On balance

Theology alert--feel free to jump in....
This was inspired by Father Sean and Brother John and Reverend Scott.

Balance.

We need balance in our lives. Overwhelmed? Seek balance.

An innocuous philosophy--who could possibly be against balance?

A madman in the back wildy waves hand--and (again) I get sent out of the classroom.

***

The light is failing. Local carbon dioxide levels will rise until late May now, when resurrected plants start reconstructing the molecules back into something we can use again next winter. CO₂ and H₂O, carefully bonded back together into strawberries in June, peaches in July, corn in August, wheat in the September...little left now but the kale and the Brussels sprouts.



Breathe on your hand--you can feel the moisture, the breeze of molecules brushing your hand.

If God can be found, She will be found in the chloroplast, Her heart made of rubisco, the enzyme that puts us together, the most common protein in our known universe. She carefully holds a tiny molecule of carbon dioxide, three atoms of nothing, and glues them to life.

Heart of God?

She takes her life, her energy from the sun. Three times a second, another molecule of CO2 pressed together to a molecule of life, over and over and over again.



Rubisco is everywhere, in every green leaf, and as the leaves of summer fade into fall's glory, She leaves us. We start to drown in our own CO2, waiting for Her return, as She has, as She will. (That's called faith.)

***

You cannot balance a lifetime. You can dance, jump for joy, cringe in fear, curl up, scream, love or hate. There is no balance for love, for fear.

A well lived life is not one where you've balanced your fears with your joys, your love with your hate.

A "well lived" life makes no sense. You cannot "lived"--you can only live, now, this moment. Either the amygdala or the cortex rules a moment. We pretend we can string together moments, we hold on to memories, to words, to pictures, to myths of eternity, and we miss the obvious.

The here and now.

And we wonder why it's hard to teach children in a classroom....

***

A couple of soldier flies erupted from our class terrarium last week. Unexpected. Large critters crawled out of the thin litter layering the glass bottom. The yellow bar splashed on their legs with their waspish wings and fluttering antennae screamed danger. My cortex knows they're harmless, my amygdala makes my fingers stutter when I pick one up.

The last few days a half dozen more came from the same dirt.

When I opened the top to feed my sowbugs yesterday, two flew out and headed for the window. They only live a day or two as adults, and they had been trapped for hours in the terrarium. They flew fiercely, full of desire, and crashed right into the glass.

Instinct, true. Fixed action patterns with proximate and ultimate causes. Memorize this, children, pay $87, and earn your AP Biology credit.

We never speak of desire in other creatures. Of wants. Of needs.

The soldier fly carcasses will sit on the sill until my students return on Monday. I will ask them how they got there. Then I will ask why.

We all need what rubisco gets us--we all feel desire. It's why we burn our energy even though we know December's coming.

***

וייצר יהוה אלהים את האדם עפר מן האדמה ויפח באפיו נשמת חיים ויהי האדם לנפש חיה׃

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and man became a living soul.

We think we're sophisticated and learned and (the worst conceit of the three) immortal. We gorge on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and forget that we are closer to the soldier flies than we are to rubisco.

I do not know who wrote the Hebrew Bible, and I do not know which of the 47 men chosen by King James translated Genesis 2:7, but there's been a huge misinterpretation of "soul" in the last few hundred years.


The soul, at least according to the Words allegedly governing the actions of the dangerously powerful here in the States, is not separate from the dirt. Our "stuff," the polymers of proteins, our layers of lipids, our DNA, our essence, is our soul.

We are mortal and finite. We are living souls, dependent on rubisco, dependent on unimaginable events in the heart of the sun, hydrogen to fusion, mass to light.

You want your children ready for the world of humans, raise them under artificial light. Keep them planted in front of monitors. Feed them impossibly perfect fruit. Keep them shod. Pump them full of music made by machines. Surround them with images of the "perfect" human, and demand they become one.

Don't talk to me about balance.

We are training our children to avoid the window pane, to stay safe, to gaze at the world outside, to create stronger panes. We don't want to see them hurt. We cannot imagine their last agonal breaths.

Me? I want my children to crash into the glass, and if they're bloodied lying on the sill, to get up and crash into it again. Again and again and again.

3 billion years of desire got us to here; a few hundred years of playing God has reduced us chasing photons on screens, practicing religion disconnected from the wiser elders who wrote texts we refuse to read, to believing we are in control.

I may be unhinged, but I am not as unbalanced as anyone who believes in balance.

The sun that sustains me has been dropping lower into the sky day by day, the plants that feed me have lost their leaves, the bees I adore have gone. I am a man of science, I have a good idea why this is so.

I am also a man of faith--faith that the sunlight will return, and that rubisco will return with it come spring.

