My town and the Manhattan Project: incomplete thoughts for a lesson

This is going to be a bit long, and a bit local. It is for my students and those of us who teach them. It is about technology and memory, about abstract concepts of global community (nationalism/internationalism) and a more manageable concept of local community.

It is not about plutonium, at least not directly. “Fat Man,” the bomb dropped over Nagasaki, was a plutonium bomb, the second ever to be detonated (the first one was tested in the States). There was not enough uranium for more than one uranium bomb used on Japan (“Little Boy”), at least that's the story.

I am not convinced that evoking images of the destructive power of a nuclear weapon, then associating it with a contaminated site just over a mile away from my classroom, is a great idea with 14 year olds. It would make a good anticipatory set, though, and it does make the lesson more tangible.

I worry that one of my wackadoodles (an affectionate term) will spend an afternoon wandering around the site, then bring in a sample to check with a Geiger counter at school, with the subsequent evacuation of the building when the needle snaps through the gauge.

At any rate, these are notes for a lesson plan not yet developed. We live in the town where uranium was first commercially enriched specifically to build the atom bomb.

Next day Prof Wigner asked me to find another source of uranium metal. After some hours in the library, I cam back with the news that two people at Westinghouse, Marden and Rentschler, had made pure uranium metal for lamp filaments at the Westinghouse plant in Bloomfield, New Jersey. They held a patent on the process. Bloomfield was just outside New York City, only fifty miles away.

Ed Creutz went to Bloomfield a few days later and was remarkably persuasive. Westinghouse soon found itself committed to delivering enough uranium metal to make many, many lamp filaments. It was the beginning of their rapidly growing role as a major supplier on the Manhattan Project.

Dr. George Cowan: Personal Reflections on the Manhattan Project ,The Atomic Heritage Foundation

Dr. Cowan's interests now lie in early child development. He is also "a patron of the arts." He helped found a bank. He is obviously a bright man, with a well-rounded background, blessed with the best formal education our culture can provide.

He frightens me. Not because of who he is--I bet I'd love him as a neighbor, nor because of anything he's done to me. It's not fair for me to single him out just because googling "Bloomfield" and "Manhattan Project" happens to land him on the front page.

He serves merely as an icon in this post, an icon revered by our culture, the scientists who come to our rescue developing dangerous technologies for the (our) common good. We are blinded by reverence.

And here is what he has to say about his work, and others like him:

The lesson that remains most vividly in my mind from my wartime experiences is that teams of highly gifted, dedicated people working together on extremely difficult problems, given great resources, motivated by an overwhelming threat to national survival, and blessed with good luck, can work apparent miracles!

--also from Personal Reflections on the Manhattan Project ,The Atomic Heritage Foundation

I could spell out my several difficulties with this seemingly innocuous passage, but before I do, I must confess that my antennae vibrate whenever I see the words "national survival", "blessed", and "miracles" in the same thought.

Some of my kids live in the Watsessing part of town, a section sliced by the Garden State Parkway a few decades ago. The area has a remarkable neighborhood alliance (Watsessing Heights Neighborhood Association) that has battled, among other things, the use of a local park to serve as the staging area for a radium clean-up site in a completely different (and wealthier) town.

They know a bit about radiation, and a bit more about local politics. They can be a real thorn in the town's side, a huge plus in my book of how a democracy should work.

They put out a neat newsletter. And they remember history.

Not surprisingly, the Westinghouse site in Bloomfield was contaminated
with residual radiation from the work that was done there.
After the plant closed, the buildings on the site were razed and the
radioactive contamination removed to the satisfaction of the Federal
Government. However, the contamination is still above the acceptable
level for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
Westinghouse's successor, Viacom, hopes to lease the land to a
developer but cannot do so until the contamination is addressed. The
story of the Manhattan Project in Bloomfield still does not have an
ending!

Mimi Michalski , “Westinghouse and World War II” Watsessing Heights Newsletter, Spring 2004

And if we remember not to forget, never will have an ending.

If it don't fit....

I worked briefly as a stevedore at Port Newark when I was 19 years old. I got a nice offer to stay (25K per year plus wheels, not bad for 1978).

For a variety of reasons, I did not take it, but I stayed long enough to inhale a bit of asbestos, develop great biceps and pecs (now long gone), and receive a nugget of wisdom that has carried me far.

