My UbD essential question of the day

The 150th anniversary of Darwin's On the Origin of Species is coming up November 29.

Do you believe in evolution?
Nope.

Are you a Bible-thumpin', gun-totin' wingnut?
On most days, nope.

Do you think descent with modification goes a long, long way towards explaining the unity and diversity of life on Earth?
Yep.

Are you a tree-huggin', granola totin' wingnut?
On most days, nope.

According to Darwin (or today's biologists) did humans come from chimpanzees?
Nope, no rational scientist in her right mind said this.

Am I related to the toe fungus growing on my Aunt Millie's foot?
Yep, I accept that we're (very) distant cousins.

So far no real controversy--I can hold on to a very strong theory that explains just about all we know in biology, I can dabble in the Gospels (and you might best run away if you see me walking around mumbling about Mark reasonably ending at 16:8), and anyone who spends time outside knows life is weird enough that everything that respires just might all be cousins.

Here's the big one, though, and one that cuts across the boundaries.

Were humans inevitable?

This is where hubris takes a hit.
This is part of why Darwin spent a lifetime trying to find cracks in his own work.
This is why teaching biology can change a student's world.

Any thoughts?

The altar of the horseshoe crab

The annuals are flowering like there's no tomorrow, and for them, that's reason enough. I gathered up 8 or 10 small cherry tomatoes this morning. A small eggplant hangs from a plant still daring to flower.

The basil is still flowering. converting the sun's energy into nectar to attract the bees, which are still buzzing, who will use the sugar to produce honey to keep them alive for the few months around here when the sunlight weakens too much to support all the life of summer.

From The Lancet, (Britain's version of our New England Journal of Medicine):

If the pace of increase in life expectancy in developed countries over the past two centuries continues through the 21st century, most babies born since 2000 in France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the USA, Canada, Japan, and other countries with long life expectancies will celebrate their 100th birthdays.

Does that make you feel better? More relaxed?
Did you do anything today that makes living to 100 a bigger deal than living to, say, 50 years old?

***

I run a class website, but I keep it separate from here. The class site is for students and their parents, this one is for me and a handful of folks who share similar conversations. The last thing I need is a chat with an administrator who wonders why I implied that humans are doomed, that life is awesome whether (or the more likely not) humans choose to continue to be part of it, and that current economic practices have (in a biological sense, anyway) predictable consequences, consequences best not shared with children in a public setting.

I have a bad habit in the classroom. Anytime a students asks me "if I do such and such will I die?" my answer is always the same.

You will die.
But not today.
And not because of "such and such."

(Unless it is one of my wackadoodles wondering if it's OK to mix bleach and ammonia just to see what happens--do not do this.)

***

The altar of the horseshoe crab
Cape May, September 28, built and abandoned by an anonymous child

I find solace in that eggplant flowering as the days darken. I do what I can do, but I am not wrapped up in grief over a culture that cannot be sustained more than a few more generations if current practices continue.

I am not going to hammer the kids with images of what we have destroyed--I want them to see what we have.

If a child starts to recognize the beauty and structure of the flow of life, starts to recognize the mystery of what we do not (and cannot) know as truly a mystery that cannot be solved by a bigger shot of technology, starts to truly see how everything is held together by everything else, she will smile before she despairs.

And she just might figure out a few worthwhile things to do with the extra decade or two she gets in the bargain.

The child who built her altar above has a clue. I hope she still does by the time she finishes high school.

End of the line?

I read pretty much anything Sean Nash writes--he is a biology teacher in Missouri, yet teaches one of the premiere (OK, kickass) classes of oceanography in this fine country. He recently wrote a blog piece on a film (or what we used to call film--I guess video is the word now).

Mr. Nash wrote (yet another) fine post, linked above. This is my response:

I am one of the water people–I am banging away on the keyboard less than a mile away from the Delaware Bay. My wife is out walking, she’ll find the edge tonight.

Anyone who’s lived more than a few decades along the shore can see the changes. It’s complicated, though, by the wide variations in local populations, but not so complicated that imminent collapse is invisible.

I have neighbors who farm the sea. At least one other in our town is a scientist who helps set limits on those who make a living on the waters around us (we live on a cape).

