Science and the art of Perrymandering

I could be a Rastafarian, a witch, or a Hindu. Maybe I'm a Jainist, a Buddhist, or a Scientologist. I might worship the sun, the moon, or maybe even both.
'

As a science teacher, it matters not a whit.

And here we have potential future Presidents insisting that Intelligent Design belongs in my science class.

I spend a lot of time defining science, more time than many, but it's time well spent. If you have no idea what science is, then either learn or, well, clam up.

Truth be told, I'm mostly a pre-Constantinian primitive Christian, who happens to be confirmed a Roman Catholic.  

Which is not a Fundamentalist--not even close.
But thanks for asking.

Image lifted from MoveOn.org.

Mixed message

On the cover of NEA Today, the National Education Association trumpets teachers as change agents. Inside, we have "Create! Communicate! Collaborate!" pushing the best in education technology.

Go us!

Then I peek at the Talkback section, where under "Confiscate Cell Phones," Shawn With-No-Name gives us a snappy way to control the scourge of student-controlled tech in our rooms:

"Attach a fee! It costs parents $15 to get the phone back the next day. Our school uses the money for a faculty lunch at a local restaurant at the end of the year."

He then follows this with a non sequitur--"safety is important but so is education."

Now I realize that Shawn's views may not represent the editorial board but the editors did elect to print it. If the union truly wants to protect our interests, they'd defer from printing this kind of inanity.

Yes, parents, we're going to whoop it up on your dime.

You cannot make this stuff up.

A Clockwork Yellow

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

Carl Sagan

I think clocks did as much to squash our spirits as anything else, but the history of time is fascinating, and surprisingly silent given its effects on our culture.

When the Prague Orloj astronomical clock was built, raw materials needed to be churned into the metal parts used to make the massive machine, some of which still exist today. People go to visit it, to take pictures, to, in a word, worship.

The beauty of the rhythm of the universe marked by the clock has been usurped by the idea of the clock itself. An abstract form that takes the concrete form of the clock has become another idol.

And we love idols.

***

What do we value in science classes? What does a child learn about the universe by Skyping with astronauts, by playing with remote telescopes via the internet, by doing simulations of labs on an iPad?

If a teacher does not have the wherewithal to teach about combustion using nothing more than a candle, a match, and a bell jar, an iPad will not help.

Teaching science simply can be stressful--there is simply no place to hide. I can teach about combustion using a chemical equation, balancing the reactants and products with flair, as though that's the point of chemistry, using animated demos to show various colorful molecules combining and breaking to form various new substances. And I used to do just that.

Now I start with water seemingly cast from a lit propane torch.

Which is the point, really--here is a piece of the universe, child, here's what we see. Let's figure out if we can find a pattern here.

Teaching combustion going to the equations first is like teaching someone how to look at a sunflower by analyzing Fibonacci spirals:

Until a child sees the beauty of the sunflower for itself, its powerful symmetry easily seen but not so easily defined without numbers, no sense pushing golden ratios.

The school awards the children who can manipulate the Fibonacci ratio. It's easily tested, and easily mastered even without seeing the symmetry in a flower head, should a child be so motivated. In school, we idolize the abstract.

A child could know the golden ratio without grasping the beauty seen in nature's symmetry, and do just fine in science class.

And so folks go to gawk at a clock in Europe, designed to reveal patterns discovered by humans hundreds of years ago, taking pictures of a machine with little machines, understanding how neither works, nor caring to. And they will show off their photos as we show off our clever students who spout off ratios, and wonder why we feel an ache in our chest as we drift to sleep, feeling that something is not quite right, that something is missing.

I keep a sundial by my classroom window.

Golden ratio image lifted from Sofluid here.
The sunflower is by lucapost released and borrowed under CC via Flickr.
Prague clock by Hector Zenil, via Wikipedia, used under CC.

Quakers

I am glad today was not a school day in New Jersey.

Those of us sitting on the state's udder, the tip of Cape May county, got a nice ride for less than we'd pay at Morley's, and countless afternoon chats under the sun made the surreal feel real.

Now imagine if we had school tomorrow--kids would be assaulted with seismographs, joule calculators, fault maps, Richter scales, and whatever else tools teachers could find to make the real become more abstract.

All that matters, at some level, of course, but for most kids, I imagine having a spectacularly lovely August afternoon off to replay a minute's worth of otherworldliness will make this one stick for a long, long time.

