Two neat things today

We found a monarch butterfly with a tag on it--PBB 518. He hung around the zinnias for over an hour.
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Getting to Mexico is tough enough, especially for butterflies, but getting there on unbalanced wings is well nigh impossible. I doubt PBB 518 is going to make it, but he seemed to be enjoying the nectar and the sunshine today.

And when you get down to it, today is all any of us have....

Our 1994 Dodge Caravan started today, and since we happened to have our 10 year old kayaks on top of it when it did, we drove a mile to the beach to enjoy this ridiculously beautiful day on the water.

While were out on the bay, a large pod of dolphins came by--four rose in unison so close to Leslie's boat I was sure she'd be dumped. Dolphins are really big animals, and look even bigger when you're sitting in a 16 foot long piece of plastic over a quarter mile off the beach.

I could teach science 23 hours a day for three years and not get close to awe we felt in those short moments.

ADDENDUM

A science guy commented that you need to note the location of the monarch in order for the tag "to be meaningful"--I took the liberty of posting my reply here:

Dear Ento Mike,

Oh, no worries, the location has been emailed to KU. We know the drill. 1-888-TAGGING.

Even so, the monarch tag is meaningful. It says a lot about humans, about etymologists, about adhesive technologies, about bias in studies (this critter was unusually comfortable around humans).

It made us wonder about energy costs to the butterfly, about balance about mass.

And since we are surrounded by butterflies here this time of year--sometimes seeing hundreds in an hour--finding ol' PBB 518 an hour later tells me that at least one monarch butterfly has a tendency to hang around zinnias for at least an hour, and that the zinnias must be reasonably tasty when its usual sources of food are all over the place here.

(We're talking North Cape May. We got almost as many butterflies as we do mosquitoes this time of year.)

Photo of PBB 518 coming.

Photo of the dolphins was never taken--hard to think when a ton of sea mammals heads towards your boat.

"The universe is made of stories..."

"The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

Muriel Rukeyser

This is a lovely quote, and a lovely way of looking at the world, written by a brilliant poet who grew up in a world that saw the horrible consequences of reducing the world to a machine, in a world that slaughtered millions of those who shared her faith, because of their faith.

The atom has been indelibly tied to the misnamed "atom bomb" and incredible abuses of the 20th century.

I just wish she had said "machines" instead of atoms.

Atoms, in the context of science, are stories. It's taking me weeks to convince my students that the image of atom that exists in their heads, an image perpetuated by many teachers, by television (is it called that anymore?), by textbooks, does not exist.

***

If there is ever a place to teach the nature of science to children, it's in the idea of atom--a (not) tomos- (divisible)--an indivisible particle.

Democritus' early view (poo-poo'ed by Aristotle) that matter can only be divided so far before it is no longer what it is is easy enough to conceptualize. Introduce the idea in 4th grade. Here's a piece of gold. Split it in half. Split it in half again. And again.

No way to see what the smallest particle looks like, but it's easy to imagine that there may be a limit to how small gold may be divided.

No need to bother with electrons or neutrons or protons or orbits in elementary school. A child who parrots these words is no smarter than, well, a parrot.

Come 7th grade or so, after a child has played with magnets and static electricity, and has some sense of what charge means (in the observable world, not the surreal field of fields), when a child gets that opposite charges attract, then show her the Thomson experiment with the cathode ray tube.

Not a Powerpoint, not a video--show the real thing. Deflect the stream of particles with a magnet. Here's a great video showing what we should be doing in class:



Let the kids imagine what an atom looks like now--we know it has tiny particles called electrons, we know the charges of the electrons are negative, and we know the overall charge of the atom is neutral. Let the children draw their own models that fit these criteria. See what they develop.

By high school, maybe sooner, they're ready for Rutherford's experiment--he fired alpha particles at gold foil, and most passed through without deflection. About 1 in 20,000 (give or take) wildly changed direction, as though it hit a chunk of incredibly dense mass.

The atom, whatever this thing is, behaves as though it's mostly empty space, at least when hit with alpha particles.

