"You can't pray a lie...."

I enjoy Mary Ann Reilly's words and works. She persistently (though gently) arouses us from the cultural slumbers that allow us to continue to do the things we continue to do, even though we know better.

"You can't pray a lie" comes to us from Mark Twain, of course, through the voice of Huckleberry Finn.

You Can't Pray a Lie, Mary Ann Reilly, 2012

Go read her if you want to wake up from your nap.

***

We can hide behind our curricula, behind our rules, behind our cultural norms, but when we teach children anything, anything, not worth the time we steal from them, we sin.

We will be playing with dancing daphnia this week--and some of them will be killed either through negligence or just the stress of being placed on a slide. Some will be squashed, some will suffocate under the cover slip. Some will get too warm from the microscope's light. Some will fall in a drop of water onto the lab table, unnoticed, swirling around as the its world slowly evaporates away.



My kids, many of them jaded by years in a system that sees them as test scores and graduation rates, feel bad for the daphnia, at least once they get to know them.  Others will fall in love with vorticella, or with rotifers, but just about all of them will feel attached to life they had no idea existed.

Every year, my kids are much more careful putting their critters back than they were at getting them. The more they learn about the natural world, the kinder they become.

We need to be more careful with what we do in the classroom.

A reminder to AP Biology teachers

We're knee-deep in molecular genetics now in AP Biology--and it's not your father's biology anymore, or even your older sister's.

She only had to contend with mRNA, tRNA, and rRNA.

Created by WGScott, shared under CC

The biology world has exploded with RNA confetti!

miRNA  siRNA. 

 ncRNA RNAi piRNA

tasiRNA and rasiRNA

While this leads to big fun for old AP teachers who love to joust with other AP teachers (and you know who you are), I realized this week that even my most interested biology superstars can only take so much RNA fun in a month.

***

I keep about 10 gallons or so of pond water in my basement during the winter months. I pretend I do it to save money--I can overwinter my elodea--but I really do it for my sanity.

Once or twice a week I peer into the bucket, tap its side, and watch the daphnia dance. I watch a water strider hunt, a spider weave, larvae wiggle just under the surface,

I brought in a pint this week, ostensibly to test run our new microscopes. Within this pint lived hundreds of daphnia, and all kinds of other strange critters simply going about the business of living, something my AP students gave up years ago, so that they can live later.

It's a harsh trade, schooling for living. The cracks are starting to show.

With snow on the ground outside, the local ponds half frozen, a few brilliant, exhausted kids peered into a drop of pondwater, and remembered why they fell in love with biology in the first place.  
Wow! Look a this! Yuck! I'll never swim again!

Shame on me for letting them forget.

 I forget every year, too. Time to read Kim Foglia's letter again...

October light again

40 49N, 74 11W

 
On the last day of October, a couple of days after Sandy had reshaped our shores, the sun rose at 6:27 AM here, then snuggled its way west at 4:53 PM, ten hours and 26 minutes later. The sunlight was dimming.

Today, for the first time since Sandy, we had ten hours and 26 minutes of sunshine, again. We're shoveling out of a moderate winter storm, but we're OK, again.

And the sunlight is returning.

I teach biology, but most of my lambs will leave my classroom in June, and not really get their connection to the sun. Every step they take, every thought of those they love, every complex molecule in their bodies owes its existence to the sun.

I'm OK with this.

What I am  not OK with is filling their heads with so much nonsense that they no longer notice that the sun comes, the sun goes, and then comes back again.

I expect I have a few more days left with exactly 10 hours and 26 minutes of sunlight. But not so many as I used to.

I have no desire to tell my students what to do.
I do care, though, to let them know they only have a finite amount of time to do it.

I teach children. What do you do?

Cool beans!

Got some words up at the Siemens STEM Academy site.

The Super Bowl Hates Children

The Super Bowl is a big deal in this part of the world.
Other cultures can learn a lot about us, and our "love" of children.

If we cared about kids, we'd not push milk on them.
If we cared about kids, we'd not push soda on them.

If we cared about kids, we'd not sell cars by using babies as toys.

But we don't care about kids.
We care about the idea of caring about kids.

But it's not the same thing, not the same thing at all....

Childhood poverty is not an accident nor an act of f God.

Science is sensuous

Many of my students are unaware they are being watched in class by critters other than teachers.

As a child gets up to sharpen her pencil, a salamander scurries back under a rock, a fish darts to the surface looking for food, a cockroach slides under some lettuce.

As they become aware, and they do over the months, they start to watch. They bang on the glass, overfeed the fish, feign fear of the cockroach.They fail to see how perceptive these critters are, at least for awhile, but over time start to get to know them.

I promise my kids very little at the beginning of the year except that they will know less in June than they do in September, that the natural world is bigger than they know, and that they are not just part of it, they belong to it.


This last part is a big deal.

***

If you do not know this world, the one that bathes us with oxygen, feeds us with grain and flesh, refreshes our thirst, you cannot love it.

And, for the most part, we don't.

If you hope to teach a child the abstract models needed for science, you best start by cultivating her love of the world instead of the sad task of earning good grades for the love of her parents.

Somewhere along the way, our children lose their way.
Somewhere along the way, we encouraged this.

We threaten our laggards with tales of woe should they fail to earn a diploma, a place on the honor roll, recognition as a National Merit Finalist. Children respond to fear, as we all do--it's what drives our politics and our economy.

Fear might generate enough engineers among us, but it does not create scientists.

***

You cannot love the natural world in the abstract; the natural world, by definition, is sensuous. We use abstract thought to make sense of the sensuous. That defines science.

If your child sees the beauty in Fibonacci numbers but fails to see the deeper beauty of a pine cone's spiral, you are raising a professional student, and we have more than enough of those.

If your child is "wasting" her time staring at a pine cone instead of logging hours of math homework to please the adults who keep her alive, she just might hold onto her curiosity and love of the world long enough to do something useful as an adult.

 

I am not saying learning math is useless--quite the contrary.

A child who loves the world develops a fondness for patterns, and will have a use for numbers.

Groundhog day

Halfway through winter, again.


An Cailleach Bhearra wandered around back in the 10th century in western Ireland, eating "seaweed, salmon, and wild garlic" (my kind of woman), looking for firewood.

If the day was bright and sunny, beware--she had gathered plenty of wood and was set for many cold days ahead. If the day was gray, she didn't bother, and she will make the days warm up again. Sound familiar?

***

A few summers ago, Leslie and I left Doolin on foot, and headed up the trail to the Cliffs of Moher, Cailleach's country, climbing over stone walls and electrified fences, keeping an eye out for bulls, as we wend our way up to the cliffs.

A few times we crept carefully along trails just inches from a fatal fall. We were foolish, and we were rewarded for our foolishness with the gift of life and shared love.

(You can, of course, go to the "official" Cliffs of Moher, and pay your euros for safe walkways, clean bathrooms, and an interpretive center to tell you what to experience.)

We live in a linear world, or pretend so. We try to teach our children to live in the same world, the world in our heads, the safe one. They buck this, as we did when we were young.

Winter lived well reminds me I will die.
So will you.
So will our children.

Cailleach, the goddess of winter, destroys what is useless to make room for new life, and makes spring possible again.

Should my children again wander over to Doolin, my brain will urge them to stick to the sanctioned trails.

My heart, though, hopes otherwise.
I want my children alive, but I want them to live.

Photos by Leslie: winter jetty taken Sunday, my leg over a cliff .
And Leslie reminded me that our eldest has already walked the same trail--we did something right.

Old post repeated, for me.