The scientist does not know the waters as well as my scalloper friend, though both recognize the problem.

I will not be able to attend your event, but urge all who read your words to visit your websites–you have created a marvelous program about, well, our world.

I fear we may be well past a tipping point, but I find hope in my night walks. A comb jelly glows its electric blue when caught in the tiny curl of a bay wave, a ghost crab freezes in front of me, then runs into the water, seemingly defying physics as it treats seawater like air.

Life is here, it is happening, and it will keep happening. 3 billion plus years is a long time–the media is excited by the recent unveiling of Ardipithecus ramidus (”Ardi”), but my faith rests in the critters that have found their niches independent of the nonsense we’ve created.

Contrast 4.4 million years (Happy Birthday, Ardi) with the 3.5 billion years or so life’s been around on this planet. Do the math. Really, do the math.

We are not special, though we are part of something truly special. It’s enough for some of us to be bit players in a larger scheme of, well, awesomeness.

(These words make more sense when sitting on a jetty watching the tide rise and fall. They make no sense sitting in a building. Guess where I prefer to be?)

Descent with modification will trump “evolution.” Evolution is a human conceit–revel in the moment of life.

Worth watching

I wish I could show this in class--a funny, concise overview of science and civics.

Cuckoo ale

This has nothing to do with teaching.
This is intimately related to teaching.

You tell me.

How different would we be if we allowed unprogrammed events to elicit "mirth and jollility"?

Corporations have all the legal rights of citizens in the United States, thanks to the Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company Supreme Court ruling back in 1886.

Publicly owned corporations have a legal duty to maximize profits for the shareholders, thanks to Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., Michigan Supreme Court ruling back in 1919. (OK, an oversimplification of a more complicated problem, but this is a blog, not the Yale Law Review.)

Corporations are immortal, despite the American Revolution. The Boston Tea Party was a deliberate anti-corporate act. American corporations had a finite lifetime back in the 18th century, and they faced dissolution if they failed to act in the public interest.

(This is one of those odd, true statements that rock my mind, right up there with "President Nixon was the last liberal President.")

We just became a Title 1 district--the educorporomob is baying at our doors. I spend a lot of time after school tutoring students. I consider it part of my job.

I can sign up for a tutoring company and make real dollars tutoring during the same time I spend after school helping my lambs. I'd get a nice cut of money paid to professional tutoring organizations. They'd get a nice chunk of change, too.

Alas, I have an old-fashioned sense of duty, and though the union will vociferously proclaim my right to pretty much do anything I want after 2:45 P.M., my professional obligation is to my students.

Call me a chump.

Still, when I go home at night, with a backpack full of papers to grade, I'll drink my cuckoo ale to remember, not to forget. I'm all for "mirth and jollility," and drinking a pint after a day's work well done fuels the feeling.

It used to be the American Way.

Carnies

The weather is drop dead gorgeous--you can smell death creeping in, as it will in autumn, yet you don't care.

The honeybees will chase you down if you wear a colorful shirt, and the impatiens are flowering like there's no tomorrow.

Tomorrow never comes.

***

The carnival came to the town green, and the carnival left.

The colors were unreal, or maybe just too real--a monitor has 16.3 million colors, and cannot capture the light of a carnival at dusk on the equinox. Nor the smells . People working. No, really working. Laying tracks. Flexing cable. Smiling and joking. Cussing. Living.

I used to work on the docks. Not for long, but long enough to help rebuild a boom on a crane anchored to a barge. I helped thread the cable once we were done welding the boom back together.

I felt like I did something that day. I could point to it. Look what I did.

Feeling useful beats feeling used.

***

I once took care of a carny mother and her two young ones. Life was not easy, but she took good care of the children, and they were happy.

They were not, however, in school.

Now I've missed a few things while playing doctor. At least one cost a life. Rarely, however, does anyone call you on it.

I got called on this one.

The NJ Division of Youth and Family Services wanted to know why I did not report the older child, well into her 7th year.

Well, um, they get home-schooled while traveling with the carnival.
How do you know?
I don't.

Truth was the mother said her said carnies school their children on the road, and I had no motive (though plenty of reason) to doubt her. I practiced medicine; I cared about kids. Her child was healthy, her child was sane, her child was happy.

