A grounded education

We have a small pile of composting leaves and twigs sitting in a terrarium just below the windowsill in our classroom, home to a community of roly polies we sometimes use in AP Biology. They get get a nice warm home over the winter in exchange for occasionally running around in Petri dishes, amusing young adult humans.

One on the driveway a few minute ago....

Soon after turning on the class projector on Monday, a high-pitched chirpy whir came out of our terrarium--we had an unexpected stowaway, a lovesick cricket, who after a week still sings his plaintive song of unrequited love to a projector that spurns his advances.

All this in a tiny patch of earth less than a foot square and an inch or two deep.

That we think we can teach cartoon models of DNA for meaning in a culture that fails to recognize the thousands of hearts beating within the sound of a child's voice every time she steps outside speaks to how ungrounded we have become.

You will not find roly polies inside a board room; you'll rarely find them underneath fluorescent lights at all.They do what all animals do, without ever giving thought to the abstractions that distract humans.

We are animals, have been for as long as the pull bugs and the squirrels and the squids that are doing all the same things all animals have done for well over a half-billion years. The first commercial fluorescent lamp was sold in 1938, not so long ago--my grandfather was already middle-aged by then.

He knew how to live.

Don't let the hum of fluorescent light be the plaintive song of your child's life....

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A reminder to AP Biology teachers

We're knee-deep in molecular genetics now in AP Biology--and it's not your father's biology anymore, or even your older sister's.

She only had to contend with mRNA, tRNA, and rRNA.

Created by WGScott, shared under CC

The biology world has exploded with RNA confetti!

miRNA  siRNA. 

 ncRNA RNAi piRNA

tasiRNA and rasiRNA

While this leads to big fun for old AP teachers who love to joust with other AP teachers (and you know who you are), I realized this week that even my most interested biology superstars can only take so much RNA fun in a month.

***

I keep about 10 gallons or so of pond water in my basement during the winter months. I pretend I do it to save money--I can overwinter my elodea--but I really do it for my sanity.

Once or twice a week I peer into the bucket, tap its side, and watch the daphnia dance. I watch a water strider hunt, a spider weave, larvae wiggle just under the surface,

I brought in a pint this week, ostensibly to test run our new microscopes. Within this pint lived hundreds of daphnia, and all kinds of other strange critters simply going about the business of living, something my AP students gave up years ago, so that they can live later.

It's a harsh trade, schooling for living. The cracks are starting to show.

With snow on the ground outside, the local ponds half frozen, a few brilliant, exhausted kids peered into a drop of pondwater, and remembered why they fell in love with biology in the first place.  
Wow! Look a this! Yuck! I'll never swim again!

Shame on me for letting them forget.

 I forget every year, too. Time to read Kim Foglia's letter again...

On trick questions

Sometimes prattling on about things I'm passionate about, like balloons in a bottle, is like chatting about my fantastic rubber band collection.  
You have been warned.

The new AP Biology exam requires thinking, requires it, and not much else. The sample questions are thoughtful, dense with information, and ask for reasonable conclusions.

It no longer is (if it ever was) a cram and dump course.

And never before have I been swamped with so many accusations that my tests have "trick questions" for questions that are just basic questions of understanding.

***

There's a chasm of difference between "heat" and "temperature," and  if you know the difference, it's very easy to get that while a cup of hot tea has a higher temperature than the ocean, the ocean has vastly more heat.

You can slog your way through definitions or equations to get there, but once you own the concepts of heat and temperature, the distinction is as obvious as a bow tie on a banana. Any question about comparing heat in a cup of tea and the ocean becomes embarassingly simple.

Or embarrassingly tricky.

***

Here's one from the practice exam:

Simple cuboidal epithelial cells line the ducts of certain human exocrine glands. Various materials are transported into or out of the cells by diffusion. (The formula for the surface area of a cube is 6 × S², and the formula for the volume of a cube is S³, where S = the length of a side of the cube.) Which of the following cube-shaped cells would be most efficient in removing waste by diffusion?

There are several ways to get this, perhaps the easiest just realizing it takes 8 of the choice A boxes to make the volume of 1 choice B box, obvious to some on first blush.

How does something like that even become tricky?
What happens along the way that bright kids doubt their own ability to think?

A November "Treet"

I rambled on about cell communication to my AP Biology class--they're bright, they're young, but they're not clamoring to know about G-protein-linked receptors, despite my cartwheels (good for kinesthetic learners, no?)


Even the College Board recognizes that the course is, well, receptive to the rush of air particles from a surrounding area of high pressure.

I walked home on a gorgeous November dusk, and then I saw it.

Across the street from the school is a tree with a streetlight buried in its nether-lands. The tree is bare, except for a patch of leaves around the lamp.

A block away, a barren tree broken by our freak storm two weeks ago has three large boughs still hanging from it--classic widow makers. On each bough, and only on these broken boughs, cling clusters of leaves, days after the leaves of the still living branches fell away.

