Time (and time again)

We keep time in class, as we do pretty much everywhere. I've got several analog clocks and one less precise (and less useful) box of digital time.

We pretend that days are exactly 24 hours long, and that each hour is as well proscribed and linear as the next. This is not true, and will not be for millions of years.

Kids know otherwise instinctively, of course, at least until we train educate them.

An hour in December lasts exactly as long as an hour in June these days, but that was not always true. Hours were invented by a mammal that paid attention--daylight was divided into 12 portions, with noon defined as when the sun was at its highest point for the day.

Last hour of the day

We started school here in Bloomfield in September--the daylight hours shrink dramatically this time of year.  We had over 12 hours of sunlight the first day of school. Tomorrow we will have just minutes more than 10 hours.

The sunlight we do get have is more oblique and less intense, long shadows and less light. We pretend our hours are equitable throughout the year.

Science teachers will make a big deal about this, explaining the seasons using globes and lamps, but if we've taught our children that sunlight does not matter, that the clock matters more than your hypothalamus, that we eat at noon, not when you're hungry, well, then, we should stop feigning shock when children really don't pay much attention to sunlight.

None of the adults around them do, either.

A clock in front of our library, from NJ State Library Photo Collection

If college graduates do not know why seasons happen, or how trees accumulate mass, or what forces act on a basketball in flight, maybe it's not because our children refuse to learn.

Maybe it's because they internalized what we've been teaching them all along....

Yes, another cyclical post--I love the rhythms of life.

Are you Sirious?

Tuesday I'll grab the clam rake for the last time this year. Late Tuesday afternoon I'll wander over to an exposed tidal flat, and pull food out of the muck.

I do not know who crafted the tines of my rake, but I know how it was done.
I do not know where the tree grew that gave me the handle, but I know how it was done.
I do know how the mead I'll drink was brewed--I watched it ferment for months.

***

Tomorrow a lot of people will get an iPhone 4S, and adopt Siri as their personal assistant. We have taken false idols to a higher level.

Our sophistication now dwarfs our humanity.

Talk to Siri as you would to a person. Say something like “Tell my wife I’m running late.”

The machine says she's not capable of love, but we are not capable of discernment. We create our own Sirens, who call us away from the world.

The world either matters, or it does not. We say that it does, but act as though it does not.

Owners of the iPhone 4S talk of how well it snuggles in the hand--perhaps it does, but I doubt it nestles quite as well as a quahog. Probably doesn't taste as good either.


Tell my wife I'm running late.

If I'm running late Tuesday, my wife will hear it directly from me. I may have to wander into the Firehouse Tavern to find a phone, but chances are pretty good she knows exactly where I am anyway. No need to wander too far on a clam bed, they don't move much.

The woman's voice I hear on the other side will be a voice I've known for 35 years. And unlike Siri, she is capable of love. We all are.   

Merry Christmas!

If you're talking to a phone, you're using it wrong.

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

We had it right over a century ago....

"Not geography, nor nature-study, nor history, but the child; not the adult, nor adult theories, nor Froebel himself, but the child, is the center and source of the kindergarten.

To see children as they really are and not according to our preconceptions; to live with them instead of making them live with us; to become as little children ourselves instead of forcing them to be wizened adults--this is our present ideal.

In the past we have over-emphasized the oak that lay hid in the acorn. True, the acorn may become a tree, but not without a long process of growth, with much kindly nurture from sun and water and soil, and he who merely emphasizes the unity of seed and plant is falling into a mysticism where distinctions become useless and the incentive to action and effort is lost.

The transformation of the one into the other; the growth process, the development from relative simplicity to complexity, is the fascinating and meaningful thing."

Amy E. Tanner
Kindergarten Review, 1911

 Friedrich Froebel came up with the idea of kindergarten. He was dead for over 50 years when this was written.
I added the whitespace--we're addicted to white space.

A Clockwork Yellow

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

Carl Sagan

I think clocks did as much to squash our spirits as anything else, but the history of time is fascinating, and surprisingly silent given its effects on our culture.

