A solstice time out

The days are shorter around these parts this time of year. The ground is covered with snow. It's winter.

Grasping winter is not easy, but with a globe and a flashlight, most of my lambs "get it," at least for a few minutes, and if nothing else, they know we are not colder because our planet drifted too far from the sun.

If I ask the usual questions, I get the usual answers, and everyone's happy. The kids are happy because good things happen when they say the right things, I'm happy because I get to use a kinesthetic exercise (looks good on the lesson plans and gets the kids out of their seats), and administration is happy because my kids are more likely to pass the HSPA.

Still, I have a bad habit of peeking under the hood even when the car's running just fine.

So I peeked....


I love the Naval Oceanography Portal--it's like my beloved Old Farmer's Almanac on testosterone.

The shortest day of the year (here, anyway) was yesterday.
The latest sunrise won't happen until early January.
The earliest sunset occurred weeks ago.

In the olden days, long before I was born, noon meant the time of day when the sun was highest in your town. That it no longer means that surprises people.

A day used to mean what a solar day still does--the time it takes the Earth to spin so that the sun appears to return back to a particular position.* A day now means 24 hours. Not the same thing.

No big deal if it's the 16th century, the daylight hours are brief, and you want to meet on the Town Green at noon. Clocks killed our connection to the sun.

If you do not grasp this, you do not "get" time--and most folks don't.

The sunsets have been later and later for two weeks now, and the dawn continues come later, as it will for another week. The state won't test that, though. Sad thing is, few folks notice. We are teaching young adults concepts before we teach them how to see.

*Since the Earth has the habit of orbiting the sun in an elliptical orbit, and moves faster through its orbit when closest to the sun (and right now we're almost as close as we're going to get for the year), winter solar days are longer than summer days.

Club card flyer physics

Walking to school this morning, I noticed about a dozen club flyers sitting on the snow-covered street. Seeing scattered club cards on the street is not all that unusual--we live near a college, and even in the age of digiterati, some partays are still announced through cards, personal "invitations" so exclusive you have to bend down to pick one up to get in.

The young woman featured on some cards occasionally catches my eye, the incongruity of her clothing clashing with the cold pavement.

But not today.

Every single card was upside down, with the edges touching the ground, like this:



And if you think about it a moment, it makes sense, and if you think about it a moment more, you have a neat little trick for a physics lab.

Winter solstice

Some days I let my limbus rule--the solstices fall in this category.
I love Christmas, and I love the Christmas story.

Still, the story predates Christmas (if not Christianity), and the story told today has been adulterated.

Not sure straightening out a few myths by referring to the source of the myths counts as science, but it's a good lesson in looking at sources, and the solstice gave me a good excuse to drag out a globe in class to explain the seasons.

(And no, we are not farther from the sun this time of year--we will be as close as we get in about two weeks.)

The Christ was not born in the winter.

The Wise Men were not at the manger.

The current version of Christianity is not in danger of extinction. It has the strength of the United States military behind it. Just ask Mr. Obama, General McChrystal, or the children of Chowkar-Karez .

The Christ did not tell Constantine to put the cross on the shields of his soldiers before his battle against Maxentius. Constantine may have believed this, but it is our shame that we accept a myth utterly contrary to His words.

We move with energy from the sun, our mass built from the breath of the life before us. Carbon dioxide and water and sunlight play with a few strands of DNA. We are special, but no more special than the yeast that taught Jesus how to make wine.

Christian privilege is real. Try greeting a Transportation Security Administration agent with "Assalaamu Alaikum".

These are the shortest days of the year in this neck of the woods. Life needs sunlight, and the light is dying. The longest night of the year looms.

The sun will return.

Merry Natalis Solis Invicti--the real reason for the season. The sun starts its inexorable journey northward, and those of us who survive the winter will be saved again, as we have since before we could speak.

And that is reason enough to celebrate.

A ton of CO2

Sophomores have firm convictions:

Neil Armstrong never walked on the moon.
We will all die in 2012.
Aliens walk among us.

In class I try to avoid opinions. In the short run, many of my lambs will remain confused.