How can I teach of G-protein-linked receptors to children who do not see the leaves still grasping onto the dead limbs that no longer talk to them?

And why would I want to?

Next dry day I'm taking my lambs out for a walk. Not sure they'll be any fonder of G-protein-linked receptors, but they might be a little fonder of trees.

Hey, we're not so different from trees and bacteria after all....
Snowstorm photo by Ed Murray, NJ Star-Ledger

Fruit flies like a banana....

Living fruit flies over three generations is an ideal creature for teaching biology in all its glory. Students learn so much more than genetics with all the potential for disaster: mold, slime, crustiness, lost flies, complaining neighbors (threatening music teachers that blame all insects, bacteria, the world's ills on biologists!), impossible statistics, realization that not all data are clean (except in physics), appreciation for the care of living things, patience, and new found respect and fond regard for lowly dipterans.

Jerry Burke, St. Mary's School, Medford, Oregon. 5/24/01

I got the fruit flies just a few hours ago, and already lost two--one squished when I pulled on the foam stopper, the other is still very much alive, exploring the room.

I chilled them long enough to keep them still, not so long that they froze to death.

Part of me weighs on the hubris of using mutated forms of a living creature to demonstrate how science doesn't work. (My virgin females probably aren't anymore, a bigger problem than you might suppose if you don't know fruit flies. And there's really no reason why you should.)

The other part?  A kid in a candy store.

I can tell you a million reasons why I teach science, and why it matters. But mostly I teach because I love teaching, and selfish man I am, hope to keep on doing just that.

Yes, I know there are wonderful computer simulations for this lab, and I may well end up using them anyway
after one colony escapes and the other mates with the white flies pestering our class veggies.

Doesn't hurt to attempt real biology now and again in a classroom.

Some things were done better a half century ago.

Photo by TheAlphaWolf/Wikimedia Commons, via Nature magazine.

Late harvest

As I was poking around the classroom garden yesterday, getting the plants ready for the weekend, I found a pea pod dangling from a tiny pea vine.

The child who nurtured it will get "extra credit"--I used promises of points to get the some of my lambs 'interested' in putting dried peas into icky peat moss. She won't remember the points. She will remember the pod.

I hope she remembers the countless times she breathed on her hand--carbon dioxide and water released deep in her cells. Our plants are built on the carbon backbone of our exhaled breaths.

I do not pretend to know anything of God or gods. I enjoy reading the words of cultures past, to see what they saw when words were still so young that they were used carefully.

I can recognize grace, though--a pea pod given to us for the cost of our breath and a little bit of water.

***

I just came in from picking a few scrawny Brussels sprouts from very chilly plants--two of them now gracefully bend towards the ground, forming archways, seemingly honoring the earth that bore them, the last harvest of last spring's garden.

The sun is returning, slowly, so that our exhaled carbon dioxide can be used again, with grace.

 I can show the kids the graph above--the annual wobble in CO₂ levels reflects the dance between the light of life and the ensuing darkness each winter.

Chloroplasts and mitochondria, ancient critters in cells that keep much of the living alive, work in tandem. Chloroplasts capture the energy of the sun in sugar, and mitochondria release the energy as the sugars tumble back to water and CO₂.

A child feeds on the lies of our culture. Magic erupts from screens, voices erupt from wire. We are consumers on the infinite, and we tell the children lies because we believe them ourselves.

She memorizes the photosythesis equation without understanding,  because we tell her she must, in order to graduate, in order to get to college, in order to earn money, in order to eat.

A tiny pod just might put a tiny seed of doubt in her. It came from nothing, or so it seems.
It's tangible in a way photons can never be, no matter how thin the computer, how bright the screen.

***

So I will keep teaching about electron transport chains and ATP and things that can be tested with no more than a scantron and a pencil. I get paid to do this, and I enjoy it.

Our classroom garden provides the real lessons. Heads of wheat are erupting from plastic bottles, impossibly yellow squash flowers lean over plastic trays, and the peas keep wrapping themselves around everything in their path.

Not everything thrives--some of the children get quiet when their seedling wilts, a few get angry. There are always more peat pots and seeds in the back, and eventually another seed gets planted, converting our breath again to the living.

Biology.

Do not confuse grace with religion, nor technology with science. I know nothing. None of us do.

The veggies came from the back yard, the graph originally from NOAA

Why AP Bio may become great

I have mixed feelings about teaching AP Biology. See the last post...

I love teaching, I love science, and I prefer to keep the two together in my classroom. Alas, my hands have been tied a bit by the AP auditing process, but I get the reasons.

If my high school wants an official AP stamp on the school transcripts, I have to deliver the product promised by the College Board. That in itself is not the problem. That the course has become a bit of a bear, though, has become a problem, and the College Board said last year it planned to fix this.

Yesterday, I got to see a video in a poll on some of the specifics of their new plan--I am ecstatic!

***

The College Board has created a course that puts inquiry first. The focus will be on science, not minutiae.



