On joyful noise and the human condition

Found on our classroom typewriter

One of the joys of clamming in December is listening to Brant geese chatter back and forth a few yards down the flat from me. Mostly at each other. Sometimes at me. Occasionally at nothing more than the water and the sky.

Wordless, but not senseless.

One of the joys of spending a good chunk of my awake hours in a room full of adolescent mammals is listening to them talk.

Not the words--I'm too deaf to spend the energy discerning whatever abstract nonsense is being piped about. We've been sharing the same abstract nonsense ever since Adam blamed Eve for his own foolishness.

No, I mean the warm wall of sound, the rhythms of vowels carved by consonants, the dance of the back and forth cadence of voices, the wavering pauses.

"Dance of Death," Michael Wolgemut

Add the fleeting facial expressions, the aromas and pheromones, and a cacophony of noise to the elders becomes a symphony of meaning for the young.

We are all mammals, even teachers. Our most intense moments of the shared sounds of communion dissolve into wordless exchanges. Shared meals, shared music, shared bodies, shared death, we remember for a moment we are all one in this world.

This is what we lose by texting

Science Teacher's 2012 Toy Recommendations

Here's a short list:

Jacob's ladder
prism
Newton's cradle
hand-cranked generator
stethoscope
a fossilized anything
a karimba
a terrarium for slugs and roly polies
a bag of marbles
and a magnifying glass.

Pushing science on on our lambs under the threat of "you will be unemployed and starve to death otherwise" works about as well as nailing a heretic's tongue to the church bulletin board--it may have great short-term results, but neither leads to a come to Jesus moment.

Even back in 1598, good intentions were not enough. (From Wikipedia)

Most attempts at educational toys fail, as evangelism usually does. Too often the giver is more interested in converting someone than making them happy. I don't want to convert anyone--I just want people to see, to think, and to be happy. Democracy depends on this, even if Exxon doesn't.

The holidays beckon--rash decisions get made. Shoddy telescopes catch more closet dust than starlight, and the carcasses of ants and sea monkeys litter bedroom floors every February.

A science toy should make the natural world more available.
It should be simple enough for a child to use without help.
It should be fun.
No batteries.
(And cheap!)


If it has the word "science" or "educational" on the box as its selling point, walk away....

Here's the annual  
Science Teacher Stuff You Should Get Your Kids Before They Hit Puberty List:

From BBC here

Glass:

A magnifying glass changes the world.  A decent loupe gives a child just enough new stuff to stimulate the mind without careening into existentialism. A small glass prism bends and breaks light, distorting a child's firm connection with light, with the world. A tiny hourglass brings time back to its kinetic roots.

Seeing light for what it is goes a long way to grasping what it is not. Not bad for a $5-10 investment that lasts a lifetime.

What not to get? Microscopes:
they're clunky, require prep, and can freak out any child who's paying attention.

From B & N here.

Paper:

The Kids' Paper Airplane Book let's your child build 16 paper airplanes. Or get grandpa to show her how it's done. Flight fascinates even the cynical among us.

Get a book on origami. Few of us use our hands for anything more useful than banging on a keyboard. Let your child experience the joy of human evolution--fingers were made for folding.

What not to get? :
An RC flying anything--plenty of time for remote and control in adulthood. 

Seeds:

Plant a basil seed in a Dixie cup. Put a carrot top in a bowl on a windowsill. Scatter wheat berries on a vacant lot. Grab a bag of Goya Great Northern Beans and toss a few on a wet paper towel.

Maybe, just maybe, your child will grasp that a farmer matters more than a financial analyst (or even a teacher).

What not to get? :
A ridiculously priced Williams-Sonoma Seedling Kit. Children need reminding how little plants need us, not how much.

Balls:

Both kinds. 'Nuff said.

What not to get?:

A fancy ball that measures how fast your future MLBer can throw a ball.
Save measuring abstract things that do not matter for her career in her corporate cubicle.

Vibrating objects that make pretty noises:

Harmonica, kalimba, maybe an ocarina. While mastery of a fancy instrument gets you glory and a better shot at a decent college, being able to bend notes on a mouth harp will give anyone about as much joy as she can handle.

Cheap joy's hard to beat.

Maybe the best gift you can give is one that takes away. Destroy her television, disable his X-box, toss the iPad into the fireplace.

Share your stories, share your time.
Trust what you know to be true.
None of us get out of here alive.


Merrie Christmas!

The kalimba picture is by Mark Holdaway, Kalimba Magic (www.kalimbamagic.com).

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.

What do you care to know about the world?

Teaching matters.

We owe it to our children to get it right.

