Another year ends

We're winding down.

Tomorrow I will wander over to the windowsill, pluck a few snowpeas who know only our classroom, and eat them. I will remind the students that their breath was combined with water, using the energy of the sun.

Communion without fanfare, a miracle unrecognized.

And if a few students leave class this week, our last few days of class, pondering the mystery of biology, the flow of energy, the flow of life, well, I've done my job.

***

I spent countless hours as a child trying to figure out transubstantiation. The wafer tasted like, well, a wafer, but the priest assured me it was the body of Christ.

In my head I imagine molecule after molecule substituting another. I did not know the concept did not originate until a thousand years after Christ's death.

This is my body.

And it is, complex organic molecules fused together by plants, abetted by the nitrogen fixing abilities of bacteria. In physical terms, at the molecular level, we are, truly, what we eat.

And everything we eat ultimately gets back to plants. OK, sunlight. Well, yeah, to something over 10 billion years ago.

***

We had some births in class, we had some deaths. Most of our tanks are unfiltered, unprocessed--light in, air in, and the occasional flakes of crushed shrimp. We have 2nd generation peas and wheat and fish and third generation snails and umpteenth generation of transformed bacteria that fluoresce.

We have the shells of horseshoe crabs and land snails, starfish and whelk.

Our class witnessed a starfish consume a snail, a shrimp snack on a hermit crab. None of this planned, all of it inevitable.

I am not a particularly religious man. My faith rests in the sun, in the plants, in life. I do not pretend to grasp the why of anything in science, and I do not ask my students to grasp anything I cannot see myself.

We do a lot of observation in B362. We see more than we can understand. We form hypotheses, we see hypotheses smashed, and we form new hypotheses.

I'm not sure how my lambs did on the state test, though historically they do well enough.

They leave my classroom more confused now than when they entered back in September.
And that's OK. That was the goal.

The world is, well, awesome. A fresh snowpea of a windowsill plant tells me so.

First lightning bug

I run this every June, because I like lightning bugs.

First lightning bug tonight. I never tire of lightning bugs.

I

Dusk settled on the lake. I could hear the kiss of bluegills as they sucked down insects struggling on the surface.

A few lightning bugs flashed above the mirrored surface. Attracted by their own reflections, they swooped ever closer to the lightning bugs flashing below them.

Fish may not be smart, but they're not all get-out stupid, either. And a bluegill will jump if hungry enough. A few were hungry enough. Inside their bellies glowed a few foolish lightning bugs.


II
Lightning bug light is cool-literally. Luciferin combines with ATP, the energy molecule of life--the resulting compound combines with oxygen, catalyzed by luciferase, and light results. Even tiny amounts of ATP will cause luciferin to light, as long as oxygen is present. While man has never been to Mars, bits of lightning bugs have--luciferin is an extremely sensitive detector of ATP. If it flashes, carbon-based life may be present.

Luciferase from the North American firefly (Photinus pyralis) is the enzyme of choice for reporter gene assays. Luciferase catalyzes the oxidation of a firefly-specific substrate called luciferin to produce light. This reaction is extremely efficient and the quantum yield is the highest of any characterized bioluminescent reaction. The bright signal makes this a valuable enzyme to use for reporting promotor activity. • Packard’s LucLite® assay system, introduced in 1994, produces a long lived glow type signal with a [half-life] of several hours, which makes it ideal for use in noninjector based HTS luminometers, like the Packard TopCount® NXT Microplate Scintillation and Luminescence Counter or the Packard LumiCount® Microplate Luminometer.

Luclite Plus Reporter Gene Assay System, 20,000mL from PerkinElmer, http://www.biocompare.com/itemdetails.asp?itemid=389636&catid=1620

Scientist have yet to synthesize luciferin, so they buy lightning bugs.


III
My daughter dug out a tiny mudhole for me in our backyard. At dusk, I sit opposite the pokeweed I am learning to like, under a stray white birch I have always liked. Lightning bugs arise from the earth, flashing their "J"'s, looking for love. Harry Potter, like the Bible, makes sense sitting outside on an early June evening.

I read until the dusk chases words off the page, my feet resting on a small stone wall we built together.

A flash just below my right foot.

I break from Harry Potter. A second scurrying critter rumbles about the flash. The flashing becomes frantic, several short blips in less than a few seconds. My eyes adjust--a spider dances around its prey.

