The Kids Are All Right!

I went to the Save Our Schools March--500 miles, a few Guinnesses, and many smiles later, I have the obligatory report.

I'm not going to blow sunshine up your colon, though there was plenty of sun to spare. I am going to focus on the huge positives, then ask the old folk to step back--yes, even you, Ms. Ravitch. We had our turn in the sun.

Teacher Ken wrote a long piece in Daily Kos about how tired he is. He may well be tired, and justifiably so. Time to pass the torch.

***

I love Jonathan Kozol, but this isn't about what we did decades ago. Jonathan Kozol made an impassioned speech, and I'm going to catch flak for this, but his references to Dr. King came off (to my ears, anyway) a tad patronizing. I understand the temptation--Arne Duncan plays the race card.

(In polite company I hear people say someone's behavior is "bordering on racism." Nope. That's racism. And Arne's words border on racism. I don't get invited to parties often.) Arne has maintained that we are racists for pointing out that zip codes, ahem, do matter. And here we go again, watching powerful pale people trot out various connections. It was much easier when "Some of my friends are black" did not degenerate into the sophisticated code that exists today.

Dr. King was 39 when he was cut down, JFK was 46, Shabazz 39, Bobby Kennedy 42. From my perspective now, they were all young men. The leaders of their time sought advice from the elders, but the younger folks led.

Jose Vilson's words (This is not a test!) electrified us Saturday. Matt Damon's speech cut to the chase, pointing out exactly why the testing madness cuts down children. John Kuhn (I will teach these kids!) reminded us why public schools are truly democratic. These are the voices we must follow now. We had our turn. Crotchety never beats evil. Hope and energy have a chance, though.

Things may a bit bleak to some of us, but the best speakers aren't resting on their laurels, they're out there fighting the good fight.

Toss the taped Jon Stewart speeches, leave the elders to counsel if counseling is sought. We can share our stories and compare our war wounds at Old Ebbit Grill, and watch our children show us the way.

I had a chance to listen to a few young'uns at Old Ebbit Grill--the future is in very capable hands.

SOS March: Our stories matter

If I could start again
a million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way....

Trent Reznor

My son's toes were cut up pretty good, my daughter's shiner began its inevitable transition from a dull red to the eggplant hue it promises to be. Leslie and I left without any wounds to discuss, but at our age, that's cool. I only had one scuffle, but over the next few days, months, and years, should I be so blessed, it will become another story that defines our clan. Yep, the Dropkick Murphys are in town.

When American Irish get together, it feels familiar--there's a wonderful tension. No one's looking for a fight, but no one's backing off from one either. We share history, mostly consistent with glaring discrepancies--truth matters more than facts.

Our story is not particularly compelling because we're Irish--it's compelling because we're human. Our story is universal, our particulars emanating from an Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger. Just about every culture paying attention, true to its history, can say the same thing.

Every culture that shares stories from more than a generation knows love and death, knows kindness and injustice, knows redemption. The danger, a real one, is believing that only your culture shares these things.

Humans are tribal--just look at Facebook. But we're not immortal--just look at your folks a generation or two ahead. It's a fine line between tribalism and racism, one often crossed, especially when times get tough. The best stories remind us of our worst behaviors.

My sister, when she was still alive, traveled for months through rural Pakistan--she spent an afternoon having tea in a Hunzakut home--and everywhere the same stories, the same shared meals, the same kindness to "strangers," thousands of miles away in the Hunza Valley.

***

I am marching tomorrow because we've lost our way, and I want to see the faces of those who still have stories worth sharing. If the story ended all shiny and happy, I'd stick to my television. Our human story, though, never ends, even as mine winds down.

I teach to share the story.

I am charged with teaching natural history, a small but real part of our history. 

***

Teachers need to be careful about some things--our march is tribal, and if we're careless, our words become exclusionary.

Yes, we work hard, but just about everybody works hard.
Yes, we're losing autonomy in the workplace, but just about everybody else has, too.

I work hard as a teacher, but I worked hard as a dock worker, as a doc, as a lab tech, as a lawn cutter, as a salesperson. We all work hard--we must not ever forget that when anyone one of us speaks, we speak for all.


