Happy New Year, 10 days late

The sun is, slowly, starting its swing northward again.
The darkest 3 weeks of the year ends tomorrow.

Delaware Bay sunset, early winter.

In these parts, the swing from where the sun sets today and where it will late June is just over 60 degrees, a huge chunk of the horizon. Degrees mean little to most folks now, no need anymore.

60 degrees is the chunk of a circle eaten by 10 minutes on an analog clock, but that's a dead reference now.

When was the last time you held a compass? When will you ever need to again?

***

The loss of the literal face of time on clocks is not much of an issue, but it does bear witness to our culture's loss of connection with the origin of hours, of minutes, of seconds.

That the sun rise, sets, then rises again is not a subtle piece of knowledge. That it slips its way along the horizon is also not subtle, if you spend anytime outside, yet many folks miss this.

Delaware Bay sunset, mid-summer

The arc of the sun's path on any given day is slightly different than it was the day before or after. In these parts, despite what my teachers taught me, the sun is never directly overhead. For most days, the sun is not at its highest point when our clocks announce noon.

We no longer tell time by the sky.
If we did, noon would be when the sun was at its highest point, and 6 P.M would mark sunset.
The hours today would be shorter than the hours in June, which would be fine with me, mammal that I am.

We're pressed for time, because somebody somewhere needs to meet some abstract deadline for (too often) an abstract idea that has nothing to do with what any of us needs.

We teach using a modern, abstract, and artificial concept of time.
Meanwhile a bored child watches the slow edge of a shadow cross the wall.

Most of us around here celebrate the New Year tomorrow, the first day of a month named after Janus, a two-faced god conceived by Romans.

Me? Mine started with the winter solstice 10 days ago, with the end of the southern slide of our sun.

Happy New Year 10 days late!

Our evolving ignorance

 

It gets worse, at least from a biology teacher's point of view:

"About half of those who express a belief in human evolution take the view that evolution is “due to natural processes such as natural selection” (32% of the American public overall)." 

Only about a third of Americans accept natural selection, the cornerstone of biology. That's like "believing in"  chemistry without accepting the concept of atoms, or physics without accepting inertia.

Forget NAEP, forget NGSS, PARCC, and CCSS--forget all of that, because whatever we're doing is not working, and will not work, so long as we continue to treat children as standardized units, as long as we treasure obedience over skepticism, as long as we continue to reward the worst of our behaviors at our highest levels of power.

In the meantime, I will continue to plant seeds in our classroom, both figuratively and literally, until the happy (but not inevitable) day when our children bark at the nonsense we feed them every day at home, in school, in malls, in just about any space where kids encounter adults.

Take a child clamming, gardening, fishing, crabbing, kite-flying, hunting, whatever it takes.

New Year's Resolutions: a science teacher's list

These were last year's resolutions.
I liked them so much I'm going with them again.

New Year's Day is coming up, and with it, the fantasy of resolutions kept.

Only wear shoes when you absolutely have to. 

Science teachers need to wear them during lab, but unless it's snowing and a bunch below zero, my toes are collecting photons.

It also cuts way down on foot issues, and if you teach, your dawgs matter as much as your voice.

My foot and a cabbagehead jelly--and no, haven't tried eating that (yet).

Eat fresh food, as much as possible, but don't make a fetish out of it. 

You can do it for health and a whole lot of other extraneous reasons, but the best reason to do it is because fresh food tastes good, and we only have so many meals in a lifetime.

If nothing else, grow some basil in a used milk carton on a southern windowsill. Even if you never eat them, basil will cheer you up--just brush against the leaves and the smell will wrap your limbus with love.

Brussels sprouts, anyone?

Walk a couple of purposeless miles every day.

No stopwatch, no GPS, no heart rate monitor, no walking shoes, no laps. Just you and the world. If you don't know where to go, you're already halfway there!

Avoid ceilings.

Get outside as much as possible, whenever possible. No telling what you'll see.

Today I got to hold an old live horseshoe crab, and found myself within a couple of feet of two ruddy turnstones. We stumbled upon a hobbled vulture nibbling on a dead black-backed gull. I considered plucking a few oysters off the rocks, but given the recent rainfall, thought better of it. None of this is possible indoors.

Chase what gives you joy for hours a day.

For me that means strumming a stringed instrument (hardly matters which), singing, and gardening. For you, it might be skating, baking, or playing hop scotch.

The universe existed for billions of years before you came to be, and it will last billions more long after you're dead.

If I teach anything at all in biology, I hope it is this much.

You only have a lifetime to live your life.

Twittering my life away.....

I'm taking a break from Twitter.
Twitter's stock value plummets.
Correlation?

Not a mockingbird....

Yesterday, while walking home from school after feeding the various critters in my classroom, I spied a mockingbird perched on a low bush. The day was cold and breezy, occasionally the wind fluffed up a few feathers. The bird was in no hurry to leave if I was not a threat.