It is not my job to convince Amanda that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon--as soon as I use my position of authority to make a point, I've lost my chance to teach a child how to think.

It is my job, however, to make them skeptics, to have a sense of what we do not know, to suspend judgment while using their God-given senses and rationality to come to their own conclusions, conclusions that might change should new evidence become available.

As a result, I fear that some day a mother will tell my principal that I did not vigorously dispel the notion of aliens, of rigged moonwalks, of the impending doom 3 short years away.

Or maybe the parents believe these things, too.

***

One of the hardest things in high school science is convincing kids that gas is made of stuff. Bring in a chunk of dry ice, place it on the teacher's desk, and let it sublimate its way to nothingness.

"What happened to the dry ice?"
(My students look puzzled at the idiot asking the question)
Um, it, uh, disappeared?

"Yes, but what happened to the carbon dioxide?"
(Eyes roll. The teacher is either really deaf, really slow, or reaaaaaalllly annoying.)
We already told you.

And they did.

***

An American artist (from L.A., in a dish of delicious irony) has sculpted a giant box of flashing images, to represent a metric ton of carbon dioxide. It was unveiled for the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, and will travel a bit for the next few years, proving that all sides are capable of lunacy.

I would be impressed if the box swelled up with rising temperatures, or shrunk when a high pressure weather system passes through. But it doesn't.

A reporter or two has mentioned that the cube represents the volume of CO₂ at standard pressure--but fail to mention temperature. Maybe the ideal gas law is too complicated to discuss.

(It's not. But it's more fun to be mesmerized by flashing boxes of lights than to think.)

***

If you want to show children how much a ton of carbon dioxide weighs, show them the solid product of a very common reaction.

Show them a block of oak, a cup of sugar, or a bowl of salad. Ask them where most of the plant "stuff" comes from.

Take them outside and show them your town's largest oak tree. Comes from the same stuff.

CO₂ + water --> plant stuff and (bonus!) oxygen

The oxygen comes from the water, it turns out. All the carbon dioxide ends up in the wood.
It works the other way, too. Burn sugar completely, and you get this:

plant stuff and oxygen --> CO₂ + water

You can show this in class. I keep a propane torch handy. Light it, briefly aim the flame at something cool and non-flammable (the faucet on my desk makes a good target), and see the water vapor fog up on the object.

It amazes me every time. Water from fire.
(When you hold your hand over a lit grill you can get the same effect--that's not sweat on your palms.)

The global warming "debate" has broken down into camps of rival religious groups. You can still read the science behind the news. Good science requires skepticism, a point lost in the noise from the mob.

Science gives us knowledge, but not wisdom.
Technology gives us power, but not principle.

Power without principle, knowledge without wisdom, will spell the end of our species, though perhaps not through global warming.

There may be a reason intelligence per se is not an adaptation found in most species. Life has been around for here for over 3 billion years, and I've no reason to believe it won't be around for billions more.

I know I won't be around to see it. It would be nice, though, if one of my descendants does.

The cube photo is all over tarnation,this one from LA Curbed, which credits Obscura Digital.
The footprint is from NASA, and is in public domain.

And this is my 400th post here--go me!

Eels, Arne Duncan, and education

I've got eels, Arne Duncan, and education running through my head.

I spend a good chunk of my awake hours with larval humans. I enjoy it, and so far as I can control what I am doing, I think I am useful, no small thing in today's culture.

Today, on the coldest day of the season, we talked about global warming. Yesterday we talked about a local company that employed over a hundred folks in my town while legally spewing tons of a probable carcinogen on my neighborhood.

These are good lessons for a lot of reasons. These are bad lessons for one reason: they will not help my lambs pass the mandatory state exam given in May.

Too bad. I teach for Bloomfield, not New Jersey, not the United States. Most of my salary is subsidized by my neighbors, many, maybe most, working hard to keep their families intact while the economic world collapses around us. And make no mistake, the world of the working class is collapsing.

But first the eels.

***

We really don't know much about anything.

Eels matter. We eat them, we sell them. (Nordstrom's will sell you an eelskin purse for $1580, but no worries, "At Nordstrom, we are committed to offering you the best possible prices," and to be fair, they're not American eels--but the elvers poached here in Jersey will cover your heating bill.)

