiny, but I also know that poverty tilts the playing field.

No more sophistry, no more hypocrisy, no more delays. We have important work to do, Mr. Commissioner. Let's get to it.

Little Scientists, Inc.

fet·ish/ˈfetiSH/

Noun:

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

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

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

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

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

Nature don't play that way.

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

The definition of fetish came from dictionary.com.

Tossing the bathwater, keeping the baby

Robert Marzano may become the Jean-Baptiste Lamarck of education.

Lamarck was the guy before Darwin who thought giraffe babies had longer necks than their parents because their parents strived to reach leaves. This "inner need" drove evolution.

Lamarck gets short shrift now, I think unfairly--he was wrong, true, but he proposed an idea that was testable, and he got folks doing just that.

Marzano, too, has some good ideas, and he's even convinced a lot of people that his ideas are founded on  "research," using meta-analysis to draw up some enticing numbers:

I've read Marzano's explanation for his "percentiles," extracting them from "average effect size," in order to "provide[s] for a dramatic interpretation of the possible benefits of  a given instructional strategy."

Lumping various studies, some of dubious quality, under the umbrella of meta-analysis, and then applying a further manipulation to amplify already questionable methods leads to the graph above.

And now teachers around the country are getting the graph above shoved under our puppy-dog noses like a soiled newspaper, while some high paid folks intone "Do this and our state scores will rise 45 percentile points."

Marzano is either stupid or disingenuous, and I doubt he's stupid. Making a case that a particular strategy will raise student scores 45 percentile points is like saying that a particular diet will add 45 years to your life. A lot of people will try the diet, and most will even be better for it. But very few are going to add many years to their lives.

So, yeah, "identifying differences and similarities" can improve student learning outcomes. But anyone who teaches kids already knows this. Really.

All the snake oil in the world is not going to get us a 100% pass rate on the 2014 NCLB tests, but some folks are going to make a lot of money telling us how to get there. Administrators are under tremendous pressure to do what's literally impossible.

Come on, PLC, make the case for Marzano's numbers. I'm calling bull crap.
Quotes and graph taken from Marzano'/Pickering/Pollock's Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement 

Cult of personality seems to run deep in education. 
Don't even get me started on Howard Gardner

Nothingness is a huge part of everything

I ramble on a lot. I edit a lot, too, hard as that might be to believe, tossing out about 7 or 8 words for every one that I leave. Yes, I know, anything less than a 10:1 scrub ratio marks me as an amateur too in love with his darlings....

Mary Ann Reilly and I have never met, though we have collaborated on a project I tossed at our state  Ed Commissioner Christopher Cerf--ain't the internet grand? She's building a high school, one I'd like to be part of, but enough of the full disclosure nonsense.

I wrote this: "The atoms taught in elementary school  do not exist. If a nucleus is the size of a dime, the electrons would fling as far as half a football field, and even that's just an average. What's in-between? Nothing. Nothingness is a huge part of everything."

She wrote that: "Nothingness is a huge part of everything and there is never the accounting for nothingness in the slick state and now national standards. They are overfilled with their own self importance."

The national standards are like our universe 14.6 billion years ago--no space, no wiggle room, no humanity.

Life found in the spaces, in the niches, in the shadows of the corners works the same way as the stuff that spews forth in the elevated air of Mount Hubris. And matters just as much.

Thank you, Mary Ann, for helping me see this.

Mary Ann Reilly is an artist who is fascinated by edges, by borderlands.

The photo is by her, used without permission.

Revolution Prep? Really?

Jake and Ramit would like you to think that they have started a revolution in test prep, and that they "had a vision to transform education and provide the highest quality instruction to all students regardless of their ability to pay."

They even call themselves "Revolutionaries."

I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt, especially since they pride themselves on "never turning a student away because he or she could not afford our program."

Two things changed this:

Strike One:

Last fall I proctored an exam given to our top freshmen. I was assigned to do so by the school, had no problem doing it, but want to make it clear that I do not work for the company.

My problem? The only way for the kids to get their results was to drag their parents out to a meeting with the Revolution Prep folks on an assigned evening. I wouldn't have stood for this as a parent. I had no dog in the fight, though.

