January sunset

Just took this picture a few hours ago. It's a bit chilly at the edge of the Delaware Bay, and the breeze was kicking up to 25 knots, but Leslie and I wandered outside anyway, as we pretty much do whenever we can.

Our imaginations are too small for this world.





And you're going to enjoy it, even if we have to legislate it.
Where's Walt Kelly when we need him? Congress puts The Onion to shame.

William Carlos Williams teaches science

I keep thinking about the blue sparks I saw, and heard. Evanescent, almost palpable, rippling under the cotton.

I remember now when I last saw the same kind of ethereal blue. August, at the edge of the bay, I watched an errant comb jelly flash away its last few moments of life.

And my mind keeps wandering back to voltages and electrons, human (though useful) conceits.

No ideas but in things.

William Carlos Williams knew this, I'm still learning it.

We just finished ecology--we started just before the solstice.
I wish I had started with this:

The half-stripped trees
struck by a wind together,
bending all,
the leaves flutter drily
and refuse to let go
or driven like hail
stream bitterly out to one side
and fall
where the salvias, hard carmine—
like no leaf that ever was—
edge the bare garden.

WCW, "Approach of Winter"

No ideas but in things. That's where science starts. In the rolling blue light under a t-shirt is the thing. Everything else about it--voltages and electrons and energy and photons--concepts to explain, epiphenomena, but not the thing.

We need to teach children to see before they can think.
There is no way to test this in a multiple choice exam.

My students are required to observe, and write about, a perennial plant. Each student watches the same plant throughout the school year. A few thought it was, well, pointless when they started, but since it was easy point, I did not get too much push-back.

And now they have grown attached to what they didn't notice before.

No ideas but in things.

The photo was lifted from The Poetry Foundation.

Fairy sparkles

In winter, I get dressed in the dark.

This morning, I got dressed in clothes that were tumbling in the dryer just minutes before--my t-shirt sparkled and crackled with static electricity.

I wanted to see what that would look like if I put the t-shirt on with my eyes open.

My eyelids must have gotten charged up, because right after I screwed my head through the neckhole, a bright sparkle arced across my left eyelashes, bright enough to startle me.

If I didn't know any better, I'd bless the fairies that danced near my face. (And I don't know any better, so I did.)

***

We call it "static electricity." I thought about voltages and arcs and other nonsense that hardly explains what I saw, then I thought about what I saw.

I didn't see volts. I saw bright blue flashes undulating under the cotton, heard the crackling.

While it is fun to think of ridiculously high voltages (thousands!) involved when electricity arcs across my eyelashes--just the sort of pseudoscience nonsense we toss at kids in class--"knowing" the voltage had no effect on what I observed.

If I ever get my physical science classes back, that will be one of my assignments--grab clothes out of the dryer on a cold, dry day, and get dressed in the dark.

I'll leave out the blessing part. I bet some of them do anyway.

Lightning photo by MONDO,via wikimedia, released to public

Psoriatic Luddite Society

It's winter here.
It's dark, dry, and cold.

In a week when not one but two of my college bound lambs could not divide by ten "in their heads," I rail for the almost extinct slide rule.

I was the the last of the slipstick generation--in 1976, the first scientific calculator appeared in my high school physics class. I could do some functions faster than the electronic machine.

I still have mine-a mahogany Keuffel & Esser 4081-3 Log Log Duplex Decitrig, first picked up by my Dad in the 1950's.

OK, you old fart, that was then, this is now...you don't still use that thing, do you?

I do indeed.
My K&E makes for a great back scritcher! Try doing that with your TI 83.

Think, Arne, think

"The message here is unmistakable: We have no choice but to educate our way to a better economy. And if you care about job growth and boosting incomes, schools are the game changer."

Arne Duncan, Remarks to the National Conference of State Legislatures
December 10, 2009

Nice rhetoric.

Here's the real game-changer:





In our current economy, 10% of the population grabs over 70% 0f the wealth, numbers we haven't seen since before the last Great Depression.

If you prefer pie charts, here's one put together by G. William Domhoff:







If every last one of our children earned an advanced degree within 8 years of graduating from high school, we'd still have a problem.

Oversimplification? Perhaps. Hard to hold an adult discussion anymore.

The diagram put together by the Wobblies--not just your great-grandparents' union.

New Year's Day

And so we're told this is the golden age
And gold is the reason for the wars we wage
Though I want to be with you
Be with you night and day
Nothing changes
On New Year's Day

U2, New Year's Day

Leslie and I went for a long beach walk on New Year's, as we have for years, and as we will, God willing. I liked the first walk so much I went for another as the sun slid over the edge of the bay.

We do this instead of resolutions.

I cannot adequately describe a winter beach, but I will try. The thoughts are scattered, as my thoughts usually are, and I am laying them down for me, to remind me what matters in the next few days, few weeks, few months, as I go back to the classroom.

At low tide, the Delaware Bay recedes from our flat beaches as though swallowed by the first of The Five Chinese Brothers.

The light is a riotous gray--steel gray sky against a changing gray sea. The splashes of white from the waves seem out of place. If you look at the sky, patterns emerge, a blue-gray swirl blending with a patch of green-gray, ever-changing.

