The pursuit of happiness

I took a walk barefoot along the edge of the bay today.
It's December, so I am re-posting this.

A rose hip in December.

The dark days. Again.

My imagination fails me, as it will, surrounded by human light, human sounds, human smells. I cannot remember the smell of honeysuckle or the soft glow of lightning bugs or the warmth that wrapped around me in early summer.

I keep a small jar of rich soil dug from my compost pile on my desk in school. Now and then, in the middle of class, I take a whiff. The children see my joy I get from the earthy aroma.

My lambs know by December that I want them to have happy, useful lives. They know I want this for every one of them.

Why else bother teaching?

***

Thomas Jefferson got the tone just right when he penned "the pursuit of happiness." It is not an idle phrase, though it does sound a bit embarrassing in context of the modern classroom, the modern office, the modern mall.

Jefferson lived before we learned how to distract ourselves with twisted visions of immortality. We have become our own gods. Mortal illness comes as a surprise, dismissed as an inconvenience. Our cultural psychosis belittles those among us who dare to expose our mortality--if they only believed hard enough, they would be cured.

Ironically, the generation closest to achieving immortality is least equipped to deal with it. Time spent on-line chasing zombies or aliens or a Nazi nation long since quelled hardly seems worth all the fuss.

We no longer seek a life worth living. We'd just rather avoid death.

Death is inevitable. Pursuing happiness is not.

***

Yesterday one of my students came running up to me with a pot of tiny basil plants she had sowed a few weeks before.

"Smell it! Smell it!"

I did. And I glowed. Growing a plant in a classroom fits in the curriculum. A child sharing her joy at its sensuousness is not.

The seed, no larger than the head of a pin, darker than a cloudy December night, grew in a pot of peat. Shiny green leaves erupted from the seeds, now effusively shedding aromatic molecules that made me grin in December.

Something from nothing, at least nothing we could see. The poets have something to say, but so do the biologists. The aroma released from the leafs was made of carbon captured from the breaths of the same student clutching the pot.

If you've never sown a seed before, this is a big deal. If you've sown seeds for much of your life, it's still a big deal.

A hundred years from now, the human world may be very different, but seeds will still grow when planted.

(I am having pesto for dinner tonight from last summer's garden.)

None of us know what this world is all about. A few among us will tell you to live a certain way in order to reach worlds that no one has seen. A few among us will tell our children to live a certain way to strengthen abstract concepts like country, or economy, or success.

Success is a slippery word, but happiness is not. You know when you're happy, even when you're not sure how you got there.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--how many of these fit into your district's curriculum? How many fit in your classroom?

If we continue to raise our kids for a better economy, a better nation, a better world while neglecting their inalienable right to their pursuit of happiness, we risk the "blood-dimmed tide" Yeats spoke of.

Happiness is not happenstance, nor is it trivial.
Mortality is not happenstance, nor is it trivial.

Why did you walk into your classroom today? Did you give your lambs at least as good as reason?

Photos are mine, and yours (CC, yadda yadda)....

Fond of bonds

Les Trois Danseuses, Picasso, 1925

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

W.B. Yeats, from "Among School Children"

***

I teach biology, or try to, anyway. What I mostly teach, I think, is a way to look at the world, a way labeled "science."

Through a series of events mostly inexplicable to me, as much related to the state biology exit exam as to the retrograde motion of Mercury, my sophomores have had essentially no chemistry before coming to my class. None...

I get to expose them to chemistry. I love chemistry. To grasp chemistry, you need to grasp bonds.

Trouble is, there is nothing to grasp--in a sense, they do no exist.

***

I had a lot of trouble with the concept of potential energy when I was in high school. A teacher would lift an object, the pontificate about how this object now had "potential" energy.

Where, I wondered (and eventually learned not to ask), was the energy?

It's like trying to "see" the energy in the water at the top of a waterfall. The water itself is exactly the same at the top as it is at the bottom. I could see that a waterfall could do work, I am not stupid, but where was it before the molecules cascaded over the dam?

