Truth

A drum found on the edge of the Delaware Bay.

 Grace

God, I know nothing, my sense is all nonsense,
And fear of You begins intelligence;
Does it end there? For sexual love, for food,
For books and birch trees I claim gratitude,
But when I grieve over the unripe dead
My grief festers, corrupted into dread,
And I know nothing. Give us our daily bread.

Donald Hall, Old and New Poems, used without permission

Late January, and though warm enough to get the bees about, we still need light, more light, to keep us all alive. And not all of us will get through the winter.

I stumble upon death along the bay's edge--the detritus of uncountable lives lost accented by the stray wing of a gull licked by the edge of high tide today.

Still, a honey bee found it worth her while to spend some energy sipping nectar from our rosemary bush. A blue bottle fly joined her,shoving its head into the sky blue rosemary flower, seeking what it wanted at that moment.

We're not so good at knowing what we want. How do I know this? Just look around.

***

On Thursday, my students were subjected to propaganda, their amygdalas tugged by a series of images and videos tying together Columbine, Hitler, smiling toddlers, Anne Frank, and (for the love of Zeus) Chuck Norris himself.

We all sat in an auditorium with no windows, entertained by "Colleen," a young woman with lovely teeth and healthy skin, telling stories meant to instill fear. The presentation was well choreographed, and it had its intended effects.

Create the bogey man, then tell kids that kindness will kill it.

***

I fell into Bloomfield by accident almost 30 years ago, and stayed because I love it. We're a mixed town, in mixed's myriad senses. We're scrappy. We're a bit to the left on the intellectual (but not intelligence) curve. Most important, we're kind.

That's a huge statement.

When my wife got smashed by a car, meals showed up on our stoop for weeks, meals made by friends, and meals made by friends of friends.

We used to have factories--we made flags, we made metal tubing, we made candy, we made rubber products. We had saw mills, cotton mills,copper mills, paper mills, and woolen mills. We had Schering and General Electric and Westinghouse. We still have an abandoned field where the Manhattan Project first enriched uranium, our town tainted by our patriotism.

We don't make much anymore because other towns across the oceans make it for less. We're a little bit desperate these days.

But we're still kind.

***

Walks along the edge of the bay remind me what is true, what matters. We are all mortal, every one of us, and every day I remember this, and every day it surprises me.

Walks along the bay remind me that there's a lot more going on than language and electronic images can capture.

Earlier today I saw a Canada goose at the ocean's edge, an unusual place for this bird. As we approached, it waddled into the surf, getting smacked one wave after the next.

It will not likely make it to February. No guarantees any of us will. My student's do not need to hear the multiple shots of two very troubled young men in Columbine to know this.

A walk in the beach will suffice.

***

Bread made by Jessica Pierce.

So here's my late resolution for 2012.

I will speak truthfully, always, to my students.

They know that I am happy, they know I find love using a clam rake, but find my joy, and maybe any joy, confusing. They have been trained by parents, by teachers, by culture, not to know what they want.

They seek immortal life with no idea why.
They fear death with no idea why.
They chase what others tell them they want with no idea why.

My primary task as a science teacher is to show them that the natural world dwarfs our imagination, and that the more we seek, the less we know, and that with this comes a paradoxical comfort.

Few of my students have seen the stars as their grandparents did, few of them know where food comes from as their grandparents did, few of them grasp how tenuous all this is as their grandparents did.

Death is certain, fear of death is not.

Joy is possible (even) in a classroom. I know nothing, but I know joy.
By June I pray my students know a little bit more about what is possible and about what is not.

Grace.

You are mortal. Why not act as though you believe it?

Donald Hall, biology teacher

Plants strip electrons from water, and use them to help store energy in organic compounds. The left-overs are oxygen molecules. Any schoolchild knows we need oxygen, but few educated adults know why.

If you hold a flame to cool glass, a small patch of condensation forms, a brief patch of fog. It is unexpected, and often missed, unless you look for it. Oxygen is grabbing electrons and protons from the fuel—butane, wax, food, it matters not—and re-forming water.

Along the way the electron has given up energy captured by plants from sunlight—it’s what keeps you alive.

We teach this in biology, or rather we teach a litany of names, a parade of complex molecules that pass the electron down an energy gradient. We focus on the carriers, and in our earnestness, forget that it’s really all about the electron.

***

If you want to learn biology, read Donald Hall.

In "Poem with One Fact," Hall talks of enzymes and amino acids in a poem, a universe, really, that distinguishes life from what we call living. I trivialize it by trying to explain it--go read it.