 What do you care to know about the world?

There's a place for what used to be called boredom, for empty spaces to slide into your mind. It's not particularly unpleasant, but it lacks the dopamine we've programmed our children, ourselves, to crave.

If you sit still long enough outside, you will see things, hear things, smell wondrous things you hardly knew existed. But you need to sit still. Without music, without a screen.  Close your eyes and listen. Sniff. Touch the earth.

We train our children to believe that we have mastered our universe. We teach them how to avert their eyes. We answer their simplest questions ("Why are people poor?") with You're too young to understand...It's complicated...It will make sense when you're older. We actively work to make our children jaded.

Science teachers, like art teachers, have an obligation to teach children how to seek what's true, if we hope to teach them anything at all. We cannot tell them.

Has any young child not been charmed by the edge of a July pond, or by a tray of watercolor paint? Both teem with countless possibilities that cannot be measured or tested. We cede control when we hand a child a paintbrush, a magnifying glass, a few moments of unstructured time.

Before you dare restructure the world of a child--the heart of teaching--dare to ask yourself what do you care to know about this world? If you do not yet know, get out of the classroom until you do.

What do you care to know about the world?

I have stared into the eyes of animals as millions of my triceps muscle cells release calcium ions, triggering almost simultaneous contraction, driving the club between the eyes of the critter I am slaying.

It remains an awful moment for me, that last instant.

Awful comes from agheful, "worthy of respect or fear," full of awe, full of fear, a word now reduced to meaning "very bad." We've long lost our sense of awe, at least those running the show now--if we had it, we'd not destroy the world mindlessly.

Yet when I mindfully take a life, so that I may eat, I slide into a rich universe devoid of words, but not of feelings, in the most basic sense of the word--the rhythmic writhing flesh in my hands now quivers chaotically, if the blow is true.

Yet to do so in a classroom would be obscene, an affront to our children, an act of career suicide, and (*gasp*) a deviation from our lesson plans,. with every minute programmed to match a standard designed by folks who long ago lost touch with what matters.

What do you care to know about the world ?

As fundamental as this is, that we are here on a planet, inextricably linked to each other and to everything else alive, and to many things not, many of us live in worlds that are but shells of the fundamental one held up by the ground.

Just like the earthworm, we eat, we breathe, we toss shite from our backside, we entangle together to share genetic memories we pass on to new life, and we die. We're of the earth, and for those who believe that this is but a tiny journey to bide time until another world finds them, may earthy joy find you before your last breath.

And you will draw a last, agonal breath from this world, the only one we can know, the world of art, of science, of writhing life, of decay, of dirt, of us.

The world worth knowing...

Watercolor tray from Officemax site here.
Other photos ours, usual CC applies.

June, again

June again--I liked this one in 2010, and I still like it.

 

I want to crawl face down in the fields

and graze on the wild strawberries, my clothes

stained pink, even for seven years

if I must, if they exist. I want to lie out

on my back under the thousand stars and think

my way up among them, through them,

and a little distance past them, and attain

a moment of absolute ignorance,

if I can, if human mentality lets us.

Galway Kinnell, from The Seekonk Woods

I have never regretted any moment outside. As in under the sky.
Not one single moment.

I've been cozy, chilled, hot, wet, dry, stung, caressed by the breeze, and almost drowned in the sea. I've feasted on wild berries, feared wild beasts. I've watched ants for hours, and the moon forever.

I've seen life take life, and I've taken lives. I've heard the last yelps. I've eaten critters that squirmed in my hands. I watched a lightning bug flicker in desperation as a spider wrapped her silk around and around and around.

Tonight the honeysuckle blossoms steal words from my cortex, and I welcome the thieves.

June lasts forever when it comes, and is impossible to remember when it's gone. No words are needed in June. None. Life is as abundant as the light. I cannot help myself--I worship the sun now, so tangible on my skin, so obviously the giver, as it settles in the north for a spell.

Tonight somewhere in my town a child is doing homework on an early June dusk. Probably safer that way. Can't have children shirk responsibilities. Keep them indoors. They must stay focused!

Say you're a biology teacher, and, say, you know a lot more biology lies outside the textbook than in it. You're older now, with many more Junes past than any yet to be (graciously) received. What does a 15 year old child need to know? What do any of us need to know?

Ambition is well-rewarded in our culture. Delayed gratification is a virtue. If you want to be rich or powerful, chances are pretty good you won't die in the same town that welcomed your birth.

There's also a good chance you won't know where the local wild mulberries lie ripe for the picking, or where clams can be raked.