When the Prague Orloj astronomical clock was built, raw materials needed to be churned into the metal parts used to make the massive machine, some of which still exist today. People go to visit it, to take pictures, to, in a word, worship.

The beauty of the rhythm of the universe marked by the clock has been usurped by the idea of the clock itself. An abstract form that takes the concrete form of the clock has become another idol.

And we love idols.

***

What do we value in science classes? What does a child learn about the universe by Skyping with astronauts, by playing with remote telescopes via the internet, by doing simulations of labs on an iPad?

If a teacher does not have the wherewithal to teach about combustion using nothing more than a candle, a match, and a bell jar, an iPad will not help.

Teaching science simply can be stressful--there is simply no place to hide. I can teach about combustion using a chemical equation, balancing the reactants and products with flair, as though that's the point of chemistry, using animated demos to show various colorful molecules combining and breaking to form various new substances. And I used to do just that.

Now I start with water seemingly cast from a lit propane torch.

Which is the point, really--here is a piece of the universe, child, here's what we see. Let's figure out if we can find a pattern here.

Teaching combustion going to the equations first is like teaching someone how to look at a sunflower by analyzing Fibonacci spirals:

Until a child sees the beauty of the sunflower for itself, its powerful symmetry easily seen but not so easily defined without numbers, no sense pushing golden ratios.

The school awards the children who can manipulate the Fibonacci ratio. It's easily tested, and easily mastered even without seeing the symmetry in a flower head, should a child be so motivated. In school, we idolize the abstract.

A child could know the golden ratio without grasping the beauty seen in nature's symmetry, and do just fine in science class.

And so folks go to gawk at a clock in Europe, designed to reveal patterns discovered by humans hundreds of years ago, taking pictures of a machine with little machines, understanding how neither works, nor caring to. And they will show off their photos as we show off our clever students who spout off ratios, and wonder why we feel an ache in our chest as we drift to sleep, feeling that something is not quite right, that something is missing.

I keep a sundial by my classroom window.

Golden ratio image lifted from Sofluid here.
The sunflower is by lucapost released and borrowed under CC via Flickr.
Prague clock by Hector Zenil, via Wikipedia, used under CC.

Quakers

I am glad today was not a school day in New Jersey.

Those of us sitting on the state's udder, the tip of Cape May county, got a nice ride for less than we'd pay at Morley's, and countless afternoon chats under the sun made the surreal feel real.

Now imagine if we had school tomorrow--kids would be assaulted with seismographs, joule calculators, fault maps, Richter scales, and whatever else tools teachers could find to make the real become more abstract.

All that matters, at some level, of course, but for most kids, I imagine having a spectacularly lovely August afternoon off to replay a minute's worth of otherworldliness will make this one stick for a long, long time.

Leslie and I went for a nature walk afterwards--the monarch butterflies are back in force, the dolphins were feeding off the beach, a fawn played peekaboo with us, and we saw a hummingbird sitting on a branch. I saw an ibis grope through the mud, a muskrat waddle its fat August body through the reeds, and hundreds of dragonflies shimmered around us, showing off their magnificently colored bodies, only rivaled by the porcelain berries we saw on the trail.

Earthquakes matter because we have infrastructure. Get outside, under the summer sun, and they matter a whole lot less.

I wish the same could be said for hurricanes.

The porcelain berries photo by Josconklin, used under CC.

No Khan Do

Salman Khan makes educational videos, lots of educational videos, using a simple technique--he draws out his thoughts on a "blackboard," while he thinks aloud. Much like someone unwrapping a problem on a napkin or on an old slate blackboard.

Bill Gates has practically adopted him, and the ed reformerati love him. He's an MIT grad, he's multicultural, he's an ex-hedge fund manager (maybe his biggest cachet, a sad reflection of our culture), and he's kinda cute. In an Ivy League rules kind of way. (What do I know, I used to be a stevedore....)

Sal Khan helps kids learn how to regurgitate what we already have in textbooks, without reading the textbooks, a video CliffsNotes for the now generation. He allows the worst parts of education to be efficiently streamlined for ingestion, about as effective and useful as cod liver oil. It works, but it's over-rated.

