The NJ Clamming End of Course Exam

The tines of my clam rake are shiny again, as the rust is polished off by the sand that hides my prey. Spring is here again. I love clamming because, well, just because. I am pretty good at it, too, because I love it and persisted at it. It's not rocket science, true, but there's an art to spotting a keyhole, the mark of a quahog.

What would you teach in class if all your children had decent livelihoods waiting for them that did not require advanced math or public speaking skills? What if you had a child who loved clamming, was good at it, and who wanted to learn more about the world?

I suppose you could argue that he could use geometry to calculate the angles of his rake tines, and biology to find new clam beds, and language arts to create better copy for his business ads, but these are excuses, really, to teach what we want to teach, in 48 minute chunks, 5 days a week.

(When was the last time you used something you learned in high school you could not have learned on your own anyway?)

What would you teach a child interested in knowing more about the world aside from economic aspirations?

Yes, well, um, of course, but such a child is rare, you see, we must focus on the global economy, on future jobs we cannot predict, on beating the scores of China or Korea or Finland--we must prepare them for the "real world."

If you believe that children are not interested in learning about the world, you need to watch them outside of school.

It might just be that they're just not interested in what's happening in your room. Even if it's "on the test."

Imagine if you had to learn about clamming--trivia about the various rakes available, the various shellfish. Where are they found? How do you read a DEP map? How do you get a license? How do you read the tides, the wind, the water temperatures?

You might argue that learning about the particulars of clamming is, well, ridiculous, and I'd agree.

Tell me how "Us[ing] mathematical formulas to justify the concept of an efficient diet" grabs your interest.That's just one of our "cumulative progress indicators"(specifically 5.3.12.B.2) for biology. Now do this for multiple subjects.

And we wonder why the dropout rate is so high....

That's me clamming somewhere in New Jersey, and even saying that much is too much.

SMARTER is Orwellian

This is a bit of a windy post mostly so I can find the links I need when I have the time to dig deeper into this.

I recently realized that few teachers know what's coming down the pike, and I want to bone up on the nonsense so I can share it.

We just finished the HSPA's this week, our form of state testing required by the No Child Left Behind Act. I continued to teach during the week, but my lambs' brains were fried by the time they got to class each day, and I doubt a whole lot of neurons got remodeled.

We get to do this again in May for a couple of days, during the NJ Biology EOC exam NJ Biology Competency Test.

New Jersey has joined the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), along with 30 other states in a nationalized testing mechanism that proctors "required summative exams (offered twice each school year)" and "optional formative, or benchmark, exams" before the summatives. The federal gummint has already given the consortium (a word I am developing a real distaste for) over $175 million.

New Jersey has agreed to start using the SBAC tests for "federal accountability assessments" by the 2014-2015 school year, now less than 4 years away.

I figured the Orwellian 1984 world eventually come, but I thought we'd get a chance to squawk for a moment before it arrived. We now have in place a nationalized curriculum with a federalized testing mechanism that will use artificial intelligence to routinely assess your child's ability to fit into the "real" corporate world that awaits her, propped up by obscene amounts of money made by the same corporate world.

Every family in Bloomfield pays a lot--thousands of dollars--to support our schools. They are local, and they are public. They are designed to help our town raise knowledgeable and decent human beings live reasonably happy lives, and we do a pretty good job doing that.

Death in a classroom, again

A roly poly died in class this week. That in itself is not unusual. This particular roly poly, however, lived in a terrarium maintained by two students. No rock fell on it. It had food and water. Unless we get an autopsy, it will go down as an "up and died." It was found in the classic dead bug position, even though, technically, it was a crustacean.

The two young women who maintained the tank were upset, but once I assured them that the roly poly died of old age, they were fine. "Old age" is foreign to the young, as it should be. Besides, I made that up. Nothing dies of old age. Nothing.

***

I am meeting with the governor on Tuesday. I hope it goes well, and I hope he uses his office to promote education, but I know we will not be talking about dead roly polies.

School should be a dangerous place, with dangerous ideas. The young should be pushing us. My students were mere embryos in 1996.

They were born in a world of incomprehensibly destructive weapons. In a culture that values words and contracts over life. In a world defined by systems and machines,

That they do not run out of the building screaming by 11 A.M. shows how much they trust us.

So we'll dither about merit based pay, and education reform, and what education means to democracy, but we won't talk about dead roly polies.

***

I have a dozen or so clams in my belly now, critters that were alive 3 or 4 hours ago. They were delicious, and nutritious. They're now dead.

That's the way it works.

 

We all die, of course, and we mostly ignore this. We eat to live. I eat the clams, they eat plankton. Most of the clams I raked up today were less than a decade old. I have no idea what clams know, and they have no idea what I know. They know enough to try to escape when I rake. Most living things, conscious or not, make every effort to stay alive.

And if we want to stay alive, and if we do not have chloroplasts, we need to eat other organisms. "Eat," a simple 3 letter word, one we do not ruminate over much, means this: taking into your body the once living body of another, in order that you can keep living.

The alternative is  premature death.