I was not a threat.

A few seconds after realizing this, the mockingbird and I had a few fine moments "conversing," or whatever verb you call this kind of inter-species communication.

***

Twitter has a cost--and the cost goes beyond the time you spend tweeting.

Twitter has benefits, and has been particularly good to me. I've gone to wonderful places, and met wonderful people. My practice of teaching has improved, and my students have benefited. I have chatted directly with the titans of education.

On the face of it, taking a break looks preposterous. It's been a rush.

And that is exactly the problem.

***

Twitter, a collection of like-minded souls spewing off tiny bits of information, lives in a linear universe. I do not.

I get that Twitter is a tool, but I also get that a good chunk of my interest stems from the dopamine loop it feeds. Call it a high. For me, that high has become destructive--it keeps me away from my old guitar and my new mandolin, from people I pass on my street, from moments with a mockingbird.

I am speaking only for me--no one wants to hear a dry drunk prattle on about sobriety.

With some luck, I have a few good years left.
With a little bit more luck, I'll spend more of my awake hours under the sky than under a roof.

If you want to chat, drop me a line.

iPad's electric ass

"Sensuous" and "sensual" are not interchangeable. Focusing on the sensual will get a teacher fired, and rightfully so.

We're now losing the sensuous as well, and this does not bode well for science.

***

We can only know the world through our senses. We use our brains to put the uncountable bits of information noted by our billions of cells dedicated to sensing, creating models of what's out there.

We do this for a few good reasons--what's out there may eat us, be eaten, or be loved. What's out there may kill us or protect us. What's out there is what's in us--we are all streaming bits of matter put together temporarily using energy from our God-given sun.

Our ancestors managed to muddle their ways through the muck and mortality, long enough to reproduce over hundreds of millions of years, and here you are.

The piney smell of the tree in our home flares up memories of so many years past, a visceral response with no words needed. The touch of kin warms us up beyond the edges of our fingertips. Shared voices, shared songs sung together flood us with joy. (Tracing the joy to dopamine does not diminish irrational impulse to sing--we do not live for survival alone.)

The iPad has not changed this. Children are not wired differently. We all still live in the same world.

What has changed is how our children perceive the world--a smooth glass touchscreen is misnamed. It responds to tiny changes in electric charge. The sense of touch, as minimal as it is, is just a distraction.

Before long we will skip the touch altogether--and this will be hailed as a breakthrough.

Simply turning a doorknob involves several kinds of touch--we sense where our fingers are relative to the rest of the world, the pressure applied, the cold firmness of the ungiving metal. We use muscle memory buried deep in the cerebellum, memory developed through opening doors thousands of times before.

Or you can simply swipe a screen.

By Steve Paine, CC

 ***

Muffling one or more of our senses heightens others--Helen Keller's words explode with sensuousness. The child who so easily gives up touch gets an explosion of light and fury. She lives in a world of immortality, a world that bends to her wishes, a world that defies the limits of the natural world.

We are (mostly) visual creatures, at least publicly.
We trust (mostly) the acts we can define in words.

Still, the animal in us, the us in us, still lives in a wordless but full world of earthy smells, sounds too deep to be heard, of bitter tastes and piercing pain, a world with mortal consequences.

In that world, and only that world, forms the foundations of what we call true in science. All our models, our hypotheses and theories, our symbolic representations of our world require that we use all our senses, that they come to some kind of concordance.

Science is about grasping the frayed edges of what we think we know about what our senses tell us.

***

I cannot teach photosynthesis to a child who has never smelled a fresh leaf she just crumpled in her hand, only to see it slowly writhe back to some semblance of its former shape. (How can the vital aroma of a still live leaf even be describe?)

Not because shes need to know what leaves smell like, but because she needs to know that leaves exist. Not pictures of leaves, but leaves as leaves, in her hand, in her nose, in her mouth. She needs to feel the different textures, smell the different aromas, of the living and the dead leaves around her.

She needs to know that the natural world exists independent of her limited perceptions. The touchscreen makers will not tell her, because they sell them, and these days, neither will her parents, because they have forgotten (or never knew).

You want your child to learn science?
You want your child to immerse herself in the natural world?
Get your child's head out of iPad's electric ass.

It's really not that complicated.
Been reading Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses--yes, it influenced me. I nicked the Keller reference from her.

Computer "science"

 A couple of years old, but still waiting for a plausible counterargument.

A Crooke's radiometer measures sunlight intensity, which sounds all scary and scientificy, until you see one in action. It's simpler than a Talking Elmo.



The more intense the light, the faster the radiometer's vanes spin inside its glass bulb. It looks like a toy.

I keep one on the windowsill in our classroom. On sunny days in September, it spun so hard it rattled. In December's dying light, it moves like an elderly statesman--steadily, slowly, with a hint of what once was.