In the end, I think it's a student's ability to pause, rewind, and rehash what Khan says that makes him so valuable, and which makes his brand so sad--really, really sad. I'm a teacher, and a pretty good one. We need to pay attention to what our kids don't know.

If 21^st century learning boils down to a hyped up version of what we did back in the 1930's, we're screwed. If Bill Gates is the valued judge of what education means (go learn his history), we're screwed. If we cannot do better in the classroom than Mr. Khan can do with his SmoothDraw and Camtasia (or what any of us can do on the back of a cocktail napkin), we're screwed.

Relax, we're not screwed (yet). Be better than the videos, not a hard task, unless regurgitation floats your boat.

Frank Noschese destroys Mr. Khan in a series of blog posts with far more sophistication than me.
Blackboard via Shorpy.

Weodmonað

Yep, mostly the same post third time around--I like the rhythm of the year.

We call it August now, for Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, a short guy with bad teeth, but this was less of an issue before television--the name was dragged over to England by William the Conqueror, who enslaved both the Anglo-Saxon people and their language with the support of the Pope.

The English had a sensible name for this time of year before William blew through--weed month (weodmonað). We teeter towards the dark months. Things fall apart.

The sunlight diminishes perceptibly now. The plants know.

The past week we've eaten deep purple eggplants and bright pink brandywine tomatoes, yellow summer squash and green-and-red striped beans. Today we will pick basil for pesto, some for tonight, some for February. A bowl full of ripe blueberries waits for us, sunlight incarnate.

But the sunlight is dying, and the plants know.

We do not speak of religion in class, at least not formally, though students will occasionally ask religious questions, and I will deflect them. I explain that some things cannot be known through science, and that what I believe beyond the limits of science falls outside the province of class.

In class we talk of light and hormones, photoperiods and abscisic acids, to explain how plants know. We talk under the hum of fluorescent lights, time marked by defined blocks of time. In class, September light is exactly the same as February light, and class is always 48 minutes long, no matter where the sun sits.

Sunset today marks the start of Lammas, or Loaf Mass Day--joy for the harvests that are coming and regret for waning sunlight. Lammas used to be celebrated--the first wheat berries of the year were ground into flour and baked into bread offered in thanks, some used for Communion, some for the feast that followed.

We thank God (or Tailtiu or Lugh or some other forgotten gods)--harvest time reflects death and grace, whatever the culture. Death and grace feel foreign in the classroom, indeed foreign in our culture. We pretend, at our peril, that life is linear.

Lammas falls halfway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. The days are shortening, winter is coming. Until you feel the seasons in your bones, until you follow a grain of wheat from the ground to plant to bread to you then back to the ground again, the modern myths may be enough.

Science can explain why plants produce fruit when they do, and I can teach the steps. We can test whether a student learns what I present, and the students that do this best have access to all our culture offers.

You can become very powerful, very rich, without knowing grace. You can go far in life if blessed with intelligence and beauty, degrees and citations, without ever knowing what a wheat berry looks like, without ever kneading a lump of flour and water and yeast into glistening dough.

In the end, we don't know much, and may never know much. We can, however, recognize grace. We might not grasp it rationally, but we we can grasp it--a good reason to celebrate Lammas.

The Skeleton of Death dances every hour in Prague--photo of the Prague Astronomical Clock by Sandy Smith found on VirtualTourist.

Horseshoe crab graveyard

 Horseshoe crabs and I have a long history.

 Theirs longer than ours.





These were tossed up on a huge hill of dredge waste, peering through the gray mud.




I have witnessed much, most unspoken, in my years, as I am sure you have, too.

I do not understand, or trust, my silence.

 

Their blood runs blue, copper grasps the same oxygen molecules that let us strip electrons from our food.

 Our blood runs red, the deep rust of iron, 

Most of us can see, most of us can talk.

Our stories remain as opaque as the mud deep below the waters of the Delaware Bay, where now in the darkness, a solitary horseshoe crab consumes a careless clam, neither ever seen by humans.

 

They have not changed much in hundreds of millions of years, their life perfect for their world.



And now they rest on the spoils made by us, we who are impossibly foreign in our own skins, looking for something beyond this life.








