December shadows

It's dark again, a reminder of what we mostly ignore.

Life depends on light, depends on combining simpler particles into larger, less stable ones. We juggle these unstable particles in every one of our cells every day, and every day they fall apart.

We eat to get those particles inside, we breathe in order to break them down back to their more stable pieces, so that we can do the things we need to do.

We lose ourselves as carbon dioxide in the breath we exhale.

Every year the CO₂ levels rise in these parts, as the plants pause over the winter. We could learn something from the plants.

***

I do not know many people well, and the number diminishes as my December comes. I saw a honeybee land on a dandelion today. I saw a grasshopper sitting in the sun. The days are short for both of them.

The days are short for us, too.

***

Our guidance department has a flyer that asks "If you knew you could not fail, what would you do?"

In December, it's the wrong question. We all eventually fail. I'd rather ask a child this: "If you truly understood that you were mortal, what would you do?"

Would that wise child take an AP course just to improve her transcript? Would that wise child sit in my class?

We cannot expect a child to have that kind of wisdom, and even if she had it, we have all kinds of social tools to get her to do our bidding anyway. We should, however, expect it from the adults.

If you truly believed you were mortal, that your students were mortal, that this H. sapiens species experiment will likely flame out just as every other species eventually has, what would you teach?

I'm a science teacher. I share what we know about the universe to children who did not exist less than two decades ago. This is all still new to them.

And it's still all new to me.

As the sun fades away to the south, the question becomes urgent. What matters?

Pics taken today.

On misconceptions

The deeper I dig into how much a child understands a particular idea, the more I  realize persistent misconceptions can be.

We have plenty of places for magical thinking in our culture: horoscopes, good luck charms, religious incantations, and the stock market take up a good chunk of our time. So long as your magic does little harm, and horoscopes and talismans fall into that category, blessed be.

Alas, much of our magical thinking has disastrous consequences. Each morning I grab my wand and recite incantations, hoping to teach science. Before I teach science, I have to unteach the magic.

If you teach young children, and you do not quite grasp something, do not preach it as Gospel. I can teach a child who knows nothing a whole lot more than I can teach a child that knows everything.

We are starting cell energetics this week, the soul of biology. After a few years of doing this, I now know what I must have them "unknow":

• Plants make food from sunlight.
• The "stuff" of plants mostly comes from the ground.
• Plants have no need to respire.

Pretty much all of science gets down to the Conservation of MassEnergy, and in high school biology, where a Newtonian view of the universe is usually sufficient, it gets down to this:

Stuff (matter) is stuff, and energy is energy,
and never the twain shall meet.

These misconceptions run deep, deeper than I realized until the past couple of years. I've gotten better at working through them, but misconceptions are tenacious, and, I think, comforting--children want to grasp the world, and a science teacher running through a laundry list of vocabulary words and biochemical cycles cannot replace the comfort of knowing, even if the knowing is wrong.

This week I'll grab my propane torch, as I have done multiple times, and again show children that water comes from combustion. I'll blow into bromothymol blue solution and again give evidence that CO₂ leaves us with each breath.

My stories have to be better than the ones they heard before. My stories have to make as much sense to them as the ones they already believe. My stories must be more true than the ones that define their universe.

My stories need to become their stories, or I've taught them nothing.

Grab David Rudel's books on science myths. Should be mandatory reading for any teacher at any grade that teaches science.

Last Saturday of November

Raked some leaves, then some clams, then some charcoals to cook the clams. New moon tide in late November on a spectacular day makes for good living, at least for me. Can't say the same for the clams now in my belly.

In between the leaves and the clams, Leslie and I kayaked up a local  creek. The cormorants are still here, soon to be replaced by the loons. The osprey are gone. We say a flock of surf scoters--a sure sign winter is coming.

The zinnias now put up tiny flowers, so little energy now available from the sun, but they're still trying.

I saw a few lazy bees hang onto the cosmos flowers--they were pretending to scoop up what little nectar remains, but they were mostly slumming in the sun. The only animals in these parts that cannot see the obvious are the H. sapiens sort.