Kim Foglia teaches AP biology, and she does it extremely well. She has done it for years, and she shares her ever evolving resources at her Explore Biology website.

For me, Kim's biggest strength has been her unflagging dedication to teaching science. I kept a folded letter she sent out to new AP teachers struggling to march through the AP curriculum, reminding us to teach to the joy of science, to teach biology, not a curriculum.

Ironically, her students consistently nailed the AP test.

Guess who's on the committee revising the course?

This is going to be GREAT!

Why AP grates...

Part 1--Part II has the good news!

AP Biology
January 2009

PARADE THROUGH THE KINGDOMS¹

(…more like a death march, than a parade, but it’s Biology! Yay! ☺)

The above is taken from an assignment given at a selective private Catholic girls high school. I recognize the gallows humors, even use it, as I drag my lambs through a similar course. I have to. It's audited by the College Board, and students, parents, administrators, board of education members, and Superintendents will walk through fire to get the coveted AP® Course Audit stamp on a transcript.

I am part of this lunacy. First, the bad news....

I teach AP Biology, or at least try to, to seniors, many who are taking far too many AP courses. There are many good reasons to take AP courses, but no good reasons to take too many. Students feel the pressure of the admissions wars. If both Punch and Judy want a shot at Elite U, and Punch takes an AP science because "it looks good on his transcript," well, Judy thinks she needs to do the same. I get two uninterested seniors for the price of one.

Our school administration encourages children to take AP, as many do, in the escalating war of school rankings. If New Jersey Monthly, a regional rag clearly read by folks with a higher opinion of themselves than I have of myself (just ask them) judges schools by the "number of AP tests offered compared to the total number of juniors and seniors (a calculation designed to avoid penalizing smaller schools)," and your local school board worries as much about property values (as it should), then there will be subtle pressure to push kids into the AP classes.

If you are Gaspar Caperton, President and CEO of the College Board, earning making over $800,000 in compensation a year (about $95/hour for every hour he breathes), you are under a bit of pressure to push your product. And he does. The College Board sells test prep materials for its own tests, materials some of my students cannot afford. The College Board lobbies politicians.

If you are the President of Elite U, and want to keep up your US News and World Report rankings, you need to sell your school to children who have no shot at getting in. Part of your rating is based on the rejection rate of first time college applicants. The more you reject, the higher your score. You're kind of stuck with the numerator, the number of slots you have open, so you best boost the denominator, how many applied. You are under pressure to sell dreams to the impressionable.

Result? We have a generation of public school seniors compromising their health in a battle mutually assured destruction as they struggle to get into colleges that pretend they have a shot.

The CEO of the College Board, the President of Elite U, the editors at NJ Monthly and US News and World Report make good coin, high school administrators keep the board and parents at bay, and the students, literally, break down and cry.

I see the tears. The children are in an impossible place. They live at the pinnacle of human civilization, they have food on the table, roofs over their heads, and youth in their veins, and they are crying.

It's easy to say they're just spoiled, or weak, or lazy, and many of those shepherding them say just that. But when I hear that a student toils away in a mall selling shoes so that she can afford to pay for a series of tests to measure how much she "knows" in subjects she only took out of fear, well, I think of the $16,000 compensation Mr. Caperton pulls down each week.

The College Board logo and the US News and World Report photo are from their respective sites.
And now for the good news.....

Montclair High School will be screening Race to Nowhere on November 30th, at 7:30 PM.
You can register here.

"An infinite number of biological factoids"

Because biology is a dynamic field with an ever-expanding knowledge base, focusing students more on how to interpret and understand new data as they become available will be much more important than having students memorize an infinite number of biological factoids.

DRAFT: Revised AP Biology Curriculum

That's what it says. Yes, it's a draft, yes, it's meant to be revised--but that's what it says. If my grasp of English is correct, the "infinite number of biological factoids" refers to the current system.

The College Board is a multimillion dollar operation. It spent over $300,000 last year for lobbyists. The CEO makes well over half a million dollars a year.

So what are my kids supposed to do in the meantime? Pay their $86 to show how well they memorized an infinite number of factoids?

***

I went bat hunting tonight--it sounds a lot more strenuous than it is. Get a lounge chair, wait for dusk, lie down with your eyes looking up, and wait.

I eventually found a bat, and watched it sweep the sky, munching on a variety of other flying critters. There aren't so many bats now as there were a few years ago.

We won't be talking much about that in AP biology class--too little time. Nor will we talk much about the decreasing phytoplankton in our seas. Nor the great mass extinction going on right now as we delude ourselves with these light machines.

***

I participate in the madness.
I am part of the madness.
I am the madness.

***

The AP Biology curriculum will not be revised before the 2012 school year, possibly later. In the meantime, I teach to the curriculum, as I am required to do.

Which is, of course, madness.





I am open to suggestions....

Yes, of course, it's Edvard Munch's painting The Scream