When you walk the fissured hillock on a chilly April morning, the exoskeletons whisper what they know.

This is all, and all is enough.

Photos taken by me.

Beware the Yabby net

Thanks to The Violet Hour for pointing me in Michael Leunig's direction.

"I [Richard Lawrence] specifically asked Leunig about the copyright implications of this and he replied that  he derives great pleasure from the knowledge that people send his 'toons, poems and prayers to friends all over the world."
--Richard Lawrence, curator of The Curly Flat




And a yabby is some sort of Aussie crustacean: looks like a crawdad to me.

Unintended consequences: King Ludd was right

Natural science has a funny way of bumping up against high tech. While we are way past the point of  rationally discussing whether we'd be better off without automobiles, industrialized agriculture, or Auto-Tune (I'd vote against all three), not all high tech gadgets are irreversibly entrenched in our culture.

King Ludd--waiting for rain to wash his hands

 
Hands-free sinks have always annoyed me--I like being able to alter the water temperature, and I have a bad habit of setting my papers down on the sink's edge, with predictable consequences. They make sense, though--less touching, more sanitary. The last thing a hand touches before turning on a bathroom sink may be a less-than-pristine orifice.

Hospitals have spent oodles of dollars installing the sinks for this reason. Nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infections are a huge expense, and despite occasional evidence to the contrary, hospitals want their patients to get better.

Alas, turns out the money may be wasted. A Johns Hopkins study shows that automatic faucets may increase risks of nosocomial infections; the fancy valves used in the high-tech sinks serve as breeding grounds for Legionella bacteria.

As a result, "hospital leadership elected to use traditional fixtures – some 1,080 of them – in all patient care areas in the new clinical buildings currently under construction at Johns Hopkins’ East Baltimore campus." Yep, they're removing the high-tech fancy doo-dad sinks and replacing them with, ahem, traditional fixtures.

How many high-tech devices in the classroom truly improve education? 

Maybe if they look at the morbidity from cars, they'll consider removing the parking lots, too.

Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!

"We failed to make orbit," Omar Baez, NASA's launch director, said at a news conference. "All indications are that the satellite and the rocket are in the southern Pacific Ocean somewhere."

424 million dollars into the drink, and the best we get is it's in the ocean "somewhere"?

Thankfully, no one knows how big $424,000,000 is anymore--other than it's a lot of money. And since no one trusts science anyway, a little more data on global climate would just get ignored.

But for almost a half billion dollars, seems fair to ask just where the sucker landed. Heck, a $99 GPS can tell you that.





The photo is from World Weblog Whizz.

Udder nonsense

(An ice cream shop in London started selling ice cream made from human milk in February for about $23 per serving; a couple of days ago, British authorities stepped in, responding to complaints, presumably about the milk, not the price. I wrote this a couple of years ago. This gives me an excuse to run it again.)

"Beer is living proof that God loves us
and wants us to be happy."

Ben Franklin

I do a lot of things that may not be good for me--I sit in front of this monitor too many hours a day, I like to go fast on motorcycles, and I use the top step on ladders. One high risk activity I refrain from, however, is drinking milk.

Cow's milk is for calves. Breast milk is for young humans until they sprout a few teeth. Aside from some sort of fetish practiced in moderation, adults should never drink milk.

In the cafeteria, Josephine serves me lunch. I love her. She calls me "Pumpkin," and she knows exactly what I like.

Still, I suspect she might be trying to kill me. She can't resist pushing the milk. People love to be in line behind me because I give my milk away. (I can actually get veggies and a fruit for only 15 more cents if I also take a half-pint of milk.)

Beer in moderation, on the other hand, prolongs life. It lowers blood pressure, reduces my chances of developing Alzheimer's, and, well, tastes good. Really good.

Really, really good. (Did I mention that I like beer?)

Guess which beverage gets the huge color poster on the cafeteria wall?

Now obviously I don't think the cafeteria walls should be covered with Guinness ads, nor do I condone drinking among the young (except maybe for those in my immediate clan during wakes).