The sun is dying. Long live the sun.

We can pretend to thrive under the fluorescent hum of madness, or we can settle into the patterns of the seasons. Biology is all about available sunlight.

If my lambs get that much, it will be enough.

Grace.

Ditching digital time

We're in the last few weeks of the dying sun, our days defined by our shadows. I know the sun will return, but I don't believe it.

The digital clock on my classroom wall leaves no shadows.  It defines little. It just assigns a number to now. 9:27, 9:27, 9:27, stuck in a moment. Suddenly the clock announces 9:28.

The sun barely moves, but it moves perceptibly, a fluid sliver of time  marking an infinite number of instants, and the long shadows move with it.

My analog clock moves with the sun, its second hand kissing the minute hand every 61 seconds, the minute hand kissing the hour hand every 65 minutes, the three hands uniting every 12 hours, then resuming the dance.

***

We spent a lot of money for fancy electronic whiteboards to replace the melamine boards that replaced the blackboards that replaced the slate. As fancy as the new board is, it has not fundamentally changed anything.

The images are fancier, they move, they tweet, they change colors, they can be saved to amuse another classroom full of children, but they do not alter the way children look at the world in any meaningful way. (They do, however, allow us to continue to cultivate the magical thinking that pervades our culture--another topic for another day.)

A digital clock alters obliterates our sense of time. It tells us of now only, a discrete now at that. An exact now. 9:29.

***

"I'm not late, it's still 9:30."
The bell rang a half minute ago.

I used to think the kids were just playing with me, confounding the instant after 9:30 started with the instant before 9:30 ends. But it really is all the same to many of my students. And to much of our staff.

***

My analog clock moves inexorably. It divvies up time into visible chunks of pie--this is where you are, this is how long you've been there, this is how long you will be there. The hands sweep over marked swaths of clock face.

The large hourglass that marked Dorothy's  inevitable destruction in Oz terrified me--the tangible flow of sand ebbing through its glass womb made even young viewers feel mortal.

Time flows both ways from the ever-present moment. The digital clock hides this from us, and we're glad not to know.

***

A bored child stares at the clock, eyelids hovering just over the pupils. When will this class ever ennnddddd...? 9:34...9:34...9:34....

Our class clock is covered with a large file card with the words "Tempus fugit" scribbled over it. (Sophomores love to say fuggit.) Time flees.

In front o the class I have a large analog clock, rescued from among the Great Clock Massacre of 2004, when we opened a new science wing at our high school.

Yes, children still get bored. Yes, eyelids still droop, But the droopy-eyed now stare at an analog clock, watching the seconds drip by, and, eventually, they see the barely perceptible movement of the minute hand as well. They learn the exact moment the bell will ring as the second hand sweeps past the 43rd tick on the clock's face. They see that 9:45 is a quarter of an hour from 10 (not 10:00), and three quarters away from 9.

***

I am not aware of any studies that looked at this, but I'd be willing to bet a carboy's worth of home-brewed mead that children learn more about time from an analog clock than from a block of blinking digital numerals masquerading as a time piece.

I pretend to teach high school biology, but what I focus on is teaching children how to see patterns, how to recognize the patterns as patterns, then how to describe the patterns in order to predict future patterns. Some folks call that science.

Everything that I can control in my classroom should be working toward those goals.

The digital clock does not, so it's covered up. If you want to know what time it is in Room B362, you're going to have to know how to read an analog clock.

Yes, we have a sundial, too--but it's only good for a few hours in the afternoon.
We have west windows.
The hourglass is obviously from The Wizard of Oz--
I got it from Julie Hedlund's website Write Up My Life

Thanksgiving redux

I liked this 3 years ago.
I still like it....Happy Thanksgiving!

This week's The New Yorker magazine cover highlights a turkey sitting on a ledge with a few pigeons. It's the classic turkey any schoolkid would draw--blue head, red wattle, and a lovely banded tail.