I've never seen a lightning bug flash quickly like that, but then I've never seen one eaten by a spider either. A lightning bug makes a flash by adding a tiny bit of ATP to luceferin. In our mechanistic view of the world, not a bad worldview if you're in the business of conquering it, lightning bugs flash instinctively. They are not known to flash for defensive purposes.

I cannot know why this one flashed, but I do know that lightning bugs, at least this one, had a pattern distinct from its cherchez la femme mode when struggling with a spider.

I almost didn't try to "save" it--a good naturalist observes, does not interfere. The spider has as much a right to the meal as I do to mine. Death by spider is likely to be quicker than death by starvation if the critter could no longer fly.

I pulled the frenetically flashing bug out of the web--a white wisp of web stuck to its backside. I set it on a leaf of the birch with mixed feelings. It will die slowly because my imagination would not allow me to let the spider bite it.

As the critter struggled with its first pair of legs to grasp the edge of the leaf, I gently pulled back the stick. The spider silk stuck to my stick. The lightning bug scootched a few millimeters, no longer flashing, and stood still.

I watched a moment longer. The lightning bug opened up its beetley shell, opened its wings, and flew away.

A moment later, a lightning bug brushed my leg at the bottom of its "J". No way to know if it was the same one. And it really doesn't matter.


IV
Some Asian lightning bugs flash in unison. The lightning bugs in the Jersey area, at least the ones that make a J, are not known to do this (according to the scientists). Oh, occasionally they'll accidentally flash together a few seconds after the flash of a bright light, as though they were all resetting their bellies after seeing a god, but left alone, our fireflies are supposed to be the individualistic sorts.

The local critters must be illiterate--once or twice a dusk, they amuse themselves with synchronous flashing. (“Amuse” sounds like anthropomorphizing, of course--it’s an interesting word, comes from the French amuser, “to stupefy”--we’re most amused when our brains are buggy.) .


V
One poor fellow one evening couldn’t turn off his belly --he’d glow properly enough in his “J”, but still fizzled a bit as he looked for a response--doubt he could see much light beyond his perpetually lit self.

I muttered “padiddle.” .


VI
Lightning bugs are, obviously alive. They have a lot of ATP. They have a lot of luciferin and luciferase. We made lightning bug earrings, lightning bug drawings, we’d smear dying and dead lightning bugs over our faces and laugh and scream like the atavistic creatures we were, mock Indian face paint.


VII
I am a science teacher; I am not a scientist. A lot of folks are confused about what constitutes science. We want children to be amazed. You can purchase, via PayPal, a lightning bug “collection system.” You have a choice of sizes, and the handle glows in the dark. Imagine that! No doubt safer than punching holes in a half-rinsed mayonnaise jar.

Kids can study and be fascinated by all the little bugs found in the average back yard. Firefly lanterns allow children to watch the lighnting sicbugs light up. The bugs can be returned to nature where they were found after a day or two of enjoyment.

Plum Creek Marketing Entomology Products for Kids.

Another “experiment” suggests that kids catch lightning bugs in a jar for 5 minutes, record their observations, then let them go.

Took me 40 years to realize I learn a whole lot more doing nothing, feet up on a tiny stone wall next to my daughter’s puddle.

Photo by me.

Go West, old man....

"There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie."

Dr. Cornel West

The price is social, paid by the pangs of hunger of a child at midnight, a child in my neighborhood. I practiced pediatrics a long time in places Arne's never seen.

The price is cultural, paid by the general malaise of folks who cannot resolve the insoluble dissonance of what can be, and what is.

The price is environmental, paid by the woman touching the bloody bandage hiding the wound that marks a missing breast.

We all lose when any of us live a lie. Our silence marks who we are.

***

 
NCLB is founded on a lie, a big, bald-faced piece of nonsense propagated by a few folks in power who do not love your children, who do not know your neighbors, who do not live more than a few years in any given area. They are, in essence, homeless, wallowing in abstract lives, pushing abstract ideas, but making very real money.

Call them on it. Call them each and every time they speak a lie. They're hurting us, bad enough, but they're hurting our children, too, and our silence is unconscionable.

I've always taught like my hair's on fire; I've always taught like our lives depend on it, because they do. Next year I'm going to teach like every day is my last.