In June, my motives are clear--teach the children to see the world under their noses. The world offers riches beyond a wealthy family's dreams, but you need to go outside.

Kids know this until we teach them to forget. Most classes fit well in a classroom--a good biology class tends to ooze outwards.

A story about basil

Last August, various bees sniffed among our basil flowers, seeking nectar.

Pollen grains stuck to their fuzzy bodies, which they carried to nearby plants and half the chromosomes of one plant joined with those of another. Not sure if the bees or the basil felt anything special, but these acts of communion give me joy.

The fertilized flowers dropped their show-offy petals, their opulence no longer needed once the union was complete, and the flowers got down to the business of making seeds.

Come fall, after the first hard frost, I stripped the dried flowers from their stalks.

In idle moments, I'd unwrap the seeds from the dried flowers, tiny hard black secrets holding next spring's promise.

I gently blow the chaff away from the seeds, and put them away in a small brown bag, tucked in the pantry, hundreds of living organisms, dormant, waiting for the sunlight.

Back in March, when the sun was just starting to win its battle with the dark, I sprinkled a few seeds on a tray of peat moss. Tiny green leaves erupted.

A week or so ago, we put our seedling in the ground, and they've been busy using the sun's energy to grab carbon dioxide from the air, to make more leaves.

Last night we ate the first of this year's batch, as we will, grace willing, until the next hard frost come November.

I am getting older, as we all are, but not the basil, living a lifetime between frosts.

And if there's a point to the story, to our story, we can find it in the basil.

We just have to look.

No point trying to grasp the intricacies of photosynthesis if you cannot see the flowers.

What we risk losing

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

"The Second Coming," W.B. Yeats

I watched a grackle along the edge of our ocean yesterday.

It gallumphed down the surf's edge like a drunken sandpiper, got smacked with a wave, then fluttered back to the top of the now receding wave.

Over and over again.

I sat on the sand with Leslie, and we chatted about our grackle as it battled the wash. I love grackles, hands down my favorite bird, and this one was being particularly grackly. What would possess a bird to challenge the edge of the sea?

After a few minutes, the grackle answered my question--it nabbed a writhing sand crab, then picked it apart a few feet away. The grackle got its reward, and we got our story.
The sand crab did not fare as well.

***

There is a risk challenging those who hope to transform public education into data farms feeding the intricate morass we still call economics. 


Look at the humorless smiles of those running the show, the lupine grins of Arne Duncan, of Bill Gates, of Eli Broad. They may even believe what they are spewing--it takes a certain lack of humor to get to reign over the destruction of things that matter.

They can hurt you, and will if you pose a threat to their goals.

But that's not the risk I am talking about. As much fun as it is to pretend otherwise, a few words shared among a very small community of teachers poses no threat at all to the ed "reformers" who value power over democracy.

• The risk is falling into their language, into their world, into their ethos. 
• The risk is spending too many hours poring over their dull documents (Next Generation Science Standards, anyone?), trying to parse out meaning of individual phrases when we should be calling out the process that created such a document.
• The risk is weighing an offer to make real money sitting at the table breaking bread with them under the hum of fluorescent lights.
• The risk is not losing the battle--I am not so blind not to see that any remnants of "public" and "democracy" are likely to be crushed for the foreseeable future--the risk is losing ourselves.

I am a happy person, blessed with the grace of a grackle wrestling with the ocean for its food.
I am a mortal person, as doomed as the sand crab picked apart by the grackle.

A grackle will still be wrestling with the ocean long after I am gone. So long as grackles continue to be grackles, our children will have larger stories to learn than the ones foisted on them in the name of the global economy.

It takes little courage to tweet in an echo chamber. 

Live well, be part of your community, grow some food, use your hands, love.

Bill Gates from Seattle Weekly. 

Grackle from Wikipedia via CC 3.0 by mdq

I don't believe in gravity, either

I may have more trouble with those who "believe in" evolution than I do with Creationists. At least the Creationists are upfront about their deliberate ignorance of the empirical.

If you think that the poster is an effective argument for evolution, then you may not quite grasp the profundity of gravity either. That things fall is obvious. That all things made of stuff are attracted to all other things made of stuff, not so much.

That there is a predictable relationship between all matter in our universe is a bigger deal than many who "believe in" gravity grasp.

There may be some confusion about religion, too, a confusion exacerbated by those who would distinguish spiritual from religious.

Natural selection, by itself, is obvious. Living things have heritable differences. Some living things are more likely to reproduce than others, partly because of these difference. Those that reproduce pass their qualities on to the next generation.

You need time for complexity to evolve, and time we have.