Our love affair with cow's milk shows what a good PR campaign can do. We are willing to drink the milk from a four-legged critter while simultaneously repulsed by the idea of making ice cream from breast milk.

I'm not going to jump all over anyone for a bad milk habit--live and let live. But on St. Paddy's Day, when I carefully pour the cream over a spoon into my Irish coffee, it's not the whiskey I fear.

It's the cream.

Particularly the cream from the milk of another species.

My students continue to drink milk and Coke and Snapple and all kinds of other things that harm them, truly harm them. Diabetes is no joke.

In D.A.R.E., they learn that beer is a gateway drug. Too much of anything can be dangerous. Thankfully, too much thinking is not one of them anymore. Uncontrolled thinking could lead to all kinds of ruinous activities.

I'll drink to that.

I lifted the image of the beer in a carboy from Homebrew Underground
--at least until they complain or I find my own photo. Addendum: it's cool--thanks, Homebrew Underground!

The udder shot is from Genus Breeding.

Leslie points out, rightly, that cow's milk has not been linked to adult onset diabetes.
Milk has been associated with Type 1 diabetes, but correlation,
of course, does not mean causation.

Leslie also says stay away from BGH (bovine growth hormone).

To be fair, I'm a bit lactose intolerant, so I may be biased.

On classroom technologies

“Young students and old thrive on the tactile experience of manipulating with their fingers. And I definitely appreciate being able to interact with the content – how could teaching and learning get any more hands-on?”

Katie Morrow, Technology Integration Specialist
From SMART Board brochure

Our fry are getting bigger--some have migrated to mini-aquariums set up by students in recycled milk and soda bottles. We have a few more wheat plants forming heads, and a student announced that her sow bugs had babies.

We got a lot going on in class.

There's been a huge push to get "technology" in classrooms--I'd argue that a recycled plastic milk bottle holding two tiny fish and a strand of elodea counts as technology, but no one gets rich selling used milk cartons.

***

I am not averse to new technologies. I have a class set of netbooks (thank you Roche/BEF/Home & School!),  an interactive whiteboard, and a couple of remote devices, including a Mobi. We use them as well as pencils, paper, and cut shower boards. The students slide easily from one tool to the next, depending on the task at hand.

Most of our newer educational technologies involve recorded sight and sound--filtered views of the universe. I am inundated with catalogs that offer written words, videos, simulated labs, and models.

When a child "interacts" with a SMART Board, she is touching a flat piece of plastic, no matter what a specialist tells us.

 

The more I try to bring the world to my classroom, the more I realize the limitations of our various tools. Even words get in the way at times, especially when the words are designed to "teach." Words matter, of course, and sharing language gets us halfway there--but in science class, or in any interaction with the natural world, words fall incomplete. We forget this.

We do not live in a "knowledge economy," we live in the world. We eat other organisms, we breathe oxygen released by plants, we drink water that has passed through other critters. We need what our world provides; we are, literally, part of this world.

Our words are not.

I will continue to use our classroom tools, high tech and low, as scaffolds to the world that exists, but I will continue to remind my students, and myself, that our tools distort our views.

This past week a saw one child sticking his nose into our class bag of dirt, smelling the impossibly complex and living collection of stuff found in soil. He liked it, told another, and he took a good whiff as well.

Can't teach that. Not with words, with pictures, or even a new MacBook Pro with a 2.3GHz Core i5 dual-core processor and Thunderbolt technology. Unless, maybe, if you dunk it in mud first.

Photos from classroom.

Moving on up!

In the past, I have had some enlightening literature left on my desk.


If you reject Jesus, your Creator, that will be your worst mistake ever! You'll be in the lake of fire with billions of others who believe we evolved from monkeys. 

Moving On Up! (Chick Publications)

If "billions of others" believe we evolved from monkeys, well, something is wrong with science education. We did not evolve from monkeys, we evolved from a common ancestor.

On the other hand, if "billions of others" accept natural selection as the mechanism for descent with modification, but are simply confused about which organism we came from, maybe there's still hope for science education and the billions of souls sitting in the cauldron of fire.