Photos are mine and Leslie's.
The rubisco model is from Wikipedia, and is in the public domain.

Pole beans in November

I'm a Plastic Paddy--we can be funny about food. A family history of green mouth disease warps one's view of the world.

It's November. The sun barely creeps 35 degrees over the horizon, then falls back down, dead weight.

I just nibbled on a leathery purple bean, plucked straight from the vine in the November darkness. The leaves are mostly gone, but the pod remains sweet. The bean plant loaded the pod with sugar. Energy. A last chance to prolong life.

I ate it.

And I think I know why Eve ate the apple. As much as she annoyed God, she might have gotten the better end of the bargain.

Mortality trumps godliness.

'Divide a loaf by a knife -- what's the answer to that?'

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Rochelle Hendricks is our acting Education Commissioner. She got the job after the prior commissioner Bret Schundler spoke the truth about what happened in Jersey's bungled Race to the Top application, an application originally made in good faith and supported by our union. She has been Commissioner less than three months.

New Jersey's largest teaching union holds its convention for the next two days. The folks that go to teachers' conventions are mostly, well, teachers.

Not administrators.
Not union officials.
Not politicians.

Teachers. Thousands and thousands of teachers.

The Commission was invited to speak to the teachers, as every Commissioner before her has, and she refused.

"When the NJEA is willing to work with the Christie administration as a true partner in an effort to reward good teachers instead of protecting bad teachers, when the NJEA is willing to modernize the tenure system and improve the quality of education in our urban districts, I look forward to working with you."

Really?

Why not slide on down the Parkway and say hello to us. The teachers. You can walk right past the table of NJEA union officials and talk directly to us.

It's been a long while since you taught, comfortably ensconced in one of our wealthiest districts (where some folks still spell Rumson with a "v"). Put away your Christie's scepter for a day and come mingle with us.

Stoop a day for the kids you so righteously defend. Get to know us.

That's how functioning government works.

Alice and the Red Queen are in public domain.
The photo of Rochelle Hendricks is from nj.com.

Science on the docks

I had a brief career as a stevedore. I had met Leslie the year before, she was the one, and she wisely counseled I get my ass out of Port Newark.

Shoveling on ship in July with a late adolescent body can be joy; doing the same in November in my 6th decade would have sucked.

Leslie's rarely wrong.

Still, I was there long enough to learn some science.

***

I worked for M.J.Rudolph, based at Starboard and Export Streets in the port. We loaded ships.

We loaded piles of metal turnings on ships headed for Japan; across the way we could see Port Newark, where our metal returned as Hondas and Mitsibushis.

I shoveled. A lot. I worked with metal turnings, shreds of old cars, old refrigerators, old wheel barrows, old metal tanks. I stood on huge piles of this stuff.

Despite wearing thick work boots with wool socks, my feet would get uncomfortably hot from the heat rising from the pile. Oxidizing lets high energy electrons slip down a state or two. When electrons relax, the energy has to go somewhere--in this case, it went to my feet.

The heat is not trivial--ships have been threatened by oxidizing scrap metal.

I can talk about oxidation all period in science class, but no reason to expect it to stick. Standing on top of a mountain of oxidizing strips of metal, however, grabs attention.

May be time for a field trip.

***

Steel can kill you several ways on the docks.

Occasionally we loaded transmissions or steel ingots onto ships. The crane operators used magnets to lift the steel.

Now and again an ingot would fall. And bounce, and bounce, and bounce some more. Turns out steel is phenomenally elastic. A steel ingot will bounce like a massive rubber ball. Transmissions will bounce off a ship's deck like a tennis ball off Venus' racket. I once stood mesmerized as several transmissions bounced around me.

Hardhats are useless when tons of steel dance around your head.

Elasticity is an object's ability to quickly return to its original shape after a deforming force is applied to it.

I can talk about elasticity all period long in science class, but it won't stick. A few moments of terror dodging huge chunks of dancing metal, however, forge the concept in one's brain.

Tiggers bounce, ingots bounce more.

May be time for a field trip.

Photo from the Star-Ledger.

DNA idolatry

We practice state religion in my classroom.

Here is the Central Dogma of Biology:

DNA --> RNA --> Protein

We worship a double helix mindlessly, memorizing details that mean nothing to its idolizers. I let an icon spin on the board, in marvelous colors, while I preach of its powers, its centrality to our lives.

We practice our chants: A with T, G with C.
We learn the sacred language of -ases and -ines,

If the children fail their DNA catechism in New Jersey, and cannot pass the state biology course, they must be re-educated.

***

Last week many, perhaps most, of my lambs were surprised to see seeds come out of a dead flower. Oh, I'm sure they've been told that a dozen times or so in their school careers, but .... We have become that disconnected from the world.