But complexity is not the "goal." We are not headed towards a higher being, just a different one, possibly more complex, possibly not.

When a child gets this, do not be surprised if she goes into a trance for a day or a week. A child who gets this will feel her universe shift under her feet, her place redefined, her sophomoric cynicism squashed by awe.

Some folk call that a religious feeling, and it is. 

Grasping evolution changes our relationships with the living world around us.

Darwin's reasoning does not need to supplant God, and for many it does not. The theory of evolution does, however, supplant the need for a superior consciousness (or any other sort of consciousness) to guide the development of the beasts we call human.

It takes more than a class or two for a kid to get this, but there's no mistaking when one does. She's the one who's gone silent, stunned.

Natural selection is deceptively easy to grasp. It's not the concept that most of us resist. It's the implications. Evolution has no goal.

We're no more evolved than the earthworm, the mushroom, or the E. coli in our guts.

The jumping lamb is from Life is Physics Not Mathematics.

It's all good--we're all a part of this universe thing, and that's just awesome!

Why kids love science anyway...

As much faith as I have in natural laws, I have much less faith in my ability to lasso them as needed in a classroom. I've had some spectacularly loud, messy failures.
Kids like this.

As much as the Arne's and the Eli's and the Bill's want to control curriculum, they cannot control a child-driven experiment. To be fair, neither can I.
Kids like this.

We grow beans and basil in class, edible stuff from the breath they exhale--at first they resist the idea, as any reasonable creature would, and I don't give them any particular reason to believe it, but some do anyway.
Kids like this.

Many of the hypotheses generated in class are as good as mine. A few are better. Now and again a child develops a spectacularly good idea, beyond anything I'd likely generate. Their ideas, crafted within the nature of science, count as much as mine.
Kids like this.

I am wrong a lot. Science teachers in general are wrong a lot. What we "knew" not so long ago is less true than it used to be.
Kids like this.

We have critters that swim, crawl, fly, hiss, poop, pee, and screw pretty much whenever they want to. Kids can't do any of those things without permission during school, except maybe hiss, and even then, very quietly.
Kids like this.

I don't quite know what the word "authentic" means, as much as it is bandied about in edutopia, but I do know that it is impossible to fake science. Children have eyes and noses, they have brains, and they have imagination. They get to use all three, and while there are some days they'd rather not, most of them find pleasure in using their bodies the way nature intended them to be used.

Want more science teachers, Mr. Duncan? Let us teach science....

All photos from B362

The Art and Science of Science and Art

Chris is the guy on the left....

I've had an interesting past few days in Tampa the past few days, celebrating the work of our principal Chris Jennings and our school at the NASSP Convention. We're a MetLife Foundation Breakthrough School this year and we're beaming, much more on that later.

I got to spend a lot of time with a colleague, an art teacher with a strong interest on how science works. We talked, and we listened, not so much on what is called science, though he is interested in that as well, but on what it means to know something in science, or to know anything.

We mostly chatted on the edge of an estuary, under the sun, occasionally stopping to watch a pelican or three glide yards over our heads, to listen to a laughing gull squawk trying to steal a crumb from a naive Iowan.

We paused a lot. (I suspect our neurons branch quicker in the silence than in the noise of human--need both though.)

I think the learned folks call this epistemology--we called it human.

We did what we hoped our students will someday do--that they don't that now is to our shame.

***

We all "know" what an atom is, or at least what the cultural icon we call atom is. When you push the model, it becomes space and energy levels and predictably unpredictable relationships that defy a concrete model.  I did more talking than he did.

We all "know" how to draw a cube, what is should look like, that the vertical lines never meet, and the horizontal ones eventually do. My artist friend drew two sets of lines in perspective--I could tell one was better, but I could not tell why. He did more talking than I did.

We worked our way through our epistemological forest using voices, written words on scraps of conference paper. We talked sitting down, we talked standing up, we talked while we walked, while we ate.

We did it because it matters, true, but mostly because we enjoyed it. The line between our disciplines dissolved a bit, like sidewalk chalk drawings on a foggy morning. The lines are still there, but the edges now blend.

I left Tampa with my neurons connected in altered ways. This is not just a figurative statement. Real learning alters the physical architecture of your brain. It takes a lot of energy, it takes cellular materials your body would gladly use somewhere else with a whisper of an excuse.

It hurts. You're not going to do it for some abstract long-term goal--I'm old enough where a few new synapses will not alter my financial circumstances.

You're not going to do it well if there's no joy.

***

As we spun our metaphorical atoms and very physical drawings into various hypotheses on how we are who we are, how our environment affects us, how we affect our environment, well, we learned more on how we learn.