We need to focus on what we value, because our values are shared values that matter to everyone who loves, everyone who stays true to this human thing, which is intimately tied to the land we walk on, the air we breathe.

If we forget our collective pasts, the joys and the injustices, the happy births and the agonal deaths, the stories that matter, then we lose our reason to teach.

Those who teach just to make a living won't be there tomorrow. Neither will those who teach without passion, without hope, without love. Everyone who shows will have stories to share, stories to bring back home, stories that shape lives.

***

Johnny Cash took Trent Reznor's song story "Hurt," and made it something new, and old. Reznor had reluctantly agreed to let Cash use it, worried about Cash's take on it. He needn't had worried:

I pop the video in, and wow... Tears welling, silence, goose-bumps... I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in, totally isolated and alone. [Somehow] that winds up reinterpreted by a music legend from a radically different era/genre and still retains sincerity and meaning — different, but every bit as pure.

Alternative Press, #194, September, 2004, via Wikipedia

***

Sincerity and the search for meaning keep us (teachers, students, families, towns) together.

Teachers still have a rare privilege in our culture--we tell stories for a living. Classrooms that work are woven with the words of all within the room. I do not want to lose my voice. I do not want my students to lose theirs. So I will march, and I will sing, and chant, and maybe even dance. I hope you do, too.

The Dropkick Murphys are the best paddy punk band in the world.

Food for thought

If you don't eat enough, you lose weight. Assuming you're hanging around the surface of the Earth, losing weight means you're losing mass.

Where does it go?

Many of my students (and many adults) think that the food (mass) gets converted to energy, and that explains the weight loss. While this does happen--the sun's light comes from fusion--we would not survive long if we were nuclear furnaces.

So where does it go?

***

High school science mostly exists in a Newtonian universe, and that's as it should be. While e = mc² has become a cultural icon, you really don't need to know much about it in biology, except to know that's how the sun has managed to bathe us with the energy needed for life for over 4 billion years.

(There are huge reasons to know the consequences of our knowledge, but the consequences are far more easily grasped than the physics behind it.)

I announce first day of class that in Room B362, we live in a Newtonian universe. The amount of mass, or stuff, in a closed system (nothing gets in, nothing gets out) stays the same. Forever.

This is a big deal, the heart of chemistry--despite all the fizzing and hissing and heat and bubbling and light--when all is said and done, you have exactly the same amount of stuff at the end of a reaction that you started with. The stuff has different qualities--but the total amount of stuff stays the same.

A child may rationally think, Ah, well, it's easy--we poop! Except for a squirt or two of bile, though, what you poop is mostly the stuff you couldn't digest--stuff that never got inside of you beyond traveling through the open tube between your mouth and you anus. A lot of this stuff is digested by bacteria partying in your gut--they grow and reproduce, but the stuff of bacteria ultimately comes from the stuff that never truly enters you.

If you don't eat, and if you carefully weigh your stool each day, the total weight of you and your stool will still go down.

Where did the missing mass go?

***

A gallon of gasoline weighs just over 6 pounds. The carbon dioxide produced from a gallon of gasoline weighs around 3 times as much! How is this possible?

When you burn something, you are adding oxygen to fuel, and rearranging the atoms of both. In a clean burn, you end up with just water and carbon dioxide. Gasoline is made up of multiple compounds, about a fifth of it is octane ("oct-" means 8 carbons, "-ane" means all single bonds):

2C₈H₁₈ + 25O₂ -> 16CO₂ + 18H₂0

Gasoline compounds have no oxygen atoms--they are added during combustion. Every carbon atom ends up combined with oxygen has mass.

The energy released was energy "held" by electron arrangements in the gasoline--the electrons are in different configurations but they are exactly the same otherwise. (A ball on a table is exactly the same as a ball on the floor, but the ball on the table has more potential energy.)

Energy had to be put into the system to get the electrons in their high energy configurations--which is what plants do with sunlight using water and carbon dioxide, essentially the reverse of combustion. When you burn gasoline, you are releasing the energy that was transformed from ancient sunlight.