The north end of our town is its wealthy end. The North End likes causes--one of the local causes is cleaning the Third River. We live by the Second River. (There is no First River--it remains an etymological mystery.)

A few wealthy Northenders hired a biologist to help their cause, to prove that the Third River is a viable stream. The biologist was paid good money to point out the obvious--eels live in the Third River.

My kids found adult eels living a few blocks away under a foot bridge that crosses our Second River. I mentioned this to the mercenary biologist after he pontificated about the virtues of the Third River, the river of the monied class here in Bloomfield.

"Impossible."

Well, nobody bothered to tell the eels. They're there yet. Come by and I'll show you.

The biologist took our Bloomfield money and left. I offered to show him the eels, but I suspect it was not the eels that motivated him to come to the meeting.

And he's an idiot, a well-paid, respected, professional expert idiot.

***

Peerless Tubing employed over a hundred locals. It also spewed over 12 tons of trichloroethylene in my neighorhood in 2001. You could look it up.

The CEO was not a bad man--he got himself elected to the New Jersey Assembly, he made decent money ($196,000 in 1996), and his company kept a lot of families afloat here in Bloomfield.

But he released over 12 tons of a probable carcinogen in my neighborhood in 2001.

We discussed this yesterday, me and a few dozen adolescents. And they got the subtleties--they like to eat, they like heat, they like shelter. They knew the implications. They were upset that toxins were dumped on their homes, but they also knew the value of a paycheck.

I do not have an answer. I just want my lambs to be aware.

This is a Bloomfield issue. No other community in the world is going to teach this lesson, and the state is certainly not going to test it. I taught it anyway.

***

Arne Duncan controls less than 10% of the money coming to this town for education. He knows nothing of our eels, of Peerless Tubing, of anything local.

Any man that would move his two young children 600 miles for personal ambition is not to be trusted. Arne Duncan did that. And he's an idiot, a well-paid, respected, professional expert idiot.

I would gladly give up the 8% of my salary subsidized by the Federal government to teach what I know about our town, in the context of science.

***

Heresy, of course--it's the American Way.

But it's not the Bloomfield way.
Family matters above ambition.

The road to national power, to D.C., is littered with the bodies of folks who decided that the eels in their local streams mattered more than the opinions of experts, that their children's lives mattered more than ambition, that knowing a tiny patch of the world mattered more than ruling a mythological piece of the universe.

I am a teacher, and I am becoming a good one.

Not because I am nationally certified. Not because I follow the tenets of a confused Secretary of Education.

Because I live, and love, the town I chose to live in, the town I chose to raise my children. My adult children do not have to travel 600 miles to return to their 1st grade classroom.

Parochialism has become a bad word. Arne wants my children to succeed in the global marketplace. I want my children to see the eels in the stream just a few blocks away.

The photo is from the state of New Jersey--that's our state record eel--
I bet the ones in our local stream, are bigger., but we aren't saying....

Essential questions

A few of my goldfish made the annual pilgrimage from my backyard puddles to classroom aquariums.

The classrooms were empty as I cajoled bubblers and filters to return to life. Saturday classrooms feel like midnight cemeteries.

Each classroom has a list of essential questions defining the ultimate goals of a unit. Our district spend gobs of money getting Grant Wiggins to talk to us, and by golly, we're going to keep posting the questions.

I have no problem with essential questions. I have no problem with Genesis, either. If we're serious about either, you might want to think twice before using them in a public school.

Grant Wiggins, the father of Understanding by Design, says that essential questions are "broad in scope and timeless by nature. They are perpetually arguable."

Indeed. I have only, alas, 48 minutes in a period.

My fish will intrigue a few students. My essential questions, which I love to develop, will not. I work with 15 year old man childs. Woman childs. Children lost in the magical thinking of brains seduced by sex hormones literally resetting their genomic activity, sex hormones that slide right past the phospholipid bilayers of their cell membranes, causing pieces of quiescent DNA to be transcribed, to wake up, to make proteins that will lead to bad decisions and dangerous behaviors that will usually result in another generation of human DNA.