On the other other hand, if I'm 15 years old, and I have a choice between passing an exam about something I don't quite understand, or tanking the exam and avoiding the whole lake of fire thing, well, I'm taking the easy way out. Eternity is a long, long time--longer, even, than when the Cubs last won a World Series.

We must never forget what children are learning outside science class. I'm not saying it justifies willful ignorance, but really, if we just preach instead of teach, we are not going to make a bit of difference in our students' worldviews.

Yes, it's really called Chick Publications.

Spontaneous generation?

Explaining the daphnia was problematic enough, then came the mosquitoes. Now I got a tank full of fish fry darting about with no adult fish in sight.

Yes, of course, I do not believe in spontaneous generation. There must be a reason, and I have a hypothesis or two to explain where the fry came from.

But what do I tell the children?

Children who never saw a carrot develop from a seed before this year?
Children who never saw saw slugs before?
Children who are just starting to trust me when I tell them that the world that matters is the world that they can observe?


I'm not going to tell them anything. An empty tank now has a couple dozen fry, really just eyeballs with a tail attached, cute as can be and not likely to survive the week. I'll let the students figure it out.

My lambs crammed together around the tank, marveling at the tiny critters that started their lives right here in Room B362. They see what they see.

If I tell them what they're supposed to think I'll ruin the whole thing.

The fish fry photo taken from ExoticGolfish.net here.

A February horseshoe crab

I love this picture.

My wife has tiny feet--that is the tip of her tiny shoe. The tracks were made by a tiny horseshoe crab last February. Chances are pretty good no one else has seen this particular horseshoe crab, and chances are pretty good it is no longer alive.

But it might be. It might be just a mile off our beach, poking along mud 30 feet below the bay's surface, bigger now, munching on whelk. No way to know.

If it lives a few more years, it may return to our beach to mate. A curious child may squat next to it, an ignorant child may run away screaming. A fisherman may snag it with a morsel of squid, his hands washed in creamy blue blood as he struggles to dislodge the hook. A wave may flip it over, and before it rights itself, a gull may peck at its gills as it flings its telson (not a "stinger"),  into the wet sand, trying to right itself.

But last February, it sauntered along our beach, no more than an inch long, feeling its way along a world I cannot imagine.

***

Horseshoe crabs see light we cannot. They have 10 eyes, the two obvious ones sitting on top of the shell--they are used to find mates in the gloom of the bay.

They can "see" light with their telsons, their "tails." They have tiny eye-spots on the front of their shells, designed to see ultraviolet light from the sun, from the moon. They know when the moon is new, when the moon is full. Such news is obvious on the edge of the shore, of course, but not so obvious deeper in the bay. The horseshoe crabs time their orgies to the moon.

They also have eyes underneath, next to the mouth--to see what?

We can pretend to know what it means to have 10 eyes, to sense UV light, to rise from the depths to mate under moonlight, but it's all pretending. We cannot know the universe of the horseshoe crab. But we can know that it exists.

***

I have a classroom set of netbooks, from very generous donations by the Roche Foundation, by the Bloomfield Education Foundation, and by our local Home and School Association.

I love what we can do with them: students can collaborate on projects, we can grab information on the fly, and there is a huge gee whiz factor built into these tiny machines that can liven up a classroom. They are not, however, a window into the world.

The only world visible on a monitor is the human world. Even high resolution photographs of exotic life are just that--human inventions, pixels flashed through electronic streams. They are not real.

A human framed the moment. A human cropped the photograph. A human machine translates the signal into the image on the screen. It is flat. It is manipulable. It is not real.

Oh, but think of the children who do not have access to these wonderful creatures!

I'd rather think of our reluctance to let the children get access to what lives among us.


My daughter, very young at the time, once found a pigeon's nest under the creek bridge that led to our closest park. She watched it for weeks, first eggs, then tiny critters, then fledglings, then gone.

She wrote no reports, took no photos. She just watched.

We keep roly polies ("pill bugs") in our room--harmless crustaceans that bumble around in a few of our terrariums, going about the business of the living, sometimes doing a whole lot of nothing.

My kids can learn all kinds of facts about them from the internet, but the only thing they really need to know for now is what to feed them, how to keep them healthy. Kids ask me, and I explain that I really don't know, because, well, I really don't.

