And yet we do it anyway...

As the sun ends its few days of rest and starts to ache its way back northward, as it has done now for eons, long before language, long before lungs, folk in this part of the world reflect, briefly, on what we think matters.

We make promises, as we have before, and as we will again, to change.

“Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance”
― T.S. Eliot

We know what matters, we know what make us and others happy, we know the stories and the songs and the food and the people that make us happy.

We know all this.

We know that choices we make, staying too long at a meeting that goes nowhere, giving tests that matter to no one, playing with our virtual pleasure machines that steal our living hours, are bad choices.

And yet I do them anyway....

So no resolutions this year, except one--to minimize the "yet we do it anyway" hours. I'd be better off sitting in silence, in the dark, alone with thoughts spiraling out of control than pretending that anything I do rationally with folks I do not know, and cannot love because I do not know them, matters.

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
― T.S. Eliot

If the silence becomes too loud, I will seek the words of someone I know, and love, and care about, not another virtual voice.

I have never regretted a single moment outside....

Puck Arne, Eli, and Bill

I used to play a little hockey. I was never really good at it, but I was decent at defense for two reasons:

I was quick (which is not the same as fast)--a gift, true, and in hockey, a huge one, and...

I learned that the only thing that mattered was watching the puck on the stick.

Motivations, feints, needs, dekes, desires, wants--all of that ultimately translated to watching the puck on the stick. Where was the stick, where was the puck.

Via Wikipedia, CC 3.0, Hockey1993

I do not care what Arne or Eli or Bill say--I am focused on the puck.

And right now, the puck is aimed right between the eyes of your young child entering school this September. The puck is flying towards the temple of a young woman headed for community college in January. The puck, if not batted down, will smash the nasal cartilage of your young adolescent, still dreaming of a life lived well.

I am not sure what the motivations of the ed reformers are, but I am aware of what happens to schools and children when the "reformers" get the reins, and if I am aware, yet accept this complacently, then I am complicit.

I did not raise two children to become part of the global economy. I raised them to be happy, thoughtful, loving people who care about their community, the concrete one. It's ridiculous, ridiculous, that we're even having this conversation, that Arne or Eli or Bill, three men who all exhibit signs of psychopathy, even matter.

Take care of the children you know, as well as you can. Do not do anything you feel will harm them. If we all do that, ferociously (as we should), fearlessly (or at least with all the courage we can muster), then these strange men lose their power.

It's really that simple.

Do the right thing...

On Beyoncé, choices, and hurting children

Yep, on my high horse again.... 

 

"Pepsi embraces creativity and understands that artists evolve. As a businesswoman, this allows me to work with a lifestyle brand with no compromise and without sacrificing my creativity."

You are wealthy, beautiful, bright, and have hundreds of millions of fans.

And yet you still felt the need to brand yourself with the seal of a corporation that pushes colored, carbonated high fructose corn syrup on the children you pretend you want to save from obesity.

I guess you can call the ad above iconic, in a hipsterish, Warholian way, and we can all wink at our unironic ironic irony, in our own mildly superior artsy way....

But I teach children, and I used to play doctor--I know what happens to a child who develops diabetes, loses her kidneys, her legs.

Hard to dance with these wounds, from Limb Salvage Institute

You can spout all you want to me about personal responsibility, and freedom of choice, and all that--you are leading a multi-million dollar marketing campaign aimed at children.

What we glorify defines who we are, and when kids see one of the most powerful women in the States branded by a company that prides itself on recognizing its "responsibility to help develop solutions to such key global challenges as obesity and malnutrition."

I teach children, because I care about them, and I teach science, because I care about the world.

If I do my job well, children will see through the unconscious hypocrisy of Beyoncé and Pepsi, through the lies so deep that children no longer have a reference point to truth in their virtual worlds that sell Pepsi as love.


Public schools stands as one of the few remaining public spaces left; the natural world surrounds us, and will not bend to money or power or fear--Jupiter will shine over us tonight, and it is there for any child brave enough to abandon her virtual world, her social world, her branded world, her world of forever unmet needs.

All a mammal ever needs sits outside, ultimately untameable, ultimately unknowable, ultimately unmarketable. Beyoncé calls our children like a Siren, promising the unobtainable, while increasing the market share of NxStage System One dialysis machines--you can buy a share (NXTM) for about ten bucks.

Natural acts have natural consequences. If a child can learn that much, she has a shot at real  happiness, and her chances of sharing her blood with a dialysis machine because of her lack of "personal" responsibility.
.
We're killing our children, and we lie to them (and ourselves) as we do it.

Tired of all the lies--a child need to think for herself if she is to think at all....

Unsolicited advice for New Year's Eve resolutions

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 almost as much as your mouth.

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 pie plate on a southern windowsill. Even if you never eat them, basil will cheer you up--they never stop yakking!

Just plucked, for tonight's dinner with pesto from last summer's basil.

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.