Strike Two:

Today I stumbled upon a poster advertising Revolution Prep in the hall leading to the cafeteria. (The advertising was discreetly veiled as a top 10 list of ways to improve test scores, no more offensive than the American Dairy Association's poster urging young adults to drink cow juice which is, to be fair, plenty offensive.)

Their advice?

"Write like a robot, not like Shakespeare."

We're a Title 1 high school. Most of our kids are not going to apply for their $2899 private tutoring course--we don't have that kind of money in Bloomfield, and if we did, we'd spend on something with more value.

But I'd bet that a child whose parent can afford that kind of juice won't be told to "write like a robot."

Maybe I'm wrong--maybe some parents encourage this kind of nonsense....
The painting is "Liberty leading the People" by Eugène Delacroix, presumably in public domain

Elementary science education, Part 2

Distinguish a force that acts by direct contact with an object (e.g., by pushing or pulling) from a force that can act without direct contact (e.g., the attraction between a magnet and a steel paper clip).

NJCCCS, Standard for 2nd Grade

You cannot, of course. We "feel" forces the same way--it's a push or a pull.

I could dive into the specifics--a few cells get squished, a Pacinian corpuscle gets agitated enough to open up an ion channel,  an action potential runs down an axon or two, joins the signals from myriad sources, and we interpret the feeling as a "push"--but that tells us nothing, really, about what a force is beyond its paradoxically simple definition: a push or a pull that can change the speed, direction, or shape of an object.

A second grader can easily see (or feel) that a magnet has "special" qualities--it can push or pull without direct contact with another object. The force itself, however, is still a pulling.

This hardly seems like a big deal, true, but I get high school students who do not know what a force is. Or what matter is. Or that none of us truly have a great grip on either.

(Matter is stuff with inertia, inertia is the tendency of a particular blob of matter to resist change when, well, pushed or pulled. That's just the way things work. Newton called inertia vis insita, the innate force of matter.)

A second grader, of course, need not (and, at any rate, could not) master Newtonian physics. Still, a second grader has Pacinian corpuscles and a cerebellum, and can think. She can figure out that magnets can push or pull,  just as she can push and pull, and that a magnet's pull feels just like any other pull.

What can be distinguished is that magnets, for whatever reason, do not need to "touch" the other object to do this. This is interesting, but I would not make it the heart of the lesson--at least not to a 7 year old. I might point out that the Earth pulls us, but again focus on what force is--again, a pull or a push.

If the child infers that the Earth acts like a magnet, well, depending on what a child's view of magnet is (an object that pulls other objects towards it), she is right. Her knowledge is incomplete, of course, but in science it will always be incomplete. The pull of the Earth feels no different than the pull of a magnet or of your mother's hand. (Your mother's hand exerts its pull on a more specific area, but the pull itself is the same feeling.)

It gets down to language and perceptions at this level. At higher levels, a child has more vigorous scaffolding (the history of millions of experiments building on existing models) and more vigorous tools (calculus), but even then, our models depend on language.

***

I'll give the state this much. The standard above is eminently testable. But it's not science.

I've been (again and obviously) on a Feynmann kick. The following video is a wonderful look at a happy man who loves looking at how the world works. And yes, I borrowed heavily from him. I want Dr. Feynman in my elementary schools.

Again, another random photo.

Elementary education science, Part 1

I am sitting on a committee put together to help redesign our elementary school science curriculum.
I'll be tossing out various posts on the topic. The posts do not reflect the views of anyone except me.

By the end of Grade 4:

Science has unique norms for participation. These include adopting a critical stance, demonstrating a willingness to ask questions and seek help, and developing a sense of trust and skepticism. 

NJ Core Curriculum Content Standards, 5.1.4.D.1, Science

A few of us in the district have a wonderful opportunity to help draft the science curriculum guidelines for early elementary students. We--teachers from various grade levels-- have been given professional time to work together to develop science education at the elementary level.

While I am a high school science teacher, I am leaning heavily on my former life as a pediatrician. You cannot separate science from perception, and perception gets colored by development.

Separating science as a discipline separate from language development does not make sense to me, at least not for the lunchbox crowd. It may be a subset of language, as fairy tales are a subset of story telling, but until children can master mathematics, Boolean logic, and other developmentally challenging tasks, pretending that they are little scientists is, well, ridiculous.

A lot of people are getting paid good money to promote the ridiculous.

***

What can a child know?