And that only gets us to 1911. Toss in Bohr to get us to 1913, a ridiculously counter-intuitive model of reality, leading two physicists to vow "If this nonsense of Bohr should in the end prove to be right, we will quit physics!"

And yet my students scribble down this counter-intuitive "nonsense" without complaint. Why? Because we present it as facts, as some Universal Knowledge, as something they must regurgitate. Many of them believe humans have seen individual atoms just like the pseudo-Bohr models printed in textbooks.

And here's the secret that even scientists occasionally forget--our worldview, science or otherwise, rises from stories. The concept of atom is pure story, though not pure fiction--there are deep truths in the model of the atom, as there are deep truths in great poems and novels.

Literacy cuts across all disciplines--we diminish science when we fail to see the stories.

The atom is no more real, or less, than the stories that define us. We reify the abstract every waking moment, and it's how we live and work and play as we get through a day.

But it's still all stories....

g
I lifted the quote from Mary Ann Reilly's blog--which I visit regularly.

Science and the ether bunny

I like the idea of ether, the idea that light needs something to travel through, but efforts to show its existence failed, and current theories do not need it.

I do, though, because it comforts me, so I have a personal relationship with ether. I can still accept other ideas about the universe, and I will even admit my belief in ether theory does little--OK, nothing--to add to my understanding of the natural world, but like Spinoza's epiphenomenological universe, it fits the facts, and gives me comfort.

But you won't hear me spout off at a physics conference about ether, because 1) it adds nothing to the conversation, and 2) I never get invited to physics conferences.

So, yeah, I accept that the natural world is ultimately unknowable, and that, in essence, the natural world is all powerful--if you want to call it God, go ahead.

Just don't go all bananas when I point out that unknowable means just that. As soon as you claim to know something about this God thing, something independent of the natural world (which is freaky enough to stun even the most staid among us), well, then, the idea of unknowable becomes bunk.

And I am tired, really tired, of bunk.

If you can attach human qualities to an unknowable God,
then I will attach lagomorph qualities to my unknowable ether--the ether bunny.

"Eyn chaya kazo"

"There can be no such creature."

Daniel Shechtman, 2011 Chemistry Nobel Prize

I am attempting to teach my lambs the concept of atoms. Their concept of the atom is much like that of the adults around them--nucleus of protons and neutrons in the middle, scattered electrons zipping around the "outside."

Their misconceptions are understandable--their synapses have been wended together by a combination of bad schooling and laughable pop culture that confounds abstractions with reality.

I've only managed to get them to recede into older models--some now "believe in" the plum pudding model, which is a start, I suppose. Many were stunned to hear that our models of atoms are just that--models. How many children believe you can see atoms with a microscope? How many adults?

If I present a Rutherford model of an atom in its textbook form, ask young children to memorize its parts, and get them to internalize the concept as real before they lose their baby teeth I'm pushing religion, not science.

Their performance on the state test would likely be worse now than it would have been a month ago, but this is fine with me--I'd rather a kid be confused by reality than sure of misunderstood models.

(If any parents are reading this, it's all good--the test is still 7 months away.)

***

The quote above is by a man who played with aluminum alloys during his sabbatical and found "crystal" patterns that his field of science did not believe could exist. He had trouble believing this as well, leading to his quote.

High school students do not need to know anything about the nature of crystals to learn something about the nature of science in  this tale. This is the universe--here it is. The universe has a bad habit of intruding on our models. Even professional scientists occasionally find this annoying.

We create abstract models that feel as real as the tree I see through the window, forgetting, over and over again, that our view of the world, as detailed and lovely and solid as it seems, is not the world.

Every year I tell my students the story of Erasto Mpemba, a high school student in Tanzania who (back in 1963) trusted his eyes more than his teacher. Mpemba noticed that his warm ice cream mix froze faster than cooler batches.

Aristotle apparently knew this already, and even up to Descartes' time, the cognoscenti accepted it, but part of being modern is being sensible, and Mpemba was ridiculed by his teacher and his peers.

Under certain conditions the same volume of warm water will freeze faster than cold water. This phenomenon is now known as the Mpemba effect, but no one is sure why it happens.

But it does.