I was busy messing with some kind of doo-dad, getting frustrated, hammering uselessly on it, trying to make it work. It was hot, I was covered in hydraulic oil, and my ineptitude amused the more experienced workers.

One of the crane operators took pity on me and offered this advice:

If it don't fit, turn it over and try again.

Last night I had to re-seat a toilet, last week fix the hood latch on our '94 Caravan. In the past few months I've replaced drain pipes, fixed switches, cut down a tree, changed a couple of tires, built two platform beds, repaired a leaky gas line, replaced a mailbox post, and the few dozen or so other little things that don't require a whole lot of theory, but do require a little bit of thought.

Nothing in a fairly fancy educational background prepared me for any of that, except perhaps the shop class I took in 7th grade, back when schools still had them.

I spent a bucketload of time in schools, just a couple of months on the docks. And I got paid to be on the docks.

Excepting the asbestos still hanging in my alveoli, which serves me better at day to day tasks?

Not saying education isn't important, not saying that at all. Just reminding myself that my kids have several decades of life beyond school.

Big Ideas: "Hooked" on cells

The cell theory is 150 years old, sort of—it's not really a theory, more a set of ideas initially promulgated back in 1839, a culmination of observations by many scientists using the relatively new tool back then, the microscope.

At any rate, here's a textbook version of it:

• All organisms are made of one or more cells.
• The cell is the basic building block of all living things.
  
• All cells come from pre-existing cells. Omnis cellula e cellula.

The first two parts are credited to Theodor Schwann and Matthias Schleiden, apparently inspired by an after-dinner coffee chat. Schwann published it (and neglected to mention Schleiden) in 1838 with a third part, something about “free cell formation,” akin to spontaneous generation. Rudolph Virchow proclaimed omnis cellula e cellula in 1858, now usually listed as the third tenet of the cell theory.

Still, each time I bring it up in class, I hope a student will challenge it. I rattle on about the Earth's finite age, about the vastly different planet it was a few billion years ago, then how, according to the cell theory, all cells come from pre-existing cells.

The obvious question—and school has a way of discouraging true questions, even the obvious ones:

Where did the 1^st cell come from?

A little less obvious, but still powerful question:

If a cell formed from a certain set of conditions once, how come it didn't happen hundred or millions or billions of times other times?
Maybe Scwhann's free cell formation idea was not so crazy after all.

Finally, and now colleagues may wander away as I don my tinfoil hat:

What prevents cells from forming de novo now?

(OK, massive environmental changes make this unlikely, but how about in vitro?)

Science is not knowing the answers, science is observing and questioning and putting together some framework to explain what we observe. Science is, after all, telling stories.

I'm the guy in the science department muttering about spontaneous generation and the ether theory--it's not so much that they're discredited, it's that so few educated people know why.

Call them abiogenesis and the neo-Lorentzian view of special relativity, however, and you're back in the club of intelligentsia.

I'd rather hang with the skeptics.

Big Ideas: "One Living Filament"

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

Erasmus Darwin. The Temple of Nature. 1802.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Hiroshima

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. ... It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. . . . What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history. . . .

Harry S. Truman

It happened on this date, this "greatest achievement."

New technology used to "solve" an old problem. We cannot help ourselves.

Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, suggested "we ought to stay out of the nuclei." Until we have a clue what we want, sounds like good advice.

You cannot separate tools from the critters who use them. Teaching science as some compartmentalized thought process without cultural context is a dangerous game.

Why We Got To Learn This?

Kids, fairly, want to know “why do we have to know this”—the flippant answer (and occasionally the most accurate one) is “because the state guidelines say so.”

Leaving aside the specific mandates from the state, it’s still a worthwhile question, maybe the worthwhile question, when discussing curriculum.

One tack is the Standard Educator Line©:

Well, we live in a high tech world. [Teacher then selects an example.] You need to know about gene technology and GMO’s, for instance, so you can understand what is in the news.

Let's dive into the student brain: Ah, yes, so we can digest the news—every day I wake up, plug my iPod into the internet, and download the latest podcast on how we can cram every last vitamin into a brussels sprout. Or make a bean glow in the dark. Or make a banana an edible vaccine.