Learning how to draw, how to play a trumpet, how to plant a seed, how to make a paper crane, or how to do just about anything for ourselves takes a little pain.

We pretend we do it for the long-term ends, and maybe a few of us do. For me, though, even the awful parts of figuring something out--my first few painful hours blatting on a trumpet also brought pleasure in its joyful noise.

I still have a lot of work to do before I become half the teacher I want to be. I suspect most of us feel the same way, not because we're on some arduous journey to reach the Promised Land of Aypia but because we enjoy getting better.

There is pleasure in creating something new.
There is pleasure in sharing this pleasure.
There is pleasure, real pleasure, in teaching.

 We owe it to our children to know this pleasure before we fault them for rejecting what we pretend they ought to know.

Thanks, everybody!

Transformations

Yesterday we fooled a few bacteria into taking in some jellyfish DNA, and now they fluoresce green. Tomorrow I will take a few colonies of these and give them what we all need--food, shelter, and a little security, and I'll get a few million more by Thursday.

This has become old hat in high school biology classes, but it still blows my mind, as it should.

We are all God  now. You may laugh, and I can temper this with some off-hand remark, but we're not the same critters we were before we started transforming lifeforms. That we do this with indifference makes it seem surreal.

(I wanted to jump up and down and scream in delight and fear--"Look what we've done!!!!" And, OK, maybe I did, just a little bit....)

***

A few planets are lining up this week, and a few folks are excited. So excited that you can go online and see them.

That planets are visible naked eye is pretty cool, and that they wander against the background of stars even neater. Indeed, that's where the word "planet" comes from--planasthai, "to wander."

To stare at one naked eye, though, is not particularly exciting. They flicker less than stars, and are quite bright, but, well, um--they look like stars.

We have made looking at planets a check list event, a commodity, an "event" simply because it's an event.

A lot of folks cannot fathom anymore why that bothers me, so I guess that puts me in the crank category. A lot of folks cannot fathom what they even want.

Maybe the point of education is to learn what you want, to figure out what's worth seeking. I'm pretty sure it's not to pass a standardized test.

***

Most of my students have never stumbled upon a flickering comb jelly, flashing electric blue as it lies dying on the beach. I have, and I wondered--who was meant to see the light?

I can change the way light is reflected off bacteria, light meant only for a few other humans to see, to reflect our glory of ourselves as we play God.

Some comb jellies flash an electric blue when disturbed, presumably to distract predators. This makes sense, a logical reason to expend energy, fit for our mechanistic view of the world.

Yet when I squat by a dying critter, the rhythm of the wash of waves running through my ears, the salty smell of the dying in my nostrils, the soft forgiving warm and wet sand caressing my feet, this single jelly flashing its last three, brief pulses of light on the edge of the bay matters to me, and I do not know why.

I only saw it because I happened to be there--and it would have mattered even if I had not seen it.

I have no opinion on the existence of God--my people said He is unknowable, and I, to their chagrin, took them at their word. I do not truck with what I cannot know.

But I do know this--we cannot know (and can never know) what we pretend to know today. Hubris does not require the existence of gods.

Tomorrow I will be the destroyer of earths as I kill the same bacterial cultures we worked hard to create. I will pretend this does not bother me.

***

As for the planets, if you think it's worth staring at them online, I have a few other parlor tricks that may interest you.

Cristoforo Colombo used a similar parlor trick to fool the locals of what is now known as Jamaica. The locals had supported Colombo and his crew, but were (understandably) a little annoyed at the murderous actions of some of his crew. Colombo knew of an impending lunar eclipse predicted by Regiomontanus many years before. He attributed the eclipse to the Christian God, the same God Europe used to justify slaughtering those who knew my bay before me.

Stories matter.

Still, a lunar eclipse is about as exciting as the planets lined up in late winter--a parlor show. That they exist (and that we figured out what those points of light mean) are the stories worth knowing.

So tomorrow, an hour or so after my bacteria break down their last molecules of sugar, I will wander outside Bloomfield High, take a look west, and see the string of planetary pearls that got so much attention this week.

Then I'll walk home, knowing I am among the luckiest men alive, feeling the earth below with every step that takes me home.

Hokey smokes! Fluorescent bacteria!!!!

Et tu, Zappa?

There's seems to be some confusion about my role.

I am, of course, an agent of the government, of the public, of my town. I am a science teacher, which should mean I teach science.