The wind whistles through your hoodie, occasionally overwhelming the mesmerizing call of the waves. The waves never stop, they never stop. Sometimes I do not hear them, then remember they never stop, and I hear them again. A crow caws. The gulls were strangely silent.

You smell the salt air tinged with odd sweetness of bay mud. In the summer, the death smell of the bay mud is more obvious, but less noticeable. In January, the tinge of death is dulled by the cold, but on this wintry beach there is little visible life to deflect its message.

I dug into the mudflat, to find a clam. The water stings. Later, on the way home in a cozily warm car, the aroma of the little mud left on my hand overwhelms my thoughts.

We saw a few vultures hovering over the beach a couple hundred yards up--beneath them, a large sea gull dragged its tattered left wing, foraging the ebb tide for the last time. There was enough life left in the gull to scatter the vultures. They will return with the tide.

At low tide, the tidal flat reaches out hundreds of yards--in the distance I saw a lone blue heron standing at the edge of a tide pool. There is enough life to sustain her. I look harder.

Tiny whelks are buried in the mud--the air is near freezing, the water a cozy 40 degrees F. There's more life present than I had realized.

About 30 yards away I see a huge horseshoe crab shell. I worked my way through the shallow pools to the shell, perhaps to use for class.

The shell is half buried in the mud, with characteristic tracks leading to where she lay--the horseshoe crab was very much alive.

I was tempted to move her back into the water--if the temperatures dropped below freezing before the new tide flooded the flats, she would freeze.

A large horseshoe crab is almost always female; one this large certainly was. She was likely near 20 years old, old enough to know what she was doing.

I headed back home.

Back in the classroom soon: WAC assignments, NCLB mandates, HSPA tests, UbD questions, NJCCCS. Acronyms developed by committees formed under the dull hum of fluorescent light.

I wonder what committees under sunlight would create?

But we cannot do that, we would be distracted,
we have important work to do!

If an idea seems silly literally under the light of day, then maybe it's the idea, not the light source.

So what am I going to do about this? If I am so enamored of the flats, of being surrounded by the natural world, yet teach under fluorescent lights, who's the villain?

Time for a field trip, to take my lambs to the real world, the one beyond the matrix we've created.

So here's my resolution: take a busload of kids to the shore, ostensibly to study something seemingly scientific, and let them loose among the mating horseshoe crabs this May.

New Jersey drinks the NCLB Kool-Aid

What's wrong with this picture?

Just to be clear, my quotes from the NJ DOE are not satire--
they are lifted directly from the NJ Core Curriculum Content Standards here.

I am not sure that folks outside education quite grasp what is happening within it.

I graduated high school in 1977. We had standards. Really.

I could handle a slide rule. I knew enough chemistry to make an attempt at creating nitrous oxide ("laughing gas") in class. I wrote history papers using primary sources. I could manipulate differential equations.

I learned to play the trumpet, use a miter box, kiss, gap a spark plug, and defend myself.

Some teachers were wonderful, a few were idiots, and at least one was a drunk.

Overall, I think public schooling did more good than harm.

***

New Jersey has a set of core curriculum standards; I imagine every other state has as well.

Before I go on, I want you to think about a 4 year old child. What should matter to that child? What should that child know?

In New Jersey, that same child is expected to "use basic technology terms in conversations (e.g., digital camera, battery, screen, computer, Internet, mouse, keyboards, and printer."

She is also expected to "use electronic devises [sic] (e.g., computer) to type name and to create stories with pictures and letters/words." Yes, our core curriculum standards committee apparently does not know how to use a spell checker correctly.

Young children do not need time in front of screens. They do not need to drop words like "digital camera" in conversation. ("Digital" is superfluous anyway--it presumes that some people still used film-based 'devises.')

***

Now imagine Elisa at 9. In most countries, she's still a child.

Here, she's required to "create a document with text formatting and graphics using a word processing program, create and present a multimedia presentation that includes graphics," and "create a simple spreadsheet, enter data, and interpret the information."

A little make-up and the right blazer, and she's ready for Kelly Services.

This is obscene.

***

By the end of 8th grade, Elisa will be able to "work in collaboration with peers and experts in the field to develop a product using the design process, data analysis, and trends, and maintain a digital log with annotated sketches to record the development cycle."

Why waste time in high school? She's ready for the boardroom.

***

By 12th grade, Elisa graduates from office clerk to corporate lawyer--she will be able to "demonstrate appropriate use of copyrights as well as fair use and Creative Commons guidelines" and "compare and contrast international government policies on filters for censorship."

If we work hard enough, she can pass the bar exam without bothering with law school.

***

I am a retired pediatrician. I know a little bit about kids. I am also a teacher. I know a little bit about the classroom.

Humans have not evolved much in two generations.

The committee developing the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards might want to dedicate a few minutes of their next meeting to chatting with a live, normal school-aged child.

You can find plenty in the schools, sitting in classrooms. If you have trouble recognizing one (they tend to be smaller, less hairy, and cheerier than adults), a teacher will be glad to point one out to you.

Kids are kids, and no set of "standards" can buck a few billion years of evolution.