Science teacher?

I love teaching, and love science. I especially love teaching science. Science education is not, however, quite the same thing.

I can "teach" Alex the law of gravity:



I can tell her that the moon is held in orbit by the Earth's mass, that the moon's pull influences the tides, and that Newton gets credit for this, and she will do fine on a state-sanctioned end of course exam, punching numbers into a calculator without once realizing that that same moon tugs on her as it does the ocean.

Until she is no longer surprised that a penny and the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics fall at the same rate in my classroom (really!), she hasn't learned a thing.

***

Compulsory science education yoked with a mandated curriculum, statewide standards, and an arbitrary "school year" will not make scientists, no more than requiring every child in New Jersey to master the quadratic equation makes mathematicians.

Oh, you can push kids to perform for awhile--elementary school has smiling children jumping through hoops for the pleasure of adults--but some point beyond the larval stage, pleasing adults is no longer enough to keep a child motivated.

There are a lot of reasons for compulsory "education," but not many good ones. If you're going to make science education compulsory, though, at least make it worthwhile.

Let me teach science.

I have heard over and over again that our children lack curiosity. Their behavior in school supports the hypothesis.

Let me teach science.

I have heard over and over again that something happens to children between elementary school and high school, that they lose interest, that they don't care. Their behavior in school supports that hypothesis as well.

Let me teach science.

What did your child learn today that was useful beyond meeting a regionally mandated curriculum?

***

If I took my lambs outside to a tiny pool for a day, armed with magnifying glasses and worksheets and assignments to complete, they'd rush through assignments, write down what their best friends are writing down, and we'd all feel like we accomplished something.

If I took them back the next day, they'd be confused, and many would not see anything more than they did the day before.

If I did this every day for 2 weeks, a few would start to glimpse how rich life is at the edge of a pond. Many would not, true, but they'd know no less than they would have had they spent the time studying the ecology unit in a textbook.

Science starts with seeing. Until my children can see, and I can help them learn this, the rest of science

***

Children (and teachers) are mortal. We all have limited time here. If we are going to force children to spend a good chunk of their conscious childhood hours in school, we'd better make it worthwhile.

If school were not mandatory, how many children would go?
If school were not mandatory and school cost, say, just $10 a day, how many parents would pay for their children to sit in your classroom?

School has costs, tremendous costs beyond the cash needed to sustain a local school district. Children give up time, time spent with families and real responsibilities not so long ago.

Is your classroom worth the exchange?

The parents of Bloomfield trust me with their children, trust me to teach them science. If after a few months in my classroom, they can see a little better, reason a little better, most of the parents I know would feel I kept up my end of the bargain.

They do not want to hear "We are flying through the material mandated by the state in order to prepare them for a state test given more than a full month before the school year ends."

I need to do more for Bloomfield, and less for Trenton and Washington, D.C.

Cartoon is by Kirk Anderson.

Pi what squared, Captain Hook?

Arrrrrr......Christmas 2009.

OK, it's a cheap science math trick.
And, yeah, well, I'm Oirish, but me mum-in-law is descended from UK folk.

The Little Sump Pump That Could

Our electric bill skyrocketed. Our pump runs on electricity. Are we getting enough bang for our bucks?

Ah, finally, applied science! (One of the white lies teachers tell students is that what they learn in class matters. When was the last time you used the quadratic equation?)

Hmmm...the pump goes off when triggered by the float switch. I have about 9 inches of play there--lessee, square the radius times pi times 9" and we get 1385 cubic inches, .004329 cubic inch/gallon, and presto! we get about 6 gallons.

6 gallons does not sound like much--not even 3 cases of beer.

The pump, however, kicks on every 20 seconds. 18 gallons per minute.

18 gallons per minute-> 1080 gallons/hour -> 26,000 gallons/day. A typical Olympic sized swimming pool holds 660,000 gallons. Every 26 days (just under 4 weeks) my pump is moving an Olympic sized swimming pool.