Arne says it means I am the linchpin of our economy.
Einstein said I have the power to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
Governor Christie says it means I'm a lazy ass lapping at the public trough. His sidekick Cerf says I'm an ankle-biter.
Walt Whitman said I should be destroyed.
Cicero said I am pretty valuable to the state--even used the word "noble."
Frank Zappa advised children to avoid me lest their minds rot.

Frank Zappa might be right....

 
All kinds of noble and ignoble nonsense spews from the mouths of those who would judge me.

Teachers are fair game, and understandably so--we're involved in a process no one truly understands honing our varied skills on the most impressionable among us. That these impressionable folk happen to be the result of sexual unions among adults who (mostly) live in the same town I teach only adds to the fun. Add to that that they're paying me out of pocket to do this, well, I expect a little noise.


I'll make it easy for you.

• I teach children science because I want them to see the world outside of humans--infinitely fascinating.
• I teach science because I want my republic to survive the nonsense spewed by those who'd stomp on their children to push a career--a nation still worth salvaging.
• I teach children because their fresh views help me see better--and as my senses fade in my twilight, I need all the help I can get.
• I teach mostly because I love it--I'm selfish that way.

Frank Zappa photo from The Rebel Kind. 

Gingko blues

Do not ever follow any advice I give for eating anything. If something has an acetyl group in it, I'll try it. 

Some folks' skin reacts to the pulp, too. This is the Science Teacher blog, not Fine Foods.

My favorite tree on the Bloomfield Green was cut down a couple of days ago, mostly for the crime of doing what its family has done for a quarter billion years: stink.

The tree was about as old as me, had its first offspring about the same time as I did. I pray the coincidences end with its death.

The gingko is infamous for its stinky fruit--some call it the "vomit tree"--but I loved my tree, walked by it several hundred times a year, and I'm going to miss it.

***

While the fruit do stink--imagine a dog vomiting into your son's gym socks sometime mid-June--the wood's subtle piney jasmine scent rivals my stash of ambergris for my favorite nose candy. I brought a wedge back into B362. One of my lambs also loved the smell--she took the wedge home with her.

I'm hoping the nuts are at least half as good.

I've read several different ways to prepare them, but I think I'm just going to roast them until they look roasted enough, then pop one or two or more into my mouth. I'll let you know how it goes.

***

What does this have to do with teaching science?

Most of my lambs have no idea where food comes from. A few watched me as I picked up a few fruits off the ground. I told them I planned to eat them, and I do.

An ancient tree planted decades ago in my town, likely by someone now dead, has been fallen by a cultural intolerance of, well, smell. Before the tree passes from my memory, I want to know what she tastes like.

The aroma of my fallen gingko reminded me of the vast unknown pleasures that await the curious. I want my students to chase the pleasures nature offers each of us, for barely the cost of paying attention, even here in an urban district, long tamed by concrete and asphalt.

The world is bigger than we can dream. It's not enough for me to say it, no child should accept the word of a teacher because he is a teacher. The gingko can speak for itself.

To be fair, the tree was not completely healthy. Then again, neither is anything else our age.

Photo from "Wildman" Steve Brill's site, a site well worth the visit.

Quahogs, Darwin, and grace

Today is Darwin Day, honoring a complex man with a stunningly simple idea that replaced the need for magical thinking.

Folks may hold on to their magic, I know I do, but they can no longer use rational thinking to hold on to the idea that the Hand of God was necessary to craft our appearance here.

The theory of evolution cannot disprove God—no science can. That was never Darwin’s intent.

See, if you grasp science, you grasp that it is not designed to disprove anything outside the realm of the natural world.

It’s not science using theology that causes all the trouble. It’s theology insisting that its stories are scientifically sound. 

I like hot sauce and I like  fruit, but I don't splash Tabasco on my blueberries.

I like fables, and I like science. I try not to confound the two.

 ***

Yesterday the soft gray wintry sky spit on the flint gray water. The air was chilly, but the water was still mid-40's, balmy for February.

Clamming in February, somewhere in Cape May County

I pulled just over a dozen quahogs out of the mix of muck and sand that gives them life. My hands were numb, too numb to feel the slice of flesh, but not so numb that I could not feel the sure shape of a cherrystone nestled in my hand. Perfect.

The more you look at these critters, the more beautiful and sophisticated they appear.

I gently tucked the oldest one back into the muck, one much older than the students I teach. I also tossed back the smallest, not out of sentiment--the small ones are tasty--but out of respect for the law.

Within a few hours, what was left of them sat in our bellies.

***

Here's the thing about science, something Darwin knew, something too many today do not--something does not have to be empirically demonstrated and peer-reviewed to be true, even matters of the natural world.

