November dark, Arne, and local slugs

The terrible beauty of Inishmore, ragged rock jutting from the Galway Bay, softened with the lush green of moss, define the few folks who spend their lives there.

The sea and mist, the perpetual dark of December, the endless miles of stone walls defines the folk who live there. Language itself blends with the land.

The land made the Irish as much as the Irish worked the land, each failing to tame the other.

Arne Duncan claims loyalty to Chicago, but his archetypal story focuses on a basement in his mama's school, saving the brown-skinned folks from illiteracy. Oh, he changes the adjectives a little, maybe uses a little more nuance with his nouns, but that's his story, the one he chooses to tell.

Did he mention he plays basketball?

***

Ireland has a long history of other peoples invading, ultimately becoming Irish themselves. The story of the Anglo-Irish infuriated English kings, and they adapted to the ways of the earth beneath their feet.

Arne Duncan and his army of corporate fools is colonizing my school. My neighbors spends thousands of dollars to support our schools, and Arne's Federal army throws a tenth of that our way.

Yet we continue to bow to him.

At what cost?

If we continue to treat the winds swirling our way from D.C. as just another nor'easter, one we can handle until the next one comes, we are mistaken.

I am a science teacher, with a reasonable number sense, a reasonable grasp of statistics, and no agenda beyond helping my neighbors' children live a life worth living. Yes, I make a decent wage--maybe less than my days succoring the afflicted, but more than enough to wile away a few afternoons each month raking clams, brewing ale, and living a reasonably happy life. I'd like my students to have a shot at the same.

Just about every "study" I dissect pushed by Arne, or Eli Broad, or our own Chris Cerf, I found obvious holes. Either these masters of power are stupid (and trust me, they are not), or they are feeding an agenda that has no concern for the slugs on the Bloomfield Green enjoying this last warm November eve before the dark chill of winter settles upon us.

Arne has never set foot in my town, and would not know it if he did. He lives in a world of human construct, a dangerous world where ideologies trump life, where sentimentality replaces affection, and power trumps love. He is of everyplace, and of no place, untethered power.

If we continue to train our children for a mythical international economy that builds little worth building if you define "worth building" as healthy food, decent water, clothes on one's back, and a few hours a day to chase butterflies. I'm no more interested in ultra-corporatism than I am in fascism. I am interested in clams and ale.

I once extended an invitation to Arne to visit my mudflat. I'm retracting it. Label me a backwards, parochial  provincialist, but know this.

I am happy, and I live with many happy people. Our schools are supported by good people at a much higher cost than sitting in your wealthy mama's basement reading stories to folks he calls "the underclass."

The Irish paid a terrible price for occupation over the centuries, but they remained essentially Irish. We here in Bloomfield want our children to be, above all, children of Bloomfield. 

While we can still speak

As we slip into November darkness, when long shadows cast fears deeper than words, when a plant struggles to catch the last few rays of the sun before dropping its last leaf, mortality bubbles through the late autumn mist.

The shadows will be lengthening for the next six weeks.

The world is dying.

No, not Irish whiskey....from Pandora's Parlor.

After a body breathes its last around here, it ends up at one of our local morgues, their names emblazoned on the t-shirts of local children's baseball teams. Zarro's. O'Boyle's. Levandoski's. Each home marks the arrival of a new wave of European immigrants not so long ago.

When a body is embalmed, its blood is drained into the town's sewers, food for the unseen microscopic critters teeming a few feet below our streets. Autumn means little to them.


We sing praises over the cadaver, words we wish we shared with the living, words the dead wish they had shared with us.

Might as well speak them now, while we can. 

We got work to do. 

Bring on your wrecking ball

Yep, we're fine--
my cortisol levels are just now starting to dip below those of a middle manager at Walmart, but we're OK

.

 "And hard times come, and hard times go
And hard times come, hard times go
And hard times come, and hard times go
And hard times come, and hard times go
Yeah just to come again...."

Bruce Springsteen, "Bring on Your Wrecking Ball"

Just about everyone knows the story of autumn leaves. The tree breaks down stuff in the leaf, and carries the small pieces down to its roots, where they will sit until late winter, when they start the journey back up to its branches.

Folks north of here tap their maple trees and steal some of the sweet sap as it works its way towards the sky, boil it down to syrup, and if you have a pocket of dollars, might even share some with you.

It's a nice little story of renewal, our autumn leaves, because they come back again when the trees spring back to life in the spring.

Me, I'm more interested in the story of the beans. And they're dying. Hard times come--they always do. But hard times go--and in the warm May earth, a bean will arc its way back towards the sun.

Bean vines lose leaves, but even as they lose them, they make fruit. This may seem trivial, and I had hardly noticed it before, but this year I paid closer attention. My beans continue to flower and fruit even as the last few dried leaves fall off the vine.

A plant without leaves cannot capture the energy of sunlight, but there's little light left to catch in these parts. We're in the dark season, and will be, for the next 3 months. Leaves are hardly worth the energy needed to build them.

So where is the energy, where is the stuff, of my newest beans coming from? (Stuff comes from stuff, and energy from energy--sunlight is not converted into food, despite what Mrs. Mayberry Weatherby told you in second grade.)