Most turkeys destined for tables tomorrow, broad-breasted whites, never looked like this. Commercial growers prefer a bird whose feathers do not betray a less than perfect plucking job, a bird with a chest so broad it cannot reproduce without a few humans involved, a bird which does not taste like the one your grandmother ate.

Today I asked the kids to describe the turkey they planned to eat. Many refused to believe it has white feathers.

At least kids still have some connection between the critter and the cooked carcass.

***

Sean Nash has started a wonderful conversation on his blog, a chat initiated by a question asked by one of his students--where are the seeds in an orange?


Detachment.

Oranges without seeds. Flour without bran. Imitation crab.

None of this need be a big deal, and they may never know what they're missing. At my age, I cannot remember what I am missing. All I can do is taste the difference between a Brandywine tomato picked an hour ago, and whatever F1 hybrid tomato A&P is carrying. That is enough.

And what if a child today prefers the illusion of safety cocooned in a womb of technology? So what if she prefers WoW to the edge of a pond? What is lost?

And here is where old folk sputter and spew, because we know something's missing, right? By the time we're done sputtering, the earbuds are back in, thumbs waving like antennae, and the child's back in her universe.

What is lost?
Complexity beyond imagination.

If a child is not exposed to the incomprehensible, she will start to believe she understands the world, that the world is truly safe, that humans are truly superior creatures, that humans can fix any problem nature has to offer, not realizing that she and nature cannot be separated.

Enough of the rich and powerful adults among us grew up in cocoons, and seem genuinely puzzled by what has happened here in the States.

Those of us with toes in the mud know better, because we know we know almost nothing.

We know this much, though. The sun, a gift, only shines so much in a year. Plants, all gifts, only bear so much fruit in a year. There are only so many animals available to eat in a year. All economics, or at least all economics of value, ultimately comes down to how much the soil and the sun can yield--not in a year, not even in lifetime, but indefinitely. There are limits to what we know, to what we can know.

There are also limits to what we ought to know; I'm a heretic among science teachers. Wes Jackson, a farmer and founder of the Land Institute, is also a heretic:

For a half century now I have had the opportunity to witness the mind of religious fundamentalists at work.... We usually think of it as associated with certain religious denominations but it is now more rampant in the scientific community than religion. Fundamentalism is worrisome, wherever it is found, because it takes over where thought ends. It is so rampant in science now, that we plunge ahead with biotechnology faster than we can develop the intellectual framework and imagination for evaluating the possible risks.

The curriculum demands I teach my students about transgenic bacteria just a few years after they traced their hands and drew the spectacularly colored turkeys they thought they were eating.

I bet most of them still don't believe that turkeys are white.

***

I was going to show a brief video today of how turkeys are inseminated, but thankfully the school filters worked better than my frontal lobe. I still may have done just enough to make Thanksgiving a little more interesting tomorrow for some of our families.

Your science teacher did what?

He gobbled like a turkey, picked up a desk, pretended it was his chest, then tried to, er, you know, do it with a pretend girl turkey, and he couldn't, so now humans do turkeys. I found a video on YouTube...want to see it?

I'm calling the school first thing Monday!

Food, from the ground to our gut, has become taboo.

How many of us dare to show how animals are raised? Butchered? Processed? Even when done humanely, we hide it from the kids.

***

I gave every one of my freshmen a wheat berry today. I told them it was part of something they would stuff inside their turkey. Only one child guessed what it was.

Just about every town around here has a "Mill Street" dating back to when flour was only fresh for a few days, back when flour had enough oil to turn rancid. Refined flour, however, has a much longer shelf life. We don't need local mills anymore.

Crushed wheat berries are brown, not white.
Crushed wheat berries have a complex, wonderful flavor that makes bread come alive.
Crushed wheat berries can keep you alive without being fortified with folic acid, niacin, and riboflavin--they're already in there.

I have fallen out of the habit of making bread--I need to start again. My time would be better spend grinding wheat berries and baking bread than sitting in front of this monitor.

On the other hand, if I keep talking turkey in class, it might not be too long before I have a whole lot more time on my hands.