She can know what she observes, of course, but what she observes depends, in large part, on what she knows.  We frame our world more than we might realize.

Many of our children come to high school with what seem to be nonsensical ideas, but which reflect the thoughts of thousands of years of human thought--if  these thoughts are not consistent with the last few hundred years, we tell the children, without offering  much evidence, that they are wrong.

If a child believes she can see in absolute darkness, and many believe as much, telling her that is simply not so is not science education, it's indoctrination.

At the early grade levels, the standard listed above does not hold water. "Adopting a critical stance, demonstrating a willingness to ask questions and seek help, and developing a sense of trust and skepticism" should be the heart of all education, not the box labeled "science."

The photo has nothing to do with the post--I just like it.

 

A February horseshoe crab

I love this picture.

My wife has tiny feet--that is the tip of her tiny shoe. The tracks were made by a tiny horseshoe crab last February. Chances are pretty good no one else has seen this particular horseshoe crab, and chances are pretty good it is no longer alive.

But it might be. It might be just a mile off our beach, poking along mud 30 feet below the bay's surface, bigger now, munching on whelk. No way to know.

If it lives a few more years, it may return to our beach to mate. A curious child may squat next to it, an ignorant child may run away screaming. A fisherman may snag it with a morsel of squid, his hands washed in creamy blue blood as he struggles to dislodge the hook. A wave may flip it over, and before it rights itself, a gull may peck at its gills as it flings its telson (not a "stinger"),  into the wet sand, trying to right itself.

But last February, it sauntered along our beach, no more than an inch long, feeling its way along a world I cannot imagine.

***

Horseshoe crabs see light we cannot. They have 10 eyes, the two obvious ones sitting on top of the shell--they are used to find mates in the gloom of the bay.

They can "see" light with their telsons, their "tails." They have tiny eye-spots on the front of their shells, designed to see ultraviolet light from the sun, from the moon. They know when the moon is new, when the moon is full. Such news is obvious on the edge of the shore, of course, but not so obvious deeper in the bay. The horseshoe crabs time their orgies to the moon.

They also have eyes underneath, next to the mouth--to see what?

We can pretend to know what it means to have 10 eyes, to sense UV light, to rise from the depths to mate under moonlight, but it's all pretending. We cannot know the universe of the horseshoe crab. But we can know that it exists.

***

I have a classroom set of netbooks, from very generous donations by the Roche Foundation, by the Bloomfield Education Foundation, and by our local Home and School Association.

I love what we can do with them: students can collaborate on projects, we can grab information on the fly, and there is a huge gee whiz factor built into these tiny machines that can liven up a classroom. They are not, however, a window into the world.

The only world visible on a monitor is the human world. Even high resolution photographs of exotic life are just that--human inventions, pixels flashed through electronic streams. They are not real.

A human framed the moment. A human cropped the photograph. A human machine translates the signal into the image on the screen. It is flat. It is manipulable. It is not real.

Oh, but think of the children who do not have access to these wonderful creatures!

I'd rather think of our reluctance to let the children get access to what lives among us.


My daughter, very young at the time, once found a pigeon's nest under the creek bridge that led to our closest park. She watched it for weeks, first eggs, then tiny critters, then fledglings, then gone.

She wrote no reports, took no photos. She just watched.

We keep roly polies ("pill bugs") in our room--harmless crustaceans that bumble around in a few of our terrariums, going about the business of the living, sometimes doing a whole lot of nothing.

My kids can learn all kinds of facts about them from the internet, but the only thing they really need to know for now is what to feed them, how to keep them healthy. Kids ask me, and I explain that I really don't know, because, well, I really don't.

We see that they only shed half of their shells at a time. We see that they tend to hang in groups. We see their antennae busily working the world immediately in front of them. Occasionally some die, occasionally new ones appear.

No pixels, no chips, no pressure. Just our classroom companions, who will be brought back to the outside world when the sun returns.

***

And what do the children take home with them? I do not know, I'll have to ask them years from now.

I do know that if the kids do not see life beyond the human walls now, it is unlikely to happen later.
I also know that most children (and most adults) confound the world we created with the world that exists. Our economy depends on the fantasy.

So I teach biology. Life. And life cannot be found in a chip.

Great article on hoseshoe crab eyes and other bits of anatomy can be found at the Maryland DNR here.

Photo by Leslie.