The natural world exceeds our collective imagination. The science world is limited to the parts of the natural world we have bothered to see. Since what we bother to see is influenced heavily by the wages we get to see it, what we look at represents a tiny, biased view of our universe.

This is true of scientists, this s true of the clergy, this is true of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. It's also true of me, and (if I may be so presumptuous) you.

Pulling up a quahog from the muck on a wet wintry day interests me. Quahogs interest me enough to know, from personal study, that many of the chowder clams I toss back are older than me, no matter what science says.

If I had pursued science research as a career, I would not be playing with quahogs, I'd be playing with telomeres--not because telomeres are more interesting, but because telomeres may unlock the fountain of youth, and (subsequently and more importantly)  have some heavy finanacial interests invested in them.

My sophomores feel this. What we call science in high school biology narrows their world view. Their wages (in this case grades) depend on reducing life to a series of incomprehensible and unpronounceable words attached to illustrations of things no human or mammal or any living thing at all has ever seen.

***

You can tell how old a clam is by checking its rings. I have seen several quahogs well into their 60's and 70's, and I mostly toss them back, again not (mostly) out of sentiment, but because they tend to be chewy.

If you Google northern quahog age you'll learn that until recently, "researchers" stated that the oldest northern  quahogs were around 40. I knew otherwise, as does anyone else who bothers to gather clams in places too shallow for dredgers, but I lack the sophisticated "sclerochronological analysis" employed by scientists. I do have eyes, though, and a large sample size

An hour ago, they were still in the mud.

Less than a year ago, researchers discovered that my quahogs can live over a hundred years:

Annually resolved growth lines in the hinge region and margin of the shell were identified and counted; the age of the oldest clam shell was determined to be at least 106 y. This age represents a considerable increase in the known maximum life span for M. mercenaria, more than doubling the maximum recorded life span of the species (46 y).

Iain D. Ridgway et al.,"New Species Longevity Record for the Northern Quahog"Journal of Shellfish Research 30(1):35-38. 2011

I could roll my eyes, but this is how science works. And now the "known" recorded life span has more than doubled.

***

But this has always been true. Natural selection has always been true. Gravity has always been true. Our understanding is more recent.

What separates science from the rest of what we know is that it depends on faith in the natural world, and faith in the idea that certain patterns have always been true, and will remain true.

God may (or may not) be a human construct--there's no way to test this empirically, and because it's untestable, it's not only uninteresting to science, it can never be science.

When I feel the perfect heft of an ancient quahog in my hand on a mid-winter day, 

when I become part of the gray light, part of the muddy smell, 

when my edge of self blends in with the detritus of life in the chilly mud between my toes, 

I am unconscious of the rational.

Mercenaria mercenaria, Homo sapiens

I am also ridiculously happy, happy to be part of this thing, whatever this thing is, that connects me and the clams and everything that lives to a world we've done nothing to deserve.

Read Charles Darwin's words. Know that he was happiest when absorbing the  incomprehensible variety of life around us, of us. The first love of his life left him because he preferred collecting bugs to meeting her family during winter break at college.

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin.

 Darwin did not kill God.
Those who persist in using science to prove God exists, though, just might.

Clam photos by us taken yesterday. 
Yes, I know, I fubared the html--still working on it....

Siemen's STEM Institute: A Luddite Wants In

I would like very much to go to the Siemen's STEM Institute this summer, though after today, I'm not sure they'd welcome me  in their midst. I've spent hours wrestling with a Flip camera, MS Movie Maker, and and apparent conflict between the chip set in my laptop and the rest of the world (a chip with a chip on its shoulder), and  may be disqualified for my inability to produce a simple two minute video broadcasting my Luddite qualities.

I have a fine 1956 Futura typewriter sitting in my room, ready to type up a cogent argument for my presence. Which may just highlight the problem.

Still, this has not been a pointless exercise.

The thrust for STEM education focuses on things human--help the economy, cure cancer, and screw the Commies and anyone else who is a little less Western-Eurocentric than the fine folk who rule our land.

And that's fine and good, I suppose, but not all my lambs have both the desire and the chops to become STEM All Stars. Each and every one of them, though, lives in this universe. Very few of them realize the same universe belongs to them.

 ***

Last week was midterms. I got restless, as I tend to do during things like midterms and shopping for underwear, so I grabbed a microscope and tossed a drop of our windowsill pond water on  a slide.

A stentor spun a whirlpool in its own universe, a magnificent critter with a reason all its own, pulling in other critters with its vortex, so that it may continue its stentor ways.



I put a camera on the scope, and projected the stentor's world on the screen. Most of the students stopped, stared. I shouldn't have distracted them from their task at hand, but I am glad that I did.