I'm bringing more flower heads in tomorrow. I've had enough modern religion in science class--time to teach that Olde Tyme Religion Biologie.

The image is from Annabeth Robinson here, used with permission.
She has some really neat stuff on her e-portfolio.

UNIVACuous

We have it all backwards

Kids should be required to have cell phones in school. Heck, schools should issue them instead of text books. It's the natural evolution of the UNIVAC, the beast of a machine that predicted Eisenhower's victory 58 years ago.

Let the kids roam the Internet. Let them ChaCha ("powered by people"), Skype, Poke ("Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life"), Tweet ("without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now"), and Google (who knows more about you than you do) their way to Network Nirvana, entering a state of High Holiness that prepares them for whatever standardized tests stand between them and the Glory of our Homeland.

And then, when the last bell rings, make them check them at the door. No phone, no net, no GPS, no electronic tether to the adult world that forgot what the Earth smells like in autumn.

Disconnect our children from the technological teat of tedium, let them wander around lost in the smoky November air. They will scrape off skin, break bones, maybe lose a tooth or two. They will do things that would make their mothers keel over (but will have enough sense to keep quiet).





They will squash bugs, torment cats, chase squirrels, and tease dogs. They will break windows with errant baseballs, and hearts with errant words. They will wreck good clothes and develop bad habits.

And through all this they will learn how to live in a world larger than themselves, a world larger than any of us.

And when they do, they will feel the weight of the first UNIVAC in their hands as they grab the now loathsome machines, sauntering back into the building full of professionals who try to mold them into something more than machine, but less than human.

Photo from the Library of Congress. Not sure where the guy's nose went--an alien, maybe?
Hops and morning glory mine, from yesterday.

Psycho metrics

I occasionally throw a piece of pedagogy out here--I'd do it more often, but I cannot pronounce "pedagogy," and even if I could, the word makes me feel like a pedantic ass.

(Yes, I know I am a pedantic ass, but knowing and feeling employ two very different parts of the brain.)

I may have an overly developed numbers brain. I've been accused of such, and it helps make up for my lack of a frontal lobe. A big reason testing drives me to pedantic assery is that so few folks using them have a clue what is being measured, putting a new meaning to "psychometrics."

(I lost a lot of hair trying to explain sensitivity and specificity to budding docs--I'm losing even more trying to teach validity and reliability to anyone who will listen....Teachers test. A lot. How many of us have a clue about what we're doing?)

***

Exhibit A

I love analyzing my numbers after a test. Who missed what? Why? What would have happened had I asked the questions in a different order? Just how much more do I know now about the students than I did before subjecting them to the test?

With the push to ask more higher level questions, I started using a ☆ system. ☆ means the question is a simple swish and spit question that requires little more than a pencil and a neuron, ☆☆ requires at least two neurons to fire in some semblance of order. The stars are right on the test.





The first question above is just plain silly. Turns out I was asking a bucketload of them--if nothing else, my system revealed just how bad my questions have been. (I think I lifted the first question from the professionals--if anyone from Pearson cares, let me know and I'll edit it out.)

There is no need for a child to ever memorize commensalism except for this course. There is a need for a child to learn how to find words they do not understand.

Five minutes of test time is open note. (OK, we call it The Open Note Extravaganza! in our room, but what happens in B362 stays in B362....)

Turns out a lot, maybe most (I'm still crunching) of my lambs do better on the ☆☆ questions. ***

Exhibit B

I've mentioned this before, but I think it's worth mentioning again.


Occasionally I will use a magic wand during a test. Each child may call on it once, and only once, to answer a specific multiple choice selected response question. I may learn more from this simple exercise than I do from class averages, means, standard deviations, or any other metric you want to apply.

I demonstrate the phenomenal powers of my wand a variety of ways. This week I made a bean plant dance. (Charge it up with a few wipes with the silk hankie, wave it around a skinny seedling, and the plant bends towards the wand. With a little practice you and your bean are ready for DWTS!

The kids love it (though they groan a lot when one's wasted--"I knew that!")

If kids are zooming in on the single ☆ questions I know they have not been diligently studying their terminology or plain forgot to bring their notebooks in for the test).

If most of the kids are tapping the same question, it might simply be a lousy question.

If nothing else, the kids get a freebie, I get exercise running from desk to desk, and I get to wear my nifty wizard hat.

There, enough pedagogy for a day lifetime....

The photo of Thomas Bayes' grave is by Glen Wood, igl on Flickr, and used under CC license.
If you look real close, you can see the tomb tremble as Mr. Bayes spins in his grave as we continue to abuse statistics.
Thanks, Glen!