Top Five Predictions for Edumacation, 2013

M.C. Escher

Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and Arne Duncan will pose in spandex as Edumacation Superheroes, spouting off aphorisms for the ages-- Every Toddler's a Tool! Glorify the Global Economy! Truth, Justice, And The American Corporate Way! They will launch an action figure line--each figurine will include a bleaching kit and testosterone injections, so you, too, can look like a real human.

Teachers will continue to contribute millions to national union leadership who will remind us how much we love evaluations and testing, because getting a seat at the table is all that matters, especially a table with century old Reed and Barton flatware and rich white men eager to disseminate their, um, ideas.

Hungry kids stressed by frequent midnight gunplay as they shiver themselves to sleep will be saved by an ambitious, cute pale woman, and teachers will be required to take voice training to mimic her soothing, reaffirming voice.

Teacher will be told, in various conferences, to place their student desks in neat rows of 5 while grouping them in three's, making a big community circle of love and empowerment, until next week, when desks are banned, and then unbanned 3 weeks later.



The latest Marzano study will show that if you stack desks in the shape of a pyramid, your school's Scoville Heat scores will rise 37% when adjusted using the Marzano Research Laboratory's Creating An Aligned Desk System (and he'll even send someone to your district and demo it for just a few thousand dollars).

***

John Spencer added one:
In the name of being "brain-based," schools will take an Oxford University study about electric shock impulses and memory retention to heart and teachers will be armed with tazers and shock centers. Kids who fail to learn will be shocked harder. Those who question the practice will be accused of low expectations.

Feel free to join the Pernicious Prognosticators!

We'll check our results in a year!

Apropos nothing...a clam chowder recipe

This one is for me, and may end up buried with other posts forever in the draft stage, but I put it together, I liked it, and I want to repeat it again someday soon.

Base:

Rake up a few dozen clams, steam them open before the next low tide, chop them up, toss back into the broth, then freeze.

Iron skillet:

Cut off a few sprigs of rosemary from the eternally flowering rosemary bush. (This bush is the very definition of optimism.)

Heat up decent or better olive oil, then toss the sprigs in the skillet. (Every time I taste a good olive oil, I think of Palestine--if ever a flavor matched the history of its peoples....)

Let the sprigs cook until just before charred (yeah, I know, but you do this long enough, and you will know, too). Remove the sprigs.

Toss in a half bottle of chardonnay--doesn't need to be fantastic, the clams are the show after all, but it can't suck, either. I'm not an oenophile, but I'm not so educated that I can't tell what I like.

Once warmed up, chunk in 1 or 2 minced onions, a chopped up whole celery plant, a carrot or two, and (maybe) one or two cloves of garlic. (I'm usually a garlic fetishist, so not sure why I hesitate here, but I do.)

Tonight I tossed in a minced jalapeno as well--not sure I needed it, but it was sitting on the counter (for Yahweh knows only reasons), so I used it.

Cook down until just before the celery gives up the ghost, then let sit. (I added basil somewhere along the way, but forget when. Basil is as forgiving as the Lord Himself, so no worries.)

Big brew pot:

Chunk up a couple of potatoes, and bathe in clam broth. Simmer until the potatoes are a couple of minutes from just so.

Um, that's it.

Putting it all together:

Dump the skillet goodness onto the potatoes. Toss in the clam meat. Let it simmer for 2 or 3 minutes, and you're done.

This is one reason (among many) I clam.

Abstract vs. literal vs. real

Reading about 30 knot gusts registered by a weather station just a mile away is abstract. Federal funds maintain my local station, and I read it religiously.

CMAN4, at the Cape May ferry dock (photo by NOAA)

Thinking about the wind and clams and life as I drag my rake through the mud is literal.
The real happens when the words fade away, when  "I" (never real) dissolve in the salty mist of the strong breeze coming off the flats.

What is real is as unknowable as the shiver of life felt when a rake's tine carves a line in a quahog. I find the line later, as I wash the mud off the clams under running water, like blood from a deep cut, reminded (again) of the violence even in clamming.

 
The strike of tine against clam is real.
The clam knows something at that moment, as I know something, but words serve neither of us as I curl three fingers under its perfect shape, a tinge (literal) that my imperfect state (abstract) requires eating (literal, again).

We take mammals made for running under the sun and the stars, made for climbing and dancing and singing and playing, and (literally) make them human (abstract) at the cost of the real. Show me a child who loves schooling, and I'll show you another lamb who has lost her way.

1921 classroom, by Lewis Wickes Hine, via Shorpy

 
Clamming reconnects me to what is real. So does gardening. And stargazing.
You have your ways, too. We all do, or did, anyway, before we let the abstract get in the way.


All the words and pictures I seek, the ones I share, are useless if just reading and looking are the goals. The goals remain wordless but not unknowable.

But sometimes all we can do is point and hope.

And try to assess that on a standardized test, Mr. Coleman.