Desire.

***

I watched my cockroach probe the edge of the Petri dish with its antennae, searching for a gap large enough to escape the scrutiny of young adult humans peering through the stereoscope. The same cockroach now sits in a bucket on my stoop on a wet, snowy night, waiting for me to figure out where to release it.

In science, we learn to avoid words like "want" and "desire," because we cannot assume that a, say, proton "wants" to be closer to an electron, though we can empirically see some sort of attraction. Everything made of stuff is attracted to everything else made of stuff--we call it gravity, and maybe it no longer amazes most folks, but it still amazes the poop out of me.

So when Doreen sees the cockroach clean its antenna by dragging it through its palps, I am supposed to correct her by explaining that cockroaches do not "want," they just "do."

I keep silent. This particular cockroach on this particular day clearly wanted to clean its antenna. I wasn't going to argue the point with a 15 year old H. sapiens, not when it took me two months to get her to trust her eyes over the words in a textbook.

***

And what is desire? What is attraction?

It is (perhaps) a uniquely human thing to imagine a better life, and work towards a long range goal. Immediate behaviors to attain long-term goals require either a fine imagination or the jackboot up the gluteus of instinct.

I remember very little about 15, but I remember this much--I wanted Desiree, desired her, was attracted to her, use whatever verb you care to use, beyond reason or imagination or sense.

I was like an electron trapped by a proton, and about as conscious.

If desire is reduced to seeking behaviors that reduce the ache of desire, then my cockroach is capable of desire. No surprise there, tautologous as it is. No, the surprise is recognizing that what I felt when I was 15, something I may have called "love" or "lust" or "friendship" was no more (or less) real than the need for the cockroach to escape its Petri prison.

Accepting that a cockroach may have desires is not elevating it to the hallowed plane of a Harvard professor searching her cerebral cortex for the phrase that will impress her suitor with her cleverness, her literateness, her, um, humanness.

And I do not mean to belittle the professor. But aren't there days when even the elite among us would like our desires to be as simple as the cockroach's.

(And here's the dirty little secret--on most days, they are.)

***

And what do we know of cockroach desire before the testosterone and estrogen warp us beyond our human nature?

We know thirst.

One of the biggest mistakes I made as a resident was letting a mother be a mother. Her baby was severely dehydrated, his salt concentrations dangerously imbalanced. Correcting the imbalances too quickly could lead to his death.

His mother let him drink. And drink. The baby boy sucked on the Pedialyte with all the urgency and need of Athena emerging from Zeus' head, the need electrons feel for protons, the need I felt for Desiree.

The baby seized. The baby, now in his twenties, may not be the same person he would have been had I thwarted his desires. I do not know how much brain damage was done.

Incomprehensible want, behaviors altered for unimagined (and unimaginable) ends, for no reason beyond the attraction of desire.

So when Doreen tells me the cockroach wants to clean itself, I do not correct her, because she is right.

***

My essential questions in class keep drifting back to matter and energy, and because I do not pretend to have a grasp of either, drift even further back to "why?"

I see essential questions like some see democracy--if either truly worked, they would be banned. Public schools cannot tolerate children seeking answers to essential questions. We expect them to sit (for 48 minutes, no more, no less) at a desk studying a subject they did not choose.

If I want to teach science, I need to go outside, and I need to be less vocal.

That I continue to teach inside, modulating my voice like an orator (or a clown), hoping to maintain their attention long enough to skewer them with the NJ Core Curriculum Standard 5.12.1.A3 or 5.12.4.B4, shows I am human, able to thwart real desires with imagined riches given to those who persevere.

And I am failing. I am a good teacher, but not a great one.

If I were a great one, a child (or two or three) would stand up on a beautiful day, and walk out into the sun and set herself by a pond or a tree and simply observe.

And if I were truly a science teacher, I would follow the children out the door.

Another badger moment

I grew up in a new suburb carved out of the woods near the Sandy Hook Bay. We spent most of our waking hours outdoors, not necessarily by choice. As soon as you got home from school, you changed out of your school clothes and went outside.

