Sunday, January 26, 2014

Truth be told

I teach "science," but it's not science my lambs need.

They need to be able to see the world as it is. I also hope they feel the beauty of the relationships between matter and energy, something worth knowing, but they need to discover that on their own, unforced. (It's why we plant seeds all year long.)

Grown by a student, in Bloomfield, in Room B362


They need to know that there are limits, that excluding the god-like transformations of nuclear reactions (as good as reason as any to worship the sun), the stuff we start with is the stuff we end up with, that when you burn gasoline you end up with the same number of oxygen and hydrogen and carbon atoms you started with, and that that free energy is now gone for, well, forever.
(Truth be told, we will not survive capitalism.)

North Cape May, before the big freeze

They need to know where there food comes from, where their shit goes, and what sunlight and water have to do with all of this.
(Truth be told, we will not survive beyond our limits.)

The bounty of South Jersey, given freely.

Students need to have a sense of the power, of the possibilities, of the awe atomic energy. Students also need to know our history as the primates we are, our experiences with power, our gleeful destruction of anything alive that's not us, from bacteria to aborigines. What other species worships Lysol and death?
(Truth be told, we will not survive our hubris.) 

For all the squawking about CCSS, NGSS, ETS, ACTs, SATs, and a whole bunch of other acronyms that mean, literally, nothing, our children are organisms foraging on this blessed Earth, and the world belongs just as much to each and every child the day they are born as it does to the Bill Gates's of this world.

It also belongs just as much to the mockingbird that hovered over my pond in the frigid cold, sipping at the water flowing freely from the pump head, one I keep open by hacking at the ice so the fish below survive the winter.



 Dear Cailleach Cailleach, get me to Imbolc....


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