But it's not just moving it sideways--it's moving it up. The bottom of the pump sits in a sump basin 28 inches deep. The outlet pipe is 76 inches above the floor. Lessee, 76" + 28" gives me 104", or 8 feet 8 inches.

Hope I haven't bored everybody with the numbers, but let me recap--every 4 weeks or so my little sump pump is lifting an Olympic sized pool over 8 feet.

A gallon of water weighs a smidgen over 8.3 pounds. An Olympic pool's worth of water, then, comes out to almost 5 1/2 million pounds of water! Over 2700 tons!!!

I am The Little Sump Pump That Could is jacking up 2,700 tons over 8 feet up every month.

***

Leslie pointed out a fundamental error in my calculations--the pump takes up volume. How much volume? Well, I could pull an Archimedes and see how much water it displaces, but it is busy working at the moment.

I could go outside and figure out how much is flowing per minute, and I might yet, but for the moment, let me assume that the pump volume is about 2 gallons, which would reduce the each load by a third.

The Little Sump Pump That Could is still jacking up over 1800 tons of water every month 8 feet 8 inches. That's over 30,000,000 foot pounds!

This month's bill was $40 higher than usual. For each dollar, I got 45 tons of water pumped up over 8 feet. That's about 2 cents a ton.

And that, my friends, is a good deal!

I weigh ~200 pounds. My little sump pump could take me over 28 miles up into the sky in a month.

Donald Hall, biology teacher

Plants strip electrons from water, and use them to help store energy in organic compounds. The left-overs are oxygen molecules. Any schoolchild knows we need oxygen, but few educated adults know why.

If you hold a flame to cool glass, a small patch of condensation forms, a brief patch of fog. It is unexpected, and often missed, unless you look for it. Oxygen is grabbing electrons and protons from the fuel—butane, wax, food, it matters not—and re-forming water.

Along the way the electron has given up energy captured by plants from sunlight—it’s what keeps you alive.

We teach this in biology, or rather we teach a litany of names, a parade of complex molecules that pass the electron down an energy gradient. We focus on the carriers, and in our earnestness, forget that it’s really all about the electron.

***

If you want to learn biology, read Donald Hall.

In "Poem with One Fact," Hall talks of enzymes and amino acids in a poem, a universe, really, that distinguishes life from what we call living. I trivialize it by trying to explain it--go read it.

***

If I used Donald Hall’s words in class, my lambs would soar—they’d forget the AP Exam as they watched an earthworm rhythmically work its way through mud, the peristalsis of life, of love. They’d tie the rocking to the rhythm of belly aches, to making love in the back seat of a dented Dodge Neon.

They’d stop worrying about future jobs and Jacuzzis lost in a freefalling economy, and get on their knees to sniff the sweet soil, knowing that’s where life starts, and that’s where life ends.

They’d no longer try to impress their impressionable parents with words like nicotinamide dinucleotide or ATP synthase (as powerful and poetic they sound when pronounced with care) and instead would say “eek… ook… oop… umm” to describe the journey of a particle of life, an electron, as it gets kicked around from water to sugar and back to water again.

What did you learn in biology today, love? Her mother asks. I saw on the syllabus you’re studying electron transport chains and chemiosmosis. Have you been keeping up with the reading? The exam is May 10th, we have work to do, no?

Amanda would scream EEK! at dinner, loud enough to make Grandma look over her diamond framed lens to scowl at her mother, who married well, but, well, not well enough.

OOK!—not quite as loud. Dad silently calculates the cost of 6 more weeks of sessions, and wonders if Xanax would be cheaper for this girl at the table, eeking and ooking, a girl who grew breasts and thighs and became this womanchild he does not know, eeking and ooking and eeking and ooking.

Oop—quieter now. Sam, her much younger brother, unplanned (ah, evolution) but not unloved, plays along. oop…oop….oop…oop. Amanda nods, smiles, and once more…Oop.

And now a very quiet umm, melodic, restful. The electron is back home, wrapped in water.


Clearly, the girl is troubled.