I realized something this week that was so obvious I almost laughed--the beans we pick in November are sacrificial beans. The plant is tearing itself apart to make the last purple flower for a bee that just might come, to make that last November bean, before the plant dies. The sun no longer matters to the plant, because the fading sun is useless.

Leslie and I ate the last few beans yesterday--and they were as sweet as the blue November sky. Light's getting late for both of us--we notice things like this now.

***

We got our asses kicked pretty good by Sandy, but most of us are OK. Many of us are not. Now we get to do what we are meant to do--put the pieces back together, reversing the entropy of our neighborhoods.

Entropy is a tough concept--the universe becomes less orderly with every passing moment. Every time we do work, we increase the overall disorder. Thankfully we have the sun nearby, fusing hydrogen atoms into helium, and the tiny difference between the mass of each gives us our warm, bright sun, and the energy plants need to make complex organic molecules.

Equilibrium is also a tough concept for most students (and most adults), but we're all hurtling towards stability, and we'll all die long before we get there.

The more disordered the universe, the more stable it becomes. The crushed wreckage of a shore bungalow now lying at the edge of the sea is more stable than  than the cute, well-maintained sea cottage it once was, just two weeks ago.

When this is all over, whatever this this is, the universe will be  a cool, stable place. Heat death.
When we die, we drift towards equilibrium--the ancient myth makers had that much right.

Equilibrium. Stability. Balance.
Such reposeful words.

Fuck that. Bring on your wrecking ball.
So long as the sun remains in our sky, and plants are around to use it, we can do work, and right now we have a lot of work to do.

We're Jersey strong. If a November bean can build, so can we!

First song on Wrecking Ball is "We Take Care of Our Own"--thank you Bruce and Governor Christie

Samhain, again

 An old one, but Samhain is creeping up, and the ancients revered the cycles. I'm creeping towards ancient status.

(I've been running a fever the past couple of days...we'll return to our regularly scheduled programming once my complement system wakes up and starts kicking some H1N1 ass.)

Despite whatever virus is playing tootsies with my hypothalamus (or maybe because of this), I found myself in thigh deep water on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean at dusk, trying to catch a striped bass. I spent the evening shivering under a blanket.

The waters here are about 62 degrees, still plenty warm for wading. The air temperature wasn't bad, either, and the wind didn't bother me until the sun set. In my feverish napping, I realized that for all my training and prepping and struggling as a science teacher, a student can learn far more about life on the edge of the Hallowe'en sea than she ever will in the classroom.

As the sunlight recedes on Samhain, the dead walk among us.

***

This morning I noticed a drop of water on the shower curtain. Light rays were bent by the drop of water clinging to the curtain, and the threads of the curtain loomed larger than life. At least that's how I perceived it.

If I had not been there to catch the bent rays of light, the light rays still would have been bent for whatever light-sensing creature might pause to look at it, or so I believe. Faith, really.

This past week we have been talking about diffusion in biology class. I started the year off with a mini-history of the universe, talking about two huge articles of faith in science:

• Whatever rules apply here at this moment apply everywhere in the known universe (given, of course, the same conditions), and
• Whatever rules apply now (at this given spot) applied throughout the past and will continue to apply in the future.

If we're going to tackle issues of faith in the classroom, may as well tackle them head on. Science requires a special kind of faith.

***

Like the drop of water visible only to me, or the fin of the striped bass cutting through the surf while I stood alone at the beach, most moments only happen once. We see patterns in our moments, and some patterns, particularly those based on the natural world, become predictable. (This borders on tautologous--if a moment defies observable patterns, we toss it out of the science realm.)

The dead among us walk among us. My mother, my father, my sister, my grandparents, and great aunts and uncles and the hundreds, thousands of my clan that preceded me still live in the common spirit our clan shares, carried by me and others, passed to our children.

We ask children to study the complement system in the face of viremia, something none of them will see in a lifetime, yet deny the ghosts they see in the shadows, as real as the refracted light on my shower curtain. I know that the shower curtain threads did not magically enlarge, and I know that ghosts do not lurk in the shadows.

What I know and what I believe, however, do not always mesh. On the edge of the ocean at night, I am afraid. Perhaps without reason.

We try to bend them to a scientific view of the world in a place where science rarely happens, in a classroom, on a forced time schedule, in order to educate them "to a better economy."

We teach models as though they are real. Science is useful, but it is based on models, a special way of looking at the universe, a way that has resulted in all kinds of wonderfulness, but not real.

Or rather, no more real than the shadows lurking under the early November moon, reminding us that we, too, will walk among the dead, no matter how education we have. If I did not believe this I would not fear the night, even though I know better.

Photo by Immanuel Giel, no permission needed

Sandy and the Core Curriculum

The guitar leaning against the wall still plays.
Even if you don't know a lick about diatonic scales, the physics of harmonics, or how cochlear hairs work.

The shovel leaning on the fence still digs.
Even if you don't know how steel is forged, the physics of levers and wedges, or that its handle grew.