 ***

Peter Singer, an ethicist, waivers on whether eating clams is OK. He seems to think it depends on whether they have interests:

[T]he only legitimate boundary to our concern for the interests of other beings is the point at which it is no longer accurate to say that the other being has interests. To have interests...a being must be capable of suffering or experiencing pleasure. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for disregarding that suffering, or for refusing to count it equally with the like suffering of any other being. But the converse of this is also true. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of enjoyment, there is nothing to take into account.

This is an interesting issue. We could spend weeks in class discussing it. But we won't, not if I want to keep my position.

I doubt a single child in my class worried about the well being of a roly poly before coming into Room B362. I can take no credit for their newfound concern beyond bringing in a few roly polies. Just about all living organisms are more interesting (and complicated) than we know, until we bother to get acquainted with them.

Every organism alive on Earth today has been evolving for the same amount of time. We are not special. And we will die, too.

So I bring a few in, so my lambs can watch them. And they do pretty much what we do. Wander around, eat, drink, socialize, reproduce, and die.


No one knows the why. No one.

***

I teach biology, the study of life. To study life, you need to grasp how we stay alive, which means you need to have a handle on death.

We spend a lot of time talking about meiosis, about biomes, about transcription and translation, about DNA. "Death", however, is not in the New Jersey curriculum standards, except when referring to stars. "Love" is not in the NJCCCS. Nor is "global warming," nor "nuclear warfare."

So what matters?

***

I slaughtered, deliberately, 27 clams tonight. I slaughtered many more organisms while raking for those clams, even more while driving to my sekrit clamming bed.

I can (reasonably) expect to die within the next 20 or 30 years, though I would beat my family average should I live so long.

Walt Kelly got this. He was one of my best teachers ever, and I only knew him through Pogo

Microsoft will outlive me. So will Cisco and GM and the US Federal Government, all fabled institutions, all protected by law. I either matter, or I don't. I'm too old to worry about that anymore, so long as i get my clams and my books and my beer, but it's a worthwhile (and interesting) question for my lambs.

Every family in my town pays a huge amount of taxes ts support our local school system. I am thankful that they do. The least I can do is teach things that matter.

If I tell my townfolks I teach about meiosis, and polymerase chain reactions, and other forms of modern nonsense, well, many would believe they're getting their money's worth, and maybe they are.

If I told them that their children were studying roly polies, I am not sure I'd get the same reception. Governor Christie could destroy me with that.

Still, death matters. A lot. Maybe not if you're a corporation, and maybe not if you're a clam, but it does if you're a child.

Imagine what we could do if each and every one of us recognized our own finiteness.

The bluefish and the clam shown were both delicious.

The Pogo cartoon used with permission--that I had contact with anyone in the Kelly family made this blog worthwhile.

The photos are ours.

Mazda Spyder? No, spider!

You mean Mitsubishi Spyder, no?

Um, no, Mazda. Mazda has recalled 65,000 Mazda6's because of concerns that spiders may have crawled into a fuel hose, Cheiracanthium inclusum, the whitish bitey kind we find dropping from the ceiling at midnight, the same kind that terrorized my daughter growing up. While there's some debate how they got in  the cars--a bug expert believes they crawled into the hoses sitting in a Mazda warehouse--Mazda maintains it's "just a mystery."

For the less mechanically minded among us, spiders (or anything besides gasoline) sitting in a fuel line is not good.

***

My sister had a Fiat Spider back when our gang had hair on our heads (and not on our ears). Her fuel line popped off once, and a small fire erupted. I didn't think to check for a spider, but I do remember being amazed at how much it looked like fog.

There's a good reason for that--it is fog. If you burn a hydrocarbon cleanly (with enough oxygen available), you get CO₂ and water. White smoke is just water. No one believes this, of course, even if we say we do. Our brains file it under the smoke category, and we get on with life.

2C₈H₁₈ + 25O₂ -> 16CO₂ + 18H₂0

Unless you teach science to sophomores.

***

I have no idea what a yellow sac spider weighs--maybe a half gram at best? I do know that a  2009 Mazda6i Sport weighs about 3300 pounds empty. Over 100,000 tons of cars have been recalled, waylaid by a spider that already has a reputation for being a nuisance.

Maybe it's the Luddite in me, maybe I'm just getting too cranky seeing us destroy the bigger world around us, but seeing rockets get lost in the Pacific and spiders move mountains of metal have made the news fun again, gentle reminders of our hubris.

The gasoline combustion equation is a bit of a simplification since gasoline is made up of multiple kinds of hydrocarbons. 

I showed octane, which makes up about a fifth of gasoline.

Apparently Mazda cars make the horizon tilt. Flipping through Mazda photos is like visiting the bad guys' lair in a Batman show.

Yellow sac spider photo from Local Pest Control Services

Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!

"We failed to make orbit," Omar Baez, NASA's launch director, said at a news conference. "All indications are that the satellite and the rocket are in the southern Pacific Ocean somewhere."

424 million dollars into the drink, and the best we get is it's in the ocean "somewhere"?