She gets up from the table, barefoot, and wanders outside under the crescent moon to check on her snow peas, their arched new stems breaking through the earth, just visible in the late dusk light, and thanks she knows not who for giving her light and life, while inside the adults sit in silence. The uneaten dinner grows cold, electrons trapped in brussel sprouts and butter, waiting to be released.

Condensation photo by fmanto, used under CC 3.0.

The Apprentice

"You're fired!"

It's been a week.

I will probably be fine, but I am the boy on the bubble in our department. This is my fourth year; everyone else here has been teaching longer.

Our district has been hit hard by budget cuts. Seniority trumps. I get all that.

When all is said and done, I will either be teaching here, or I won't. But I will still be teaching.

I will still wander over to the befuddled Dad trying to untangle a horseshoe crab from his daughter's line, taking a moment to teach a child how to hold the ancient critter.

I will still show my nephew how to rake clams from the muck, how to shoot a hockey puck, how to burp heartily from the basement of the bowel.

I will still point out Orion to strangers on cold February nights, gazing at the star nursery nestled in the Great Nebula, marveling at light and distances.

So I will still teach, as I have.

But I really, really hope I get to keep my sophomores (and seniors, see comments below) in Room B362.

The photo has the little AP thingie on it, though I found it elsewhere....
That's our new Governor. He yells at referees at his kid's hockey games.
He talks about himself in the third person.
I may start calling him Li'l Arne.

My Google Analytics stats fell off the map with this post--OK, no more evil Governor pictures....

Crocus sirens

Ecclesiastes 11.1

We must cast our bread
Upon the waters, as the
Ancient preacher said,

Trusting that it may
Amply be restored to us
After many a day.

That old metaphor,
Drawn from rice farming on the
River’s flooded shore,

Helps us to believe
That it’s no great sin to give,
Hoping to receive.

Therefore I shall throw
Broken bread, this sullen day,
Out across the snow,

Betting crust and crumb
That birds will gather, and that
One more spring will come.

Richard Wilbur, New Yorker, this week

The crocuses are blooming. Every year I cannot believe it will happen. Then it does.

Every year they have something to teach me, late winter, when the burst of life reminds me I will die, something worth remembering.

I lifted up an errant patio stone, looking for pill bugs ("roly polies") for biology class. Under it, a miracle.


Several crocuses had risen from the earth, as they do, but the leaves remained yellow--no sense spending a whole lot of energy on chloroplasts if no light is around. That they rose at all, hidden from the sun, weighted down by a stone, rivals anything we have done.

On top of the yellow stalks?

Flowers--riotously purple petals exploding from the ground, hidden by the rock, calling to bees like silent Sirens, hope against hope, burning energy from last summer's sun.

I can talk of auxins and gibberellins, reduce my crocuses to a mechanized world, and sniff the sniff of the cognoscenti.

Or I can sit and marvel at that which we cannot understand--fecundity's wasteful exuberance celebrated as the sun returns. A starling squallacked at me today; I could not grasp the words, but I felt the sound. The sun has returned, and it's OK to be drunk again. Drunk with light, with life.

I will die. So will you. The starling told me so.

I started planting tonight. It's the closest I feel like to God, closer than anything I ever felt in medicine. And, of course, it's ridiculous--I plant seeds, and they grow, but they will grow whether I intervene or not.

And the world will go on as well.

So what do we teach in biology? The gibberish of gibberellins? Do we speak of death?
At 15 years old, we all live forever. At 50, a moment's forever is all we got.

I forget this in January. Today I remembered it.

Not much else to say....

What do I do now?

I need your help.

This ancient Luddite, who still uses a turntable and does not own a cell phone, not even a broken one, somehow managed to glom a grant. A technology grant.

I am getting a set of notebooks for my classes, along with a fancy router--we're going to jump into the 21st century.

Wiki, Twitter, Ning, Google Docs, moodle, Mouse Mischief, Skype....where to start?

Who's connected out there? Who wants to help saddle up this old horse for one last ride before he hits the glue factory?

I feel like Bill McKay in The Candidate after he won:

What do we do now?

OK, a cheap way to put me and Mr. Redford on the same page.