***

If I used Donald Hall’s words in class, my lambs would soar—they’d forget the AP Exam as they watched an earthworm rhythmically work its way through mud, the peristalsis of life, of love. They’d tie the rocking to the rhythm of belly aches, to making love in the back seat of a dented Dodge Neon.

They’d stop worrying about future jobs and Jacuzzis lost in a freefalling economy, and get on their knees to sniff the sweet soil, knowing that’s where life starts, and that’s where life ends.

They’d no longer try to impress their impressionable parents with words like nicotinamide dinucleotide or ATP synthase (as powerful and poetic they sound when pronounced with care) and instead would say “eek… ook… oop… umm” to describe the journey of a particle of life, an electron, as it gets kicked around from water to sugar and back to water again.

What did you learn in biology today, love? Her mother asks. I saw on the syllabus you’re studying electron transport chains and chemiosmosis. Have you been keeping up with the reading? The exam is May 10th, we have work to do, no?

Amanda would scream EEK! at dinner, loud enough to make Grandma look over her diamond framed lens to scowl at her mother, who married well, but, well, not well enough.

OOK!—not quite as loud. Dad silently calculates the cost of 6 more weeks of sessions, and wonders if Xanax would be cheaper for this girl at the table, eeking and ooking, a girl who grew breasts and thighs and became this womanchild he does not know, eeking and ooking and eeking and ooking.

Oop—quieter now. Sam, her much younger brother, unplanned (ah, evolution) but not unloved, plays along. oop…oop….oop…oop. Amanda nods, smiles, and once more…Oop.

And now a very quiet umm, melodic, restful. The electron is back home, wrapped in water.


Clearly, the girl is troubled.

She gets up from the table, barefoot, and wanders outside under the crescent moon to check on her snow peas, their arched new stems breaking through the earth, just visible in the late dusk light, and thanks she knows not who for giving her light and life, while inside the adults sit in silence. The uneaten dinner grows cold, electrons trapped in brussel sprouts and butter, waiting to be released.

Condensation photo by fmanto, used under CC 3.0.

Ecstasy in a classrooom

I remember

coming to the farm in March

in sugaring time, as a small boy.

He carried the pails of sap, sixteen-quart

buckets, dangling from each end

of a wooden yoke

that lay across his shoulders, and emptied them

into a vat in the saphouse

where fire burned day and night

for a week.

Donald Hall, from "Maple Syrup"

I am drinking some fine mead made by my daughter and her beau--they had almost given up on it a few months ago. Honey, water, and yeast, when left alone long enough, make one feel like a part of a universe that matters. We play a part, but just a part.

This week's Perennial Project, my year long observation project, is for the kids to go stare at the tree they picked way back in September. The leaves gave up their nutrients, sugar flowed into the ground, and the trees "died."

And now the sugar returns, last summer's bounty fueling this spring's growth. We don't tap trees in this neck of the woods, but we could. Maybe next year we will.

***

Miracles continue to happen in the classroom. I ate the freshest rattlesnake bean possible in February--Dina brought it up to show me the bean, concerned that her plant was dying. And it was. Somehow her plant had gotten fertilized, and the bean sprout poured its energy into this lovely bean pod.

Without a thought, I ate it, and it was delicious. Another teacher eyed my basil patch this afternoon and offered to "thin" it out. My student teacher has already confessed to gnoshing on some others.

Dina will get extra credit for getting her bean to fruit, but long after the points dissolve to nothing, she will remember her bean, and the ridiculous look of joy on my face as I ate it, the freshest produce in Bloomfield, righ under her nose.

Mead, basil, and rattlesnake beans make the last week of February tolerable. We teach order and restraint, as we must in a public school setting, but wildness creeps through anyway. We share our room with yeast and daphnia, basil and fish. We've raised E. coli that fluoresce with jelly fish protein. We have tomato plants that are threatening to fruit.

And what will a child's heart follow a decade or two from now? Will it be influenced by a battery of tests designed to create super-citizens who will "outcompete" workers from around the world?

Maybe, just maybe, a heart or two will be influenced by the few moments of pure joy experienced by the oldest in the room, eyes rolling up as he savors the explosion of flavor available to anyone who cares to know. Life consumes the living, and all living today will be consumed by life.

That's science.
Just ask Donald Hall.





The photo is of Palestine, the great great grandfather of Willow of Willow Manor, via Creative Cmmons 3.0.
Isn't it a great photo?
It's reason enough for a post....