We see that they only shed half of their shells at a time. We see that they tend to hang in groups. We see their antennae busily working the world immediately in front of them. Occasionally some die, occasionally new ones appear.

No pixels, no chips, no pressure. Just our classroom companions, who will be brought back to the outside world when the sun returns.

***

And what do the children take home with them? I do not know, I'll have to ask them years from now.

I do know that if the kids do not see life beyond the human walls now, it is unlikely to happen later.
I also know that most children (and most adults) confound the world we created with the world that exists. Our economy depends on the fantasy.

So I teach biology. Life. And life cannot be found in a chip.

Great article on hoseshoe crab eyes and other bits of anatomy can be found at the Maryland DNR here.

Photo by Leslie.

Science fiction

 13 percent of teachers explicitly endorse creationism or intelligent design, and spend at least on hour of class time presenting it in a positive light. An additional 5 percent reported that they support creationism in passing or when answering students’ questions.

from Wired, citing Science.

What if 13% of science teachers announced in class that they didn't believe that our current economic system is sustainable, that there are limits in biology, that capitalism as practiced today will collapse in the face on natural limits? How long would they last?

What if 13% of science teachers made it a point to discuss the biological basis of homosexuality, to explicitly analyze twin studies suggesting that genetics plays a role in sexual behaviors? How long would they last?

What if 13% of science teachers explicitly discussed the phenomenal rise of breast cancer in our land since the 1940's, the rise of carcinogens found in breast milk, the local CEOs who dumped toxins on our towns, the politics of industrial waste disposal?

Heck, what if 13% of science teachers explicitly discussed the threat of leprous leprechauns roaming the countryside?

Ask your child what your science teacher "believes"--then do something about it.

The photo of the book cover from here.

And no, I do not speak of economic collapse in class. 

We do talk about population growth and carrying capacity. I let your children come to their own conclusions.

On the mosquito

I call thee stranger, for the town, I ween,
Has not the honor of so proud a birth-
Thou com'st from Jersey meadows, fresh and green,
The offspring of the gods, though born on earth;
For Titan was thy sire, and fair was she,
The ocean nymph that nursed thy infancy.

--William Cullen Bryant

I witnessed a miracle tonight,
Well, maybe not a miracle, it happens millions of time a day, but today it happened in my classroom.

I saw a pupating mosquito larva erupt into a tiny pale adult.

***

The late January sunset floods the back wall of or classroom. I have a small tank of elodea. A few snail keep the plants company. About a week ago, I noticed a few wrigglers in the tank. I have no idea how they got there. 

Just before I leave, I make my rounds, checking our plants, our roly polies, our snails. I love watching the elodea bubble off oxygen. It's a nice way to end my work school day.

Just under the water's surface, I glimpsed a violent wiggling. A glassine wriggler struggled at the surface, occasionally contracting violently, reminiscent of the last violent transition stage of human birth.

In this tiny universe, the glassine mosquito struggled against the water's skin. The pupa looked like fine crystal, lit by the setting sun and the tiny light above.

I watched for about 15 minutes, until, finally, a pale adult mosquito emerged, paused, then attempted flight. Three times it jumped, three times it came back to the water, with the tentativeness of a newborn foal testing its legs. 

It needs nectar, and it won't find it tonight. I suspect it will be dead by morning.

***

Where did it come from? How do the countless microscopic critters alive in our room find their way here?

I encourage my students to draw conclusions from the observations they make. They now have a decision.

They can trust me when I tell them spontaneous generation does not happen, that all cells come from pre-existing cells, that life only comes from existing life. The ponds outside a frozen, the snow over a foot deep. We have not seen flying insects outside for over a month.

And I have a tank full of wrigglers sitting in the back of my classroom.

Or they can quietly believe in spontaneous generation. For a few moments tonight, as I knelt watching the emerging pale ghost of a mosquito erupt from the water, I would have quietly agreed with them.

The poem excerpt is from The Mosquito, written in the 19th century.
The music is from Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, "I'm Nature's Mosquito"--I'm playing it in class tomorrow.

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