Beyond student cynicism, though, we might well question just what a student needs to know about gene technology in order to participate in democracy. Again, the short answer may very little, at least in the technical aspects.

We all need context.

The natural world (or for me, just “world” without the safety of “natural”) exceeds our imagination. Our imagination exceeds the digital world. It is worth pursuing. It will remain ultimately unknowable, and it will remain worth pursuing.

No sense fretting about what your kids know about vectors and sequencing until they have some clue the big ideas in biology.

In order to understand (technically) gene splicing you need to understand (technically) how eukaryotic genes work which requires technical understanding about exons and introns which require technical understanding of spliceosomes which require grasping RNA and protein structures…it’s turtles all the way down.

Somewhere along the way we lose the student, and, I daresay, a significant percent of the public school science teachers. We point snurpy fingers at each other—“You introduced spliceosomes?! What were you thinking?” And so it goes.

And here is where I ask the cynics among you to hush—just because most of us cannot do this, and the few of us who might be able to still would need more hours a day the Earth currently blesses us with, does not mean the goal is silly or cosmic or ethereal or mystic or whatever other word that blurs and demeans the wonder.

Many of my students have ADD—awe deficit disorder. It's hard to teach awe. Even harder to test it. (Looks like Richard Louv tackled this in Last Child in the Woods, in which he coins Nature-Deficit disorder--I need to get my hands on his book.)

Testing recall of gene technology, however, is easy. Throw a few terms on a multiple choice question, have the students bubble away with their #2 pencils, and crunch the results.

Predictably, a small fraction of the students get it right—one advantage of multiple choice questions is that at least a few students will darken the right bubble.

Teaching science in a classroom, outside of the larger cultural context, and largely through LED projectors and text, doesn’t work well for most students under most teachers, excepting the rare charismatic visionary who spins rainbows on desktops, mesmerizing her flock with her ability to open up the natural world that outside the room (and ultimately within the room for those who wake up fully).

I want to know how to bridge that gap.

Book science

We are too exclusively bookish in our scholarly routine...In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before they saw them.

A.N. Whitehead (lifted from The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts, Vintage, 1968, p. 100)

In the 1890’s, the Committee of Ten decreed that the public high school curriculum shall start with biology, followed by chemistry, then physics, or so the myth goes. Turns out the Committee actually said students should take either botany or zoology at some point in their high school career.

Still, public schools in these parts still tackle biology before chemistry and physics. A lot of teachers think the bio-chemistry-physics sequence is a bit outdated now.

We would suggest that a modern day Committee of Ten would recognize the need for “biology” to adapt to its new educational environment and would recommend resequencing high school biology so that it is studied after introductory physics and chemistry. Also, as an absolute minimum, introductory high school biology should be a 2-yr course—something that the original Committee of Ten did not nor could not anticipate.

Keith Sheppard and Dennis M. Robbins
High School Biology Today: What the Committee of Ten Actually Said

One child in my class last year complained that the text was misleading—“it had a picture of two owls in the beginning—it was the last time we saw an animal until March”—and I don’t think she left knowing any more about penguins than the day she started.

Richard Feynman tells the story about naming a bird—his father was seen as less that astute by his friends’ mothers since his father did not bother teaching the names of the birds.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Richard Feynman

Zip up to 5:17 to hear the story.

To name a creature tells you nothing about it—it is a symbolic sound that spares us the effort of running around trying to find one to point to when we want to convey its image, but it really says, well, nothing.

I can turn it around—hand each child a sow bug. We have 48 minutes to do something with it. Figure a couple of minutes for the “Do Now”, then a few minute for the anticipatory set (perhaps showing the Feynman video, though he’s such a natural even my live performance cannot touch the 2D video of a man sitting in his chair telling a story). A good story. A happy man.

Each child has a sow bug, in a Petri dish, and now the pregnant silence.

“Mister Doctor Doyle, what are we supposed to do?” I write the assignment on the board.
“Tell me what it is.”
“How many words do we have to use?”
So it goes. Few good stories. Fewer happy students.

Maybe I could give them each a ”pet” sow bug. Just ask them to keep it alive for two weeks. Everyone can get an A. (No sense instilling any more competitiveness here otherwise I’d find a lot of dead sow bugs with a day.)

Just what do I want a child to take away from a nameless animal?