This universe cannot be subdued. The horseshoe crabs will creep out of the bay millions of years after we're gone.

This matters.

I teach what matters, and a lot of what doesn't.
I teach to young folks whose bodies share the same carbon atoms that will, sooner or later, end up in the carapaces of the horseshoe crabs that will outlive us.

I teach science because a child who know her universe is more likely to know joy than a child who does not.
If she happens to cure cancer in the meantime, well, bonus points.

On a good day, nothing, nothing, beats teaching science to young humans.

Imbolc

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

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

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

***

We are trapped by words.

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Photos by us.

Breathing biology

We got beans growing in our classroom. Three gorgeous rattlesnake pods hanging from a vine, the soft purple puff of a flower between the second and third bean.

Most of the stuff that makes up these beans is carbon dioxide, much of it from the breath of all those who share ideas here in our room.

Carbon dioxide from yesterday's Pop Tarts,
Snapples, and bologna sandwiches.

Carbon dioxide that traveled through the hearts 

of every child in our class.

Carbon dioxide expelled as a sigh, 

broken down by a few brain cells that would

rather do anything but this school thing.

Carbon dioxide that is invisible and soft as a baby's breath

as real as the ancient massive maple tree 

just outside our classroom window.

Carbon dioxide children are taught to fear as "bad,"

the harbinger of catastrophic climate change.

We ruin it, this carbon dioxide communion, reducing it to hieroglyphics on a page, to be regurgitated by spilling bubbles on a sheet, a religiously messy communion of sorts sterilized to a formula:

C₆H₁₂O₆ +6 O₂  =>  6H₂O + 6CO₂

And yet, for a moment, the moment before eating the bean, a few students allow themselves the beauty and the power of the story to let them believe what they've always known to be true, that this whole life business, as messy and complicated and incomprehensible as it seems, gets down to this:

Each living thing, every living thing, shares an intimate bond that goes beyond the language of science, beyond the language of art, beyond human boundaries.

The universe belongs to all of us, as we belong to it.

No matter how we do in school, no matter what we know, now matter what we do.

I would trade all the biochemical pathways we "teach" for a child's grasping, for more than a moment, 

that we are indeed the stuff of the universe around us, and that this stuff cycles through us, is us.

Proust effect

 

If we could teach science by shoving a funnel up a child's nose then pour in "knowledge" as a slurry of data, vocabulary words, and equations, I've no doubt that we would--for the glory of our nation and our economy.

That we cannot does not keep Arne from trying to force us to use bigger, shinier funnels.

Arne and his crew will see progress measuring the internal diameter of the nostrils of our students, No Choana Left Behind.^* With enough time, our children will have nostrils at least as wide as the Koreans, perhaps even as large as the Finnish. Our economy will hum as every child has the opportunity to master the dismissive sniff of the 1%er.

***

The world outside the fluorescent hum of my classroom reminds me what matters, and though I have as big a collection of funnels as any teacher could want--SmartBoards, Mobis, digical cams, and 1:1 netbooks--I think a nose has a finer purpose.

I keep the skeletal remains of last summer's basil in a bag--brown sticks with rosettes of seed pods, each pod holding several tiny black specks, each a potential basil plant. I spend a little time each week picking at  the pods to collect the seeds, using my fingers, as fingers were meant to be used.

I keep a Petri dish on the teacher's desk to hold the seeds I gather.

Yesterday some students saw me take a deep whiff of the bag holding the seemingly dead plants, and they saw the pleasure that it gave me.

A few children will take a dried, broken branch of last summer, and sniff. A few children will take some seeds from the same broken branch and watch a new plant grow from a speck.

 ***

This past week, a child was upset that his carrots, grown from seed, were not doing well. He had planted several dozen seeds where one would have done. He was trying to save them all.

I suggested that he thin the plants. He plucked the first plant, and held it a moment. I could tell it bothered him.

      Crush it, then smell it.

He looked puzzled, but then did just that. His surprised smile lit up the room.

     It smells like carrots!

I'm not sure where this particular child falls along the norms of the internal diameter of choanae, and, like many children, he's a bit resistant to funnels that stretch his nostrils for no reason that makes sense to him.

The pleasure of the aroma of a freshly crushed carrot seedling in the middle of winter's dark days will not help him pass the New Jersey Biology Competency Test, and his results are not likely to bolster my career. The economy will not be helped by children who find pleasure in using their noses well.

But that's not why I teach.

*I had no idea that the word "choana" came from the Greek χοάνη ("funnel") until after I wrote this.