Leslie and I went for a nature walk afterwards--the monarch butterflies are back in force, the dolphins were feeding off the beach, a fawn played peekaboo with us, and we saw a hummingbird sitting on a branch. I saw an ibis grope through the mud, a muskrat waddle its fat August body through the reeds, and hundreds of dragonflies shimmered around us, showing off their magnificently colored bodies, only rivaled by the porcelain berries we saw on the trail.

Earthquakes matter because we have infrastructure. Get outside, under the summer sun, and they matter a whole lot less.

I wish the same could be said for hurricanes.

The porcelain berries photo by Josconklin, used under CC.

No Khan Do

Salman Khan makes educational videos, lots of educational videos, using a simple technique--he draws out his thoughts on a "blackboard," while he thinks aloud. Much like someone unwrapping a problem on a napkin or on an old slate blackboard.

Bill Gates has practically adopted him, and the ed reformerati love him. He's an MIT grad, he's multicultural, he's an ex-hedge fund manager (maybe his biggest cachet, a sad reflection of our culture), and he's kinda cute. In an Ivy League rules kind of way. (What do I know, I used to be a stevedore....)

Sal Khan helps kids learn how to regurgitate what we already have in textbooks, without reading the textbooks, a video CliffsNotes for the now generation. He allows the worst parts of education to be efficiently streamlined for ingestion, about as effective and useful as cod liver oil. It works, but it's over-rated.

In the end, I think it's a student's ability to pause, rewind, and rehash what Khan says that makes him so valuable, and which makes his brand so sad--really, really sad. I'm a teacher, and a pretty good one. We need to pay attention to what our kids don't know.

If 21^st century learning boils down to a hyped up version of what we did back in the 1930's, we're screwed. If Bill Gates is the valued judge of what education means (go learn his history), we're screwed. If we cannot do better in the classroom than Mr. Khan can do with his SmoothDraw and Camtasia (or what any of us can do on the back of a cocktail napkin), we're screwed.

Relax, we're not screwed (yet). Be better than the videos, not a hard task, unless regurgitation floats your boat.

Frank Noschese destroys Mr. Khan in a series of blog posts with far more sophistication than me.
Blackboard via Shorpy.

Seine thoughts

Went seining yesterday with my brother and my niece, dragging our net along the edge of the Delaware Bay looking for whatever.

We found lady crabs, spearing, a croaker fry, lots of comb jellies, a  blue claw, a few hermit crabs, and a horseshoe crab molt.

We were looking for nothing in particular, and we found it. A few kids and their parents joined us--looking for nothing in particular trumps searching for something specific on a fine August afternoon.

***

School starts again in a couple of weeks.

Schedules. Bells. Curricula. Because that's the way it's done.Because it's efficient. Because it's orderly. Because we have to. Because we need control.

It's not how we learn, though, and never has been.

Several children felt the wiggling of minnows in their hands yesterday, the weight of warm, gooey comb jellies, the snip of crotchety crabs. It's unlikely they will seine in school, even in biology class.

And that's a shame.

You can get a decent  4x8' seine net and a pair of oak poles for about $30.
It will outlast the laptop you bought your child last week.
If taken care of properly, it might even outlast you.

The woodcarving from Sea Fishing by John Bickerdyke, 1895

What your child's science teacher believes

This is from last year--as the school year approaches, I like to lay things out, re-evaluate them, tweak as need be.



I may be teaching your child soon--here are some of the things I believe:

General Jack D. Ripper had a point, fluoridating public water is a bad idea.

Not all vaccines mandatory for public school in NJ should be mandatory, and that using a healthy abortus for a common vaccine may be ethically dubious.

Tithonus and the rubella vaccine

Drinking from a public water fountain is safe and a good idea, and charter schools are neither.

Public water and charter schools

However, drinking water held in bottles made with an estrogen-like agent is dangerously stupid.

Sylvester McMonkey McBean and the FDA

Our Federal Secretary of Education is under-qualified.

I really don't like Arne

I have a bit of a religious streak, inconsistent as it may be.

Eating in a science class

But I have little tolerance for those who dismiss descent with modification with little (or no) thought. Evolution is the heart of biology.

Darwin in the classroom

Photos/illustrations as attributed at the original posts.