The old manual typewriter still writes letters when the internet is down.
Even if you don't know the history of our alphabet, how the ribbon was made, or why ribbon ink is a technological marvel.

Why do we learn anything?

***

Cape May getting slammed, from The Christian Science Monitor

I agree with Arne Duncan and his wealthy cronies that education matters, but I care about the parts that matter to my students, to my town.

My town is digging, cutting, raking, rewiring, sawing, hammering its way back to normal.
We're also sharing tales, drinking ales, and wasting precious hours not contributing to the global economy. No worries, though, we'll spend enough on Chinese supplies at the local Home Depot to contribute something,

If we had school today, most of my lambs would be too shook up to grasp the intricacies of the receptor tyrosine kinases we would be studying. Hard to study when the reality of shelter and food issues poke into a child's life.

All the education in the world could not stave off Sandy, and very little of what we teach today is of much use in its aftermath.

After the storm, my guitar is worth more than Arne's platitudes, but that's not saying a whole lot.

We got work to do, right here in New Jersey, with plenty of people who are capable of doing it. We need to rebuild, and we will. The arc of a hammer's swing is a lovely sight, the harmonics of a true strike resonates with the soul.

***

Do we need to teach science? Of course.
Does every child need to learn the quadratic equation? No, but Arne would have us teach it anyway.

from Let's Be Clear blogsite

There are only so many hours in a school day, so many hours during childhood. Few of our children truly master quadratic equations, but muddle their way enough to pass state algebra exams with their flexible standards.

Fewer master how to fix a damaged home, but there's no fudging those results.

Home matters. Families matter. Stories matter. Life matters.
It shouldn't take a storm to remind us. 

For many children, the uncertainties of Sandy mirror the uncertainties they face daily.

Are you listening, Mr. Duncan?

Men's room science

The public bathrooms along the Garden State Parkway have fantastic hand dryers, so much fun even I bother to wash my hands after a splash at the urinal.

The XLERATOR the Ferrari of public bathroom, uses a 5/8 HP motor, and blows at 16,000 linear feet per minute, over 180 mph! It's even the Official Hand Dryer for the New England Patriots.

And it just looks sexy, in a steam punk kinda way.
But that's not why I'm talking about it.

The XLERATOR is green certified by various agencies, not something I spend a whole lot of time worrying about, but if you want to be green certified, you need to cut your watts down somewhere. The machine uses a 900W heating element, but it also uses a thermostat--the air temperature is controlled, and tops at 135°F where your hands should be.

This matters--you can play without frying yourself. [WARNING: the temp gets a bit warmer when you put your hands right at the vent--if you feel your hands frying, pull them away...]

If you push your hand right up to the vent while it's blasting a few zillion air particles, you'll reach a point where your hand suddenly gets pushed towards the vent, Bernoulli's principle in action! This amazes me every single time, and is enough excuse to make a pit stop just because...

You can't, of course, drag a whole class of kids into the men's room, at least not more than once. But you can do this.

• Grab a spool of thread--we usually have about 9 of them attempting to mate in the junk drawer. If no one sews in your home anymore, go to grandma--she'll have a few.
• Stick a short pin through a file card, then guide the pin into the hole in the center of the spool.
• While still holding the index card, face the floor and start blowing hard through the spool opening.
• Let go of the index card.
• Be amazed.

From Mr. Right's Amazing But Simple Science Experiments series on English Sabla

If you're in a pinch for a class demo, you can simply hold up two strips of paper and challenge a kid to blow them apart--the harder the child tries, the closer the tighter the strips cling together.

For the record, paper towels are more sanitary, and you can use them to open the bathroom door if you're particularly worried about folks like me. I've become quite cozy with our prokaryotic friends, and worry more about Eli Manning's QB rating than I do about bathroom bacteria.

No, you are not allowed to comment about Bernoulli's principle and airplanes--

I know it's not just Bernoulli's forces that allows planes to fly. Go find a physics forum.

Don't get me started on anti-bacterial everything....

Storm coming

Wanted to go clamming today before the DEP closes the beds for God knows how long, but we got work to do to get ready for Sandy. If she's even half as ferocious as she threatens to be,  the prepping will be as useless as tits on a bullfrog, but it gives nervous hands something to do while we wait.

North Wildwood, 1962 storm. Press of Atlantic City

Should she hit, or the earth shake, or the sun flare, or the magma erupt, you can either be useful, or not.

When calamities happen, and they will, work needs to be done.

Care for the wounded, clean up the rubble, solve the hundreds of small problems you will face as they come up. The needs become obvious quickly--decent water, shelter, and (eventually) food. Waste has to go somewhere. Some sort of order needs to be maintained through the chaos.

A guitar or a harmonica can help, too.

Life becomes very public, and culture defines who will thrive, and who will not. Problem solving at the local level trumps the Arne's false security of "an educated, skilled workforce that can compete in a global economy".

After the storm blows through, when what you can do matters to the people you live with, what kinds of skills matter?

If any decent thing comes out of a mother of a storm like this one promises to be, it's this much: it helps remind us what matters, at least for those who care to be reminded.