I lifted the orange from Sean Nash's site, who borrowed it from
Weil, Gyorgy. “wguri’s photostream.” oranges. 17 MAY 2007. Flickr. 24 Nov 2008 


The wheat berry came from the University of Arkansas.

The New Yorker cover came, natch, from the New Yorker site.

The bread comes courtesy of Jessica Pierce, the bunny lady.
She creates wonderful things regularly. If you're ever in Atlanta, stop by and try her cake!

November nirvana

There are mornings when the mind is flying, neurons remapping as I try to put things together. Rapid leaps of thought spin hypotheses rapidly ground down to nubbins. Whole theses are created (and often dismantled) during the mile or so walk to school.

Then there are mornings like today, a drizzly November morning, shades of gray broken up by crazy patches of yellow and orange leaves scattered on the ground, the hickory smoke smell of fall wrapping around everything.

It was cheerfully gloomy. I managed to forget everything and, briefly (though time was oddly suspended), felt everything. We were mammals long before words made us something else.

Science is interesting because the world is interesting, not the other way round.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Little Scientists, Inc.

fet·ish/ˈfetiSH/

Noun:

An inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit. A course of action to which one has an excessive and irrational commitment.

Guess the goggles aren't needed for the pre-pubescent crew.
That looks suspiciously like a carboy of homebrew sitting on the scientist's right.

Unless you give a child a reason to want to know something, to know the world, then getting them all gooey-eyed thinking that they love what passes for science in order to please mama is just cultivating a fetish.

If we continue to push science as a religion, a cult with idolized props--the lab coat, the goggles, the geek 'tude--used to induce awe through glorious displays, well, we'll keep getting what we've been getting. Before we can hope to create more scientists, we ought to focus on creating more thinkers.

I'd like to keep our fetishes in the boardroom and the chapel--both indoor places defined by humans, where magical attachment to objects (flow charts and holy books) enhances our worlds of magical thinking. Our magic worlds follow an internally consistent blend of logic and lust, that allows us to makes some sense of the universe on our terms.

Nature don't play that way.

While many of us have been vicariously living through Natalie and Justin and Prince Harry, a few have stumbled on amazing stuff. Photons erupting out of nothingness, neutrinos defying basic laws of the universe-- a very few among us giving us knowledge we'll probably misuse, again and again.

***

Science for children, for anyone, starts with the flick of a minnow's tail, a dragon fly cocking its head in a child's direction, with a mud pie that falls apart if too wet or if too dry. Before you can learn how to predict, you need to learn how to see.

You don't need iPads or Vernier probes or simulated computer programs. You don't need fancy "scientifical" equipment.You just need curious children (a redundancy),  a door that lets children out as easily as it lets them in,  and an interested adult or two to guide them..

We keep shoving kids in concrete buildings, away from their clan, away from Grandma's stories, earlier and earlier and earlier. Away from sunburn and skinned knees and bruises and tears, away from the air, the sky, the sun, the puddles teeming with life, away from the only laboratory that matters in science--the natural world.

***

Science starts with a child outdoors,  it starts within the sulci of the convoluted mush of nerve tissue sitting in our skulls, it starts with our senses.

You cannot see a whole world in a drop of pond water if you've never seen to see the world you live in. We don't need Junior Scientists© donning their fetish garb to impress adults whose understanding of the universe goes no farther than The Big Bang Theory sitcom.

Children are just as more likely to get there reading W.B. Yeats than they are watching a rocket launch on a monitor. They're even more likely to get there if they're allowed to wander around this fine world of ours, chasing whatever interests their souls outdoors, becoming part of the world so many adults no longer realize even exists as they slowly dissolve in front of their huge television screens, inanimate objects inhabited with the spirits of the famous and the fictitious, the fetish in the living room.

Every time I walk home in the dark, seeing the eerie blue manic light leaking through drawn shades, I wonder how we hope to create anything resembling scientists, or even human.

The photo was by  Matt Stamey for the Gainesville Sun found here.

The definition of fetish came from dictionary.com.