I was told the energy was in the object until I finally got my first real science teacher, Ms. Lehman, a wonderful woman with a wonderfully twisted view of reality (any honest view will be twisted) and the patience of Job, who explained to me that the energy was in the position. Over and over again until I got it.

Once I internalized this, I shot through chemistry and never looked back.

It is really a simple, simple idea.

***

The waterfall analogy suffers from a major flaw--rearranged atoms do form new substances. Still, you end up with exactly the same atoms that started the reaction, just scrambled up differently.)

Every time.

If you hope to get kids (or other forms of humans) to understand chemistry, they must also internalize the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy. This can take months, even years, especially if our children demand evidence. (Alas, we beat the snot out of the curious very early on in public education...)

We don't have that kind of time--so we (students, teachers, districts, states, with Arne's approval) fake it.

I suspect that's a major reason so many despise stoichiometry, a shame--stoichiometry is the Mikhail Baryshnikov (or Michael Jackson) of science, an intricate choreographer of seemingly impossible moves as energy flows through matter.

The moves of Michael Jackson do not "exist"--they represent the relative positions of pieces of Michael Jackson.

***

Many of us "teach" the photosynthesis/respiration equation this way:

C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂ ⇒ 6CO₂ + 6H₂O + energy

Kids see "energy" the same way they see everything else there, if they see it at all. Energy is hanging out there just like the other "stuff"--heck, they've been told since kindergarten that plants convert sunlight into food.

Plant do not do any such thing--they simply rearrange the stuff around into more complex, less stable forms.

We tell the more sophisticated students that plants put energy is "in" the bonds, and they nod sagely, writing  down like ancient Irish monks bent over their vellum, recopying wisdom passed down through the ages.

I'm not here to tell you the Irish copied bunk--I do not need my Granny's leathery yellowed hand breaking through the earth, grabbing my ankle. I will tell you, though, that our student do.

***

Here's what I do.

Every time I mention a reaction that requires a net input of enery to build a bigger, less stable molecule, I stack a lab stool on top of a desk. It takes exertion. When I'm done, I have the same stuff--a desk and a stool, but I have a larger, less stable object.

If I want to break it down, I still need to put in a little bit of energy to nudge the structure. This is not a trivial matter. If a few atoms are clustered together in a non-random position, there's something about that position that allows them to "stick" together. Every reaction requires breaking up that something.

We call this activation energy.

I love watching the stool cascade off the desk, loudly bouncing along the floor until it comes to rest in a more stable position. The kinetic and sound energy are obvious, the bump up in temperature where the stool collided with the floor a little less so. ( I've been know to touch the floor at the spot of impact and pretend it is hot.)

Energy released.

The stool lying sideways on the floor is pretty darn stable, and its position pretty darn strong. This may be counter-intuitive--students confound strength of bonds with the energy released as substances break down from less stable to more stable arrangements.

This is, of course, a bit of a simplification, but unlike the concept of bond as some thing betweeen atoms, it allows for growth of a more accurate model. It also makes visible the idea of potential energy as a consequence of position, of the dance, as opposed to the stuff itself, or the dancer.

The Michael Jackson photo is from Spilled Mind, without attribution.

You cannot appreciate MJ's genius from a still.

We're here to share stories

While I'll leave it to the great philosophers to figure out the meaning of life, and there are as many words as stars trying to do just that, this much seems obvious:

Humans are, in this neck of the woods anyway, the best at telling the story of our universe. We are critters of awareness.

I just wandered back from a quick jaunt to the beach to watch the sun set on the Delaware Bay. The sand was ridiculously cool, the water a tad warmer than last week, the sky pale pink, and the soft waves resonated one with the next. The air, well, nothing clears out the conscious brain like a whiff of bay air. I'd describe it to you if I could. I cannot.

No one can.

***

I saw an old friend this week--we've known each other for longer than most humans around today have been alive.I didn't used to believe age meant anything--I do now. We came to the conclusion that maybe we're just here to share stories.