If you knew you could only teach another year, another week, another hour, would Arne or Eli or Bill have a whiff of influence in your classroom?

I owe it to my lambs to show them what's possible. It's what I'm paid to do by my neighbors. Bloomfield is an incredible town. I bet you live in an incredible town, too.

Tip of the hat to Mike Klonsky, whose words I read regularly.
None of this happens by accident. Get to work.

Fish heads by Leslie (in Dublin).
Horseshoe crab shell by me, Delaware Bay.

A June song

If I have anything worthwhile to pass onto they young ones, it is this--the world belongs to you, it is you. Not the human world of images and egos, but this vast, incomprehensible, and terrifying and loving ball of energy that surrounds us and the billions (billions) of living critters within arm's length.

It's June. Tonight we feasted on pesto made from basil from the garden, basil that was mere specks of black seeds just a couple of months ago. We ate snowpeas, now climbing to the sky. We ate radishes--pink ones, purple ones, white ones, red ones--riotous rainbows resting in the earth.

Our battle with the Arnes of the world matter, and I am not ceding anything tonight. But I am enjoying a soft June dusk, honeysuckle in the air, belly full of food that erupted from the earth because I spent a few moments putting seeds in the ground.

I'll watch the sun set. I'll play a wooden flute. I'll sing. I might dance, I might not. The lightning bugs will be here any day now. It's June.

Light drives us. Light is finite. We are mortal. A lightning bug blinks in the dusk.

Light, and dirt, and water, and air keep us alive. None of my students need Arne Duncan's nonsense. They need a piece of land, unadulterated air and water, and enough vision to know what they do today will affect their yet unborn children.

If our children can pass tests better than they can plant peas, we have failed as parents, as teachers, as humans. If Arne and Bill and Mike and Eli represent the pinnacle of our culture, then I don't want a part of it.

I believe those of us who dance to what's true will prevail. But if we don't, at least we had a reason to dance. And so we did.

Pictures from the front yard.

The logic of Arne

“Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day."

 Arne Duncan

This is a fascinating logic statement, and my brain's smoking trying to parse it.

I'm a hard-working teacher, working for a hard-working supervisor, under a hard-working principal. And yes, our test scores have incrementally risen over the past few years, and yes, we're recognized as a nationally distinguished Title 1 school.

Incremental gains in "standardized" tests, tests that have us slapping our foreheads as we push mediocre writing habits on our borderline kids so that we make the grade, hardly counts as education.

Getting through another year of AYP successfully is like passing a ridiculously large and hard stool. You do it because you have to, there's a modicum of relief when it's done, and you pray you haven't done too much damage when passing it.

I'm hanging on to the edge of civility here, but if Arne keeps up his nonsense, I'm going to ask him to perform another bodily function not often mentioned in polite company.

There's not enough castor oil on the East Coast to put up with Arne's nonsense.

I really have things I'd rather do than go to D.C. in late July. But I care about my kids. 

Quick report

We took about 150 kids to Sandy Hook today, just as the high tide of the new moon of June was receding.

Horseshoe crabs, oblivious to our presence, did what horseshoe crabs have done for millennia.

A few dozen horseshoe crabs danced at the water's edge. Thousands upon thousands of impossibly blue-grey horseshoe crab eggs floated in the water.

Four huge, filleted drum littered the beach.

When the young of the H. sapiens species mix with the old of the L. polyphemus, good things can happen.

And they did.

Thank you PSEG, Bloomfield BEF, BHS administration, and all the chaperones for making this day a tremendous success.

Learning, truly learning, about horseshoe crabs (or any other form of life alien to our culture) will not help on any NCLB exam. But it will change a life, in a good way.

I teach children. Today was a good day. Photos taken by the kids.

This Brazen Teacher

I just got back from our awards ceremony tonight. Among our students is a young man going to Princeton this fall, a man whose family moved to our town from the other side of the world less than a generation ago.

And NCLB haunts us like a pinworms haunt a three year old. Annoying and useless and something no one wants to talk about rationally.

Meet This Brazen Teacher,
She's young, she's brilliant, she's angry.



This ain't rocket science.

Mr. Obama, imagine a world with Linda Darling-Hammond running education.
You sold us on hope.
Hope.