And that's the point--science is about attempting to understand why the world behave as it does, and our understanding of the world will always be a bit fuzzy.

If you want the security of facts, of a concrete reality, of a world where the abstract is the reality, well, the First Amendment makes it easy to do this in these parts--we got all kinds of religions more than willing to tell you the truth.

If you want to learn something about the world, though, at some point you need to look beyond the abstract, get beyond words, abandon human conceits, and just look.

The universe is full of creatures that cannot exist, far more real than the ones in your head. It would be a lot easier to teach science if folks bothered to let the kids know this somewhere along the way....

Imagine how lonesome Newton felt when he first got it, how terrified Darwin was, how bemused Einstein must have been.
None of this makes any sense.
Enjoy the ride.

My first plug

This is a preview of a review of a must-read book for any teacher who attempts to teach science in public schools.

I got a copy back in August, and have been reading (and thinking and doing and arguing and questioning and playing) with it since. It's already scribbled all over, pages dog-eared, then dog-eared again.

I do not know the author--he emailed me cold back in July, and I was wary, very wary, of taking on a review--never did one, had no idea how. I still haven't done one.

But I've changed a few classroom practices, finally have a grip on wave theory, and hope to pass the book along like a Gideon Bible. But I'll have to buy extra copies to do that--I'm not letting go of this one.

And whenever I figure out how to write a real review, I'll do just that.....

I rotate a few favorite books that I read--literally--for years.
>This one joined the rotation, the first new book in the pile in two years

I was not paid for the review other than getting a copy of the book--
since I plan on buying another copy to share, as well as buying the 1st volume,
I don't think that counts as payola.

September light

Been busier than a bumblebee in May, mostly chasing my own tail, and just about missed September. If anyone checks, though, I got state standards sitting next to some lesson plans on some hard drive somewhere.

How many Septembers do any of us have?

Suppose you live to seventy, and that's a huge suppose. The first few hardly count. Your first September you were likely surprised whenever your fist appeared in front of you face. Your second September you were too busy trying out your legs to notice anything else.

The third and fourth Septembers were nice, but then you got tossed into school. Then work. Deadlines, duties, and data streams.

You think you'll catch September next time around with its soft light and crisp apples, the edge of decay in the air reminding us our bodies belong to the earth and the worms. Maybe when you retire?

That leaves you five Septembers. If you get more than that they will find you in the body of an old man, a body abused for decades, a body ready to quit.

***

I saw three of our local "residents" cackling away on a park bench late this afternoon, as I rambled home through the Green. One was screaming "You're nuts," to the other two, and all three convulsed in hysterical laughter, because they were, indeed, nuts, have been certifiable for years, and they were outside on a late September day, a gorgeous day that almost allows me to forgive fall, and they were happy as the fat squirrels who waddled around the same bench, hoping for peanuts.

I want my students college and career ready, true, because they have no land and can starve if they fail to play the game.

But I also want my students to see the beauty of late September light with its earth smells, to laugh at the absurdity of the dying light, to howl at the moon, to play, to wander and wonder, to be the mammals that we are.

If the heart of science is observation, and I believe that it is, and if my teaching carries any influence, as I believe it does (why else teach?), then our town will continue to have fools cackle on park benches in the dying summer light.

And if I'm lucky, I'll spend a September or two cackling right along with them, our wise fools of the park, no longer pretending that the matters of man matter more than the ginkgo that shades the bench.

Photos by us. Go us! CC and all that. Boats in Galway, mud field in Cae May.

The satellite is falling! The satellite is falling!

I'm curious--are other science teachers noticing a dearth of numeracy?

While we struggle to get enough of our lambs to wiggle through algebra algorithms to pass the state exam,  fewer children "feel" numbers. Numbers may not be warm and fuzzy, but each one has a certain, um, heft, to it. Solving quadratic equations may impress the senators, but failing to recognize simple arithmetic relations pose a much bigger threat to our republic than a lack of algebraic fluency.

Innumeracy will kill democracy long before illiteracy can.

Dedicated to every child who loses sleep tonight over UARS, a satellite raining down on us tonight.
Woodcut by Gregor Reisch: "Madame Arithmeticae," 1508