Stories are about awareness. Being human is about awareness, as good a reason as any to teach science.

Here's a list of simple things any of us can do today to increase our awareness:

• Plant some basil
• Walk barefoot.
• Brew some mead.
• Grind some flour. Mix it with yeast and honey. Knead it. Bake it.
• Clam or fish or hunt or gather from the wild.
• Stare at some stars
• Sniff cherry blossoms

Yep, a bit slanted, and likely not the same list you'd generate. That's not the point.

You cannot define the universe, but you can become uniquely aware of your tiny chunk of it. Or not.

I think education is about preventing the "Or not." I doubt Arne Duncan or Governor Christie would agree (or even have an idea of what I am talking about), but I doubt either get Keats or Yeats, either.

OK, not a science post per se, but Yeats and biology are more closely related than biology and engineering.
Kudos to Tom Hoffman for turning me to Michael Ruhlman.

The widening gyre

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats, from "The Second Coming"

The dark days. Again.

My imagination fails me, as it will, surrounded by human light, human sounds, human smells. I cannot remember the smell of honeysuckle or the soft glow of lightning bugs or the warmth that wrapped around me in early summer.

I keep a small jar of rich soil dug from my compost pile on my desk in school. Now and then, in the middle of class, I take a whiff. The children see my joy I get from the earthy aroma.

My lambs know by December that I want them to have happy, useful lives. They know I want this for every one of them.

Why else bother teaching?

***

Thomas Jefferson got the tone just right when he penned "the pursuit of happiness." It is not an idle phrase, though it does sound a bit embarrassing in context of the modern classroom, the modern office, the modern mall.

Jefferson lived before we learned how to distract ourselves with twisted visions of immortality. We have become our own gods. Mortal illness comes as a surprise, dismissed as an inconvenience. Our cultural psychosis belittles those among us who dare to expose our mortality--if they only believed hard enough, they would be cured.

Ironically, the generation closest to achieving immortality is least equipped to deal with it. Time spent on-line chasing zombies or aliens or a Nazi nation long since quelled hardly seems worth all the fuss.

We no longer seek a life worth living. We'd just rather avoid death.

Death is inevitable. Pursuing happiness is not.

***

I sound sanctimonious. Would I drink from the Fountain of Youth? Of course, and for the wrong reasons.

I want to see what happens next, I want to breathe the air of a thousand Junes, I want, I want, and I want some more, and I miss the moment, this moment, the only moment that has ever existed. My fear of what awaits robs me of the joy of the present.

***

Yesterday one of my students came running up to me with a pot of tiny basil plants she had sowed a few weeks before.

"Smell it! Smell it!"

I did. And I glowed. Growing a plant in a classroom fits in the curriculum. A child sharing her joy at its sensuousness is not.

The seed, no larger than the head of a pin, darker than a cloudy December night, grew in a pot of peat. Shiny green leaves erupted from the seeds, now effusively shedding aromatic molecules that made me grin in December.

Something from nothing, at least nothing we could see. The poets have something to say, but so do the biologists. The aroma released from the leafs was made of carbon captured from the breaths of the same student clutching the pot.

If you've never sown a seed before, this is a big deal. If you've sown seeds for much of your life, it's still a big deal.

A hundred years from now, the human world may be very different, but seeds will still grow when planted.

***

None of us know what this world is all about. A few among us will tell you to live a certain way in order to reach worlds that no one has seen. A few among us will tell our children to live a certain way to strengthen abstract concepts like country, or economy, or success.

Success is a slippery word, but happiness is not. You know when you're happy, even when you're not sure how you got there.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--how many of these fit into your district's curriculum? How many fit in your classroom?

If we continue to raise our kids for a better economy, a better nation, a better world while neglecting their inalienable right to their pursuit of happiness, we risk the "blood-dimmed tide" Yeats spoke of.

Happiness is not happenstance, nor is it trivial.
Mortality is not happenstance, nor is it trivial.

Why did you walk into your classroom today? Did you give your lambs at least as good as reason?