Carnies face a lot of prejudice. They're different. They're transient. They're drunks. They're shifty. They're loused. They're ne'er-do-wells. They're a lot of things according to the townsfolk, but their biggest sin might be their strengths. They do useful work, and they have reason enough not to trust the future, so they live more in the moment.

A few of them are even, well, happy. Perhaps their biggest sin.

We should all be carnies for a day.

***

When I was a pediatric cardiology fellow at Mount Sinai, a short-lived disastrous turn early in life, I spent an afternoon poolside with a dozen docs or so, and their clans. The hostess sniffed at her perceived happiness of one of her gardeners--"they're too ignorant to be unhappy."

It's hard to pretend class lines do not exist in the States when you're a doc, and even harder when you think that as a doc you've fallen on the wrong side of the line.

I was, I think, a good doc, but never a "gentleman." I wonder about the child from the carnival--she's a young adult now, and by now DYFS has given up on her, one way or the other.

I wonder whether the extra few month with the show made any difference one way or the other.

I know this much, though. She was happy once in her life.

The photo was shamelessly lifted from the Dixieland Carnival Company until I get my own photos uploaded here.

Walt Kelly is dead. Long live Walt Kelly.

I've been busy. Too busy.

Too busy to clam, to write, to stargaze, to play my guitar, to get drunk, to chase ghost crabs on midnight beaches, to watch the monarch butterfly migration, to catch sea bass, to carve wood, to watch the ferry come and go, to brew peach melomel, to be human.

Last night Leslie and I stargazed on the edge of the Delaware Bay, chased ghost crabs under the starlight, and today we raked up some clams from Richardson Sound. I will play my guitar tonight for her after an ale (or two), and tomorrow I hope to sit on the jetty and watch the butterflies flutter by. Next week I'm brewing peach melomel, come hell or high water, and I am "wasting" my time writing now.

***

My hands smell like low tide at the moment--I played, today, and rejoined the universe. Women and cilantro and bay mud all smell like life, and that's no accident. I forget sometimes. If I ever forget permanently, I may as well be dead.

Clamming is serious business--it costs lives. Not just the lives of the clams and, occasionally humans. I rake up bloodworms, tiny blue claws, whelks, and all kinds of critters I cannot see.

Clamming is serious business--it feeds lives, As I stir up the muck, shrimp and kellies and whelks congregate around me, nibbling on the manna, and occasionally nibbling on me (apparently psoriasis is tasty).

Right now 15 clams sit in the fridge--I raked up a few more than that, but Leslie and I decided that 15 was enough, so I put a few back. I scooped up a few small holes in the sound, and placed the clams in my artificial beds. No doubt I killed a few thousand critters to save the few extra clams I dug up. Still, there's something to be said for knowing when enough is enough. (15 clams for two people may be too much.)

***

I teach, or try to, anyway. I teach about excited electrons, Latinized naming systems, and entropy. It's all very exciting for me, but out of context, I'd bet it's stultifying. If you're 15 years old in our culture, a culture predicated on lies and salesmanship, what I teach is out of context.

A couple of hours ago I was sitting in a kayak, surrounded by water and herons and sea weed and egrets and cormorants and, of course, clams. Context.

If you kill but do not consciously slaughter, you are missing something. It is very hard to live without killing, unless you are a green plant. If you are not a green plant, you have an odd sort of agreement with the universe.

***

I love Walt Kelly's work, and had I known him personally, I'd have loved him, too.



This is the 2nd time the pogo strip used the phrase "Don't take life too serious...it ain't nohow permanent." Walt was alive the first time. He's still alive in my head.

We pretend we're as immortal as the corporations influencing our curriculum, but, of course, we are not. IBM will exist long after my children celebrate my life at a good ol' fashioned Oirish wake.

If I teach nothing else this year, I hope I teach this much.

You are alive, part of a mystery that you cannot comprehend. You will die, also a part of a mystery you cannot comprehend. Enjoy the ride.

(Alas, it's not in the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Science Standards. I'm teaching it anyway.)

Addendum: turns out 15 clams was just right.