Sunlight is not abstract. The spinning radiometer is not abstract. Telling my lambs that the sun barely rose 25 degrees above the horizon is abstract. I can show them fancy solar data charts on the internet, teach them algorithms for interpreting the data, and get them to bark like trained seals.

We need the abstract. I get that. Focusing on the imaginary before children grasp the real, however, has created a generation of idiot savants.

***

Our children live in an abstract world. They bop along life with personalized song sets, immerse themselves in virtual worlds with personal avatars.

We used to worry when kids held on to imaginary friends a bit too long. A toddler talking to a giant imaginary squid is cute; a 13 year old doing the same thing is disturbing.

Constructing the abstract is a special kind of imaginary thinking. If I describe my Christmas tree, a lovely balsam fir afflicted with minor scoliosis now covered with ornaments, some made by my children's hands years ago, I am talking about something real.

If I tell you that the average balsam fir sold in Bloomfield this year is 2.11 meters tall, weighs 20.3 kg, and has 533.7 branches, you might be able to imagine it in your head, but it does not exist. Anywhere.

When we teach science in high school today, we focus on the abstract--at the exclusion of looking at the bent-over balsam fir sitting in the room.

Using an iPad to help a child grasp the abstract concept of "Christmas tree" passes for education now. Not even an Apple screen lets a child know the real thing.

It might even be detrimental.

***

There is a huge push to use "technology" in classrooms. By technology, I am assuming most folks mean the digitized high-tech expensive stuff, or else the discussion is just silly. All of us use some sort of technology in class--the ballpoint pen is a technological wonder.

Science requires contact with the physical, with the real--grasping the natural world is the whole point. Until children know the ground under their feet, they cannot hope to grasp models.

I use plenty of technology in class: our Crooke's radiometer, our Drinky Bird, our Newton's Cradle, our classroom garden (hey, we even use fluorescent lights!),  our aquarium pumps...and on and on.

Tech doesn't make us illiterate. Embedding digital technology into science too early, before our children get a decent handle on the physical world, does make our children scientifically illiterate.

It's why my class has an analog clock. It's why I threaten to smash calculators in class.

Do I use a computer? Yep. Sometimes I sip a good Oirish whiskey as I do so. Neither belongs in the hands of a child.

Radiometer pic by Nevit Dilmen, used under CC.

The cost of one laptop buys a lot of tangible science gadgets.
Bet a young student learns more science from a bag of magnets than from a computer. .

My children's backyard

I can see the now brown hops flowers hanging off the bine just outside the window. Just past that are the remnants horseradish leaves that stood like peacock feathers just  a couple of months ago in a garden bordered by a pond dug by my daughter. Just beyond that, at the edge of the yard, stands a pine pirate ship, the deck now covered with a velvet green carpet of moss.

The long shadows of the Christmas sun cast a dreamlike spell over the backyard where children laughed, pulled radishes from the ground, bled, launched rockets, ran through a tiny plot of cornstalks. They lived here once.

View from my window, this morning.

No one else can see this at this moment, not without sitting in this spot, not without knowing this spot's history.

For all the hype of shared lives and common culture, we all live in separate universes. How we choose to live and share in this universe matters, but it is ours so long as we choose to live in it, until, of course, we die.

***

Words and myths allow us to share common themes, a vital piece of who we are, but words and myths are pointless if we do not know (and trust) our own universes.

I can tell you where basil grows best, where the bodies of past pets rest, where the random crocus will erupt through the ground in 6 weeks, where the brown snakes hibernate, where Orion will rise tonight.

This fella guards the pond dug by my daughter.

There is some comfort in science, in that the stories of the natural world it tells in my universe will be predictably true in yours. There is some comfort in great fiction, where the characters created in the minds of others mirror the hopes and fears I feel in mine.

Delaware Bay, Jersey side

We all share the great mystery, this edge of knowing life, the abyss of facing death, and our shared thoughts keep us comfortable so long as we do not wander too far from the crowd, too far from the shared abstract ideas that make the mystery bearable.

I teach. It pays reasonably well, I enjoy it, and it turns out I'm reasonably good at it, together sufficient reasons to keep doing it.

But that's not why I teach--I teach because I want every child to know the universe that belongs to her, the one that surrounds her at this moment, wherever she happens to be. I want him to touch the mud, smell the earthy air after a spring storm, know that what he sees, at that moment, matters as much as the abstract ideas pontificated by the adults who hope to mold him.

What I do in the classroom only matters as far as what the child does outside of it for her self. Not for me, not for her family, not for her town or country or even the WTO.

Not "for herself" in the selfish sense--our consumer culture will push her hard to do just that. I mean for her self, the only person who knows what she knows, and only she can know how best to live her life.

I have faith that all of us want the same things when we pay attention to who we are.