Thankfully, no one knows how big $424,000,000 is anymore--other than it's a lot of money. And since no one trusts science anyway, a little more data on global climate would just get ignored.

But for almost a half billion dollars, seems fair to ask just where the sucker landed. Heck, a $99 GPS can tell you that.





The photo is from World Weblog Whizz.

Thoughts before meeting Governor Christie

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus, from "New Collossus"

A few cool things happened the past couple of days. At least one of our pair of red-tailed hawks that hang just north of the high school returned. I found deer tracks on the Bloomfield Green, a first, I think (though we did have a turkey feasting on acorns there a couple of years ago). And Governor Christie's coming to visit our school.

Our principal caught me in the hallway and asked if I'd like to join a few other teachers in a meeting with him.

After being assured it was not a big media event (just a get together for discussion), and that I did not have to dress up (I squeeze into my suit for funerals and weddings only these days), I said I'd be glad to be part of it so long as I could speak freely. His smile spoke volumes. "Of course."

***

The last first Jersey governor I met was DiFrancesco, on a beautiful but sad day in September 2001. We were waiting in the shadows of the Statue of Liberty for wounded that never came, and he came around to check on us. There wasn't much to say--the city kept burning, and we kept waiting.

I was a pediatrician then, and would be for a few more years, but I think that my decision to teach was made soon after that long day. DiFrancesco had little to say, but to be fair, there was little to be said.

There's a difference between having little to say and saying nothing.

 ***

Democracy depends on discourse. Democracy depends on trust. Democracy depends on keeping the concept of the commons alive. I keep copies of the Declaration of Independence and The Bill of Rights on the wall of our classroom.

Most of us work hard at what we do, and most of us love what we do.

So while many in my field may fantasize about moments with Governor Christie, about what they would do given the chance, I still fantasize about a functioning republic, which, of course, depends on truly public schools doing the hard work that needs to be done.

I owe it to my students, to my town, and to our republic to practice civil discourse. And I will. No matter how quaint that may sound in an age of soundbites, fury, and the "new normal."

Statue of Liberty torch photo from pix.fr
My memory's had a few too many concussions:
I met Governor McGreevey at some function, and I chatted briefly with Gov. Corzine when he flew on the saqme flight as mine.
Whatever else you might think of Corzine, he flew coach, and he flew alone. 

Udder nonsense

(An ice cream shop in London started selling ice cream made from human milk in February for about $23 per serving; a couple of days ago, British authorities stepped in, responding to complaints, presumably about the milk, not the price. I wrote this a couple of years ago. This gives me an excuse to run it again.)

"Beer is living proof that God loves us
and wants us to be happy."

Ben Franklin

I do a lot of things that may not be good for me--I sit in front of this monitor too many hours a day, I like to go fast on motorcycles, and I use the top step on ladders. One high risk activity I refrain from, however, is drinking milk.

Cow's milk is for calves. Breast milk is for young humans until they sprout a few teeth. Aside from some sort of fetish practiced in moderation, adults should never drink milk.

In the cafeteria, Josephine serves me lunch. I love her. She calls me "Pumpkin," and she knows exactly what I like.

Still, I suspect she might be trying to kill me. She can't resist pushing the milk. People love to be in line behind me because I give my milk away. (I can actually get veggies and a fruit for only 15 more cents if I also take a half-pint of milk.)

Beer in moderation, on the other hand, prolongs life. It lowers blood pressure, reduces my chances of developing Alzheimer's, and, well, tastes good. Really good.

Really, really good. (Did I mention that I like beer?)

Guess which beverage gets the huge color poster on the cafeteria wall?

Now obviously I don't think the cafeteria walls should be covered with Guinness ads, nor do I condone drinking among the young (except maybe for those in my immediate clan during wakes).

Our love affair with cow's milk shows what a good PR campaign can do. We are willing to drink the milk from a four-legged critter while simultaneously repulsed by the idea of making ice cream from breast milk.

I'm not going to jump all over anyone for a bad milk habit--live and let live. But on St. Paddy's Day, when I carefully pour the cream over a spoon into my Irish coffee, it's not the whiskey I fear.

It's the cream.

Particularly the cream from the milk of another species.

My students continue to drink milk and Coke and Snapple and all kinds of other things that harm them, truly harm them. Diabetes is no joke.

In D.A.R.E., they learn that beer is a gateway drug. Too much of anything can be dangerous. Thankfully, too much thinking is not one of them anymore. Uncontrolled thinking could lead to all kinds of ruinous activities.

I'll drink to that.

I lifted the image of the beer in a carboy from Homebrew Underground
--at least until they complain or I find my own photo. Addendum: it's cool--thanks, Homebrew Underground!

The udder shot is from Genus Breeding.

Leslie points out, rightly, that cow's milk has not been linked to adult onset diabetes.
Milk has been associated with Type 1 diabetes, but correlation,
of course, does not mean causation.

Leslie also says stay away from BGH (bovine growth hormone).

To be fair, I'm a bit lactose intolerant, so I may be biased.