It seems as though the gasoline has less mass after we burn it, since all we see is a tiny bit of water trickling out the tail pipe. Just about all the exhaust today is invisible water vapor and carbon dioxide. For whatever reason, most of us do not think of invisible gasses as having any mass.

So where does the carbon in gasoline go? Through the exhaust and into the air. It's as real as solid oak, but we do not perceive it as such.

For most of us, the tank was full, we drove around, and now the tank is empty. We infer, incorrectly, that the gasoline "disappeared." It did not--it merely transformed when combined with oxygen.

***

So what about food?

Breathe on your hand, what comes out? CO₂ and water vapor. (OK, mostly nitrogen, then unconsumed oxygen, a smidgeon of argon, and then carbon dioxide, but certainly more carbon dioxide than what you breathed in.)  The same stuff spewed out by your ULEV car engine.

If you are starving, that carbon came from, well, you. You are breathing out particles of yourself, particles released as you combined pieces of yourself with oxygen to allow electrons to settle down into more comfortable positions, releasing energy as they did so,

Yes, I know, your nitrogen gets converted to urea, and urea as well as ketones can be peed out. I'll save that part for AP Biology class.

A non-NCLB test for your students

This graphic from Adbusters was shared by someone on the AP Biology listserve.

Issue #84: Nihilism and Revolution

There's not much to say.
Not much at all.

I have never regretted a single moment spent outside, even those times an instant before impact.

Unanticipated, but not unnatural

CO2 is denser than air. This is easily demonstrated in class.

Combine vinegar and baking soda together in a beaker to generate the gas. The students will groan. Yeah, we know this already, it bubbles.... Ask them what bubbles, and they will tell you what everybody already "knows"--carbon dioxide.

Now light a candle. As a diversion, ask them what gasses are emitted (CO₂, H₂0), then hold the beaker over the lit candle, and "pour" out the CO₂, leaving the foamy liquid.

A second or two later, the flame dies, as if sucked back into the wick.

What happened?

***

Just a few hours ago, hundreds of dragonflies swooped around us in the dying dusk. A cold front had just passed through, and the critters were feasting on the swarming insects trapped at the bay's edge, where horseshoe crabs have just about finished their annual orgy.

Dragonflies and horseshoe crabs both came through the Great Dying, a quarter billion years ago. Most of life was destroyed in an event far more extreme than the last mass extinction that ended the age of dinosaurs.

Though it's not clear what happened, extreme CO₂ levels likely played a role. CO₂ snuffs fires, CO₂ snuffs life.

This August marks the 25th anniversary of the Lake Nyos disaster--over 1700 humans killed in Cameroon by a cloud of carbon dioxide exploding out of the lake in a 100 yard high watery mountain of foam, as tall as Manhattan's Trinity Church, the gas suddenly released like the effervescence of  millions upon millions of bottles of seltzer.

The heavy gas flowed down the walls of the volcanic lake that released it, a deadly spree, depriving the living of oxygen as it pushed up the lighter air.

Unanticipated, but not unnatural.

Some locals briefly attributed the devastation to Mami Wata, to a neutron bomb, to "strange Europeans...heavy-set, menacing Nordic...motorcyclists" seen just before the explosion. The eruption had been predicted by a healer who himself did not survive.

***

251 million years ago, carbon dioxide obliterated over 90% of the species around at that time. So little plant life grew that there's a "coal gap" in the fossil record--a 10 million year span where no coal was formed. And yet, the dragonfly line persisted, the horseshoe crabs, too.

These ancient creatures once frightened me with their compound eyes, their complex symmetries, their deliberate living, their bodies so perfectly fit for their niches that little has changed in hundreds of millions of years.

In biology, perfect life does not exist. In biology, the environment defines those who are less imperfect.

But if perfection does exist in life, if there are life forms that will continue to see the dying dusk so long as the sun casts its energy on Earth, it might be found in the creatures that share edge of the Delaware Bay, the bizarre ancient forms of the dragonfly, the slow creep of the horseshoe crab.