Every day.

And we stayed out until dinner, ate, then stayed out again until dark.

Our division was new enough then that we still had woods. We had our myths--the "strippers" would make you undress if they ever caught you. The murderers would kill you. We were more worried about the strippers.

We had tree forts. We learned not to saw off the limb we were sitting on, logical enough, but not so logical that we did not test it empirically. We gained wisdom through concussions our folks never knew about, mutual silence.

Every child on Bayberry Lane could find their way through Turtle Woods and Grasshopper Hill. We were the wild things our parents, most of them city children, and many of them immigrants, were not. We knew the moon, we knew the tides. We caught turtles and frogs and snakes and toads.

And then one day we cornered a badger.

***

Badgers did not read the ecology journals, and neither did we. I do not know how we figured out it was a badger, but at least two of us had the Zim's Golden Guide to Mammals. What we lacked in cell phones, iPods, and GPS's we had in time. If Zim's said it was a badger, it was a badger.

We chased one into its hole, found its alternate route, and started digging. And digging. And digging some more.

Dinner time approached. We were busy. We sent a scout to tell Mom and Dad what we were doing.

Our parents, being adults, didn't believe us. "There are no badgers in New Jersey."

But we knew better. There was, it turns out, at least one.

***

We see what we're trained to see.

My CP Biology classes are studying ecology now. Today I had one of my favorite labs. Various critters, some alive, some pickled, are placed on the lab tables. A live cockroach next to a scorpion trapped in acrylic, a live snail next to a pickled pig. Potatoes and young pea plants failed miserably trying to seduce my children from the siren song of strange critters.

I ask the kids to describe features of two organisms. Sharks and horseshoe crabs and sea horses and scorpions compete for their attention.

"It's an eye."
Pretend I'm an alien--I have no idea what an eye is--describe what you see.
"Uh, a circle with a black dot in the middle."
Great!

She walks away puzzled. This was too easy.

No questions, and I resist judging. These kids grew up surrounded by a human universe, I grew up in a larger one. I need to be kind.

I have a large, live cockroach in class. It's actually the second one I've gotten this year--the first one died from student exuberance and my clumsiness.

This one is very much alive.

It's long antennae search the borders of its universe under a stereoscope. A couple of girls watch it.

The antennae undulate, probing as delicately as snowflakes on a calm winter midnight. Then the cockroach does something unexpected. It cleans its antennae, like a cat licking its paws. The girls are mesmerized.

***

It took hours, but we finally caught it. One fierce, slashing badger, true to Zim's Golden Guide. We marched home, our prized mammal as badgery as a badger can be, and we were promptly told to return it to the woods.

I learned two big lessons:

Parents can be wrong, and badgers don't read books.

***

Last week my daughter and I continued our futile search for a legal striped bass. Saturday was a gorgeous late November day--we watched the sun settle over the ocean, snuggling far south of where it should be.

Just before the sun touched the horizon, when our shadows were longer than our imagination, the few minutes before sunset when a Jersey beach makes Alice look sane, my daughter screamed the triumphant cry of a child with a striper on the line.

But her line was slack.

A half foot creature writhed on the beach. It looked like a shrimp with an edge.

My daughter went to pick it up. I stopped her. And I'm glad I did.

On a late November Saturday, a very live and active mantis shrimp, as impossible as a badger in a Jersey suburban woods, tossed itself on the beach,creeping and clambering.

And I was again reminded of my badger.

***

My cockroach, our cockroach, sits in a Chinese take-out dish in Room B362. It will be released tomorrow, or maybe Monday if the promised snow arrives tomorrow.

My mantis shrimp, our mantis shrimp, may well be dead now--it's too far out of its range, and December has started acting like December, as it will.

The sun fades south. I am not sure it will return, and for some of us, it won't.

But today, a few children here in Bloomfield became attached to a creature that does not know they even exist.

It won't help their test scores. It won't even get them past the midterm. It might even be the only thing they remember three decades from now, long after they've wrestled with whatever homework comes home with their children from biology class.

But if they remember the casual cleaning of a cockroach's antennae years after I am dead, I will not have wasted my time here.