I do not know how many of us know the story of Lake Nyos, the stories of Mami Wata, the stories of the horseshoe crabs and the dragonflies, the story of the Great Dying so long ago.

Something so simple as the gas brewed from baking soda and vinegar can silently kill something as complex as a mammal. Next time I snuff a flame with CO₂, I will share the story of Lake Nyos, of the Great Dying--these are the stories that define us, stories that may someday save us.

Our stories make us worth saving.

Candle image by Matthew Bowden, who freely share. Thanks!
Lake Nyos photo by Jack Lockwood, USGS, in public domain (via Wikipedia) 

Horseshoe crab graveyard

 Horseshoe crabs and I have a long history.

 Theirs longer than ours.





These were tossed up on a huge hill of dredge waste, peering through the gray mud.




I have witnessed much, most unspoken, in my years, as I am sure you have, too.

I do not understand, or trust, my silence.

 

Their blood runs blue, copper grasps the same oxygen molecules that let us strip electrons from our food.

 Our blood runs red, the deep rust of iron, 

Most of us can see, most of us can talk.

Our stories remain as opaque as the mud deep below the waters of the Delaware Bay, where now in the darkness, a solitary horseshoe crab consumes a careless clam, neither ever seen by humans.

 

They have not changed much in hundreds of millions of years, their life perfect for their world.



And now they rest on the spoils made by us, we who are impossibly foreign in our own skins, looking for something beyond this life.








When you walk the fissured hillock on a chilly April morning, the exoskeletons whisper what they know.

This is all, and all is enough.

Photos taken by me.

Why I'm marching next week. Hope you join us!

If you want to see, you need to sit still. Still enough, for long enough, to be part of what is.
Be still and know.

You will know what it means when you get there--but first you have to sit. Still.

This is my Auntie Beth's pond, not mine.

***

I've gotten pretty good at sitting still on these cataract days, so humid even thoughts have a hazy edge.  A functioning republic needs a reflective citizenry--I sit by the edge of my pond and nap reflect, doing my patriotic duty.

If most of us knew what we wanted, and thought hard about how to get there, about what matters, and then pursued those things in ways that do not harm ourselves or our families, our republic could work.

Most of us don't anymore, most of us don't have the time, and the time we do have we pre-empt to the thoughts of others--Fox news, Cialis ads, NFL, Nascar--we've become the natterin' nabobs of negativism Agnew feared decades ago. (Full disclosure: I love Nascar and the NFL.)

It shows in public discourse, but even sadder, it shows in our private lives as well.

***

I am going to the SOS March for a few grand, and many selfish, reasons.

I will be chatting, laughing, drinking, maybe even dancing with generally happy folks who live the lives they believe worth living. Folks who still make bread, can, knit, brew, and write. Folks who give a damn, and who know enough history to know that giving a damn is how you fix things.

Folks who know their craft, and the history of their craft, well enough to know this march matters.

I am trading bottles of mead with Tom Hoffman, I am going to share words with Jose Vilson, I am going to shake hands with Diane Ravitch. Linda Darling-Hammond will be there, so will Jonathan Kozol. Heck, even Matt Damon (of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back fame)  is coming!

When I go back to school in September, and someone bemoans NCLB, I will share my stories from the march, so that they will join us.

My Dad marched in DC back in 1963 in his full dress US Marine Corp officer's uniform. (Yeah, he's that guy...) He was proud of being the first in his clan to be born in America, and he was proud to be a Marine. He got to fly because the USMC didn't care where he came from, only what he could do. He lived the American dream.

I have a copy of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence up in my classroom. I teach science, true, but my primary responsibility is to create citizens. Not scientists. Not suits. Citizens.

I work in one of the few public spaces left in our country, one of the few places left where ideals of our republic are discussed earnestly.

When the discussions end, so does our republic.

We are marching "to reclaim schools as places of learning, joy, and democracy." Joy is a wonderful word, right up there with Jefferson's pursuit of happiness. Joy matters in a democracy, because we matter as people, as families, as communities.

Hey, it's going to be fun! And educational!