Photos are mine, and yours (CC, yadda yadda)....

EduBloggerCon 2.0

I remember walking down Alimar Drive to Harmony Elementary School, feeling confused, pretty much all the time.

I specifically remember a conversation when I was in 4th or 5th grade. Scott was talking about the Marx Brothers. I knew Marxism was bad. I didn't know there was a whole band of them. Harpo did not sound like a Communist name.(I rarely asked for clarification of anything--I've always been a tad deaf, and I like to save my myriad interruptions for essential things.)

And so it goes for the techno world. Everything's 2.0, soon to be 3.0. Folks were twittering madly about #ISTE, and I thought maybe I had missed THE BIG ONE!

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the 2.0 Coming is at hand.
The 2.0 Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Siliconus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in mountains of Denver
A shape with man's body and the head of a bot,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its Core i7, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant Luddites.

with aplologies to W.B.Yeats

***

A lot of people spent a lot of money to spend time chatting up social media the old fashioned way, face to face. "Honestly, this is a great event, and many will tell you it is the event to attend at ISTE because it's all about connecting and sharing."

I had no idea what was happening as #ISTE and EduConBlogger references tweeted before me--and again I felt like the kid who could not tell Karl from Zeppo. But I do know this much:

1. Anything promo that needs to start with "Honestly" gets my hackles up.
2. I'm all for connecting and sharing, and I obviously push science. Convince me that an unconference will help me be a better teacher before I plunk down my time and money.
3. Convince me that attending this conference will make me a better teacher than, say, getting stung by a honeybee. (Really, I'd love to have a lesson where the whole class wanders around a clover field barefoot, risking a bee sting or two, but gaining so much more.)

I would love to meet many of the folks wandering around the Colorado Convention Center--some of my favorite writers are there.

Why not save the conference fees next year and all meet somewhere midway? Why not Auntie Mae's Parlor in Manhattan (the one in Kansas)? If we're lucky, Jeff and Vida will be there, singing of life.

And maybe even Scott McLeod, a true techno-guru who himself has become suspicious of these bloggerfolks, might let his hair down.

And I leave you with Jeff and Vida:

Holy water

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

W. B. Yeats
from "Among School Children"

Earth Day. Again.

For a few generations, a small slice of humans on this planet got to pretend they rose above the wilderness, the wildness. We pretend we are immortal. We hide our dead and dying.

Wheat settled yesterday for $4.99^3/4 per bushel. A penny will get you 2000 individual wheat berries.

An acre in wheat will yield about 42 bushels, gross about $210 for the farmer. The farmer pays for fertilizer, for grain, and sometimes for water. The carbon dioxide and sunlight are free.

I grew wheat once on a 20 square foot plot. It yielded about a pint of wheat berries. Cost me nothing but a handful of grain.

It's Earth Day--go scatter some wheat.

***

We eat a lot of wheat. We chew bread, break down the complex sugars to smaller parts, tiny pieces of which finally enter our cells. In our cytoplasm, the bread is broken, and even smaller pieces wander over to mitochondria. Oxygen accepts the now spent electrons, electrons initially excited by sunlight on a Kansas plain, and we recreate the holy water that initially gave up the electrons on a sunlit wheat field.

Resurrection in a water drop. The water is broken on a farmer's field, resurrected in a cell deep within my body.

I can never claim to be a reborn Christian--that implies a singular event. I've been reborn enough times to qualify as an Hindu. I'll leave the Mysteries to the theologians, but I do like our Creation stories, even if they are internally inconsistent. Good stories focus on truths, not facts.

And in the Genesis I read, our soul is made of mud. Our soul is made of breath. We are living souls, acts of creation, and temporary acts at that. We are part of something larger.

Every breath in, oxygen. Every breath out, resurrection.

***

How do you teach this, this mystery of the mitochondria, of the wheat, of water that splits and combines, then splits again, using the sun's energy, so that we can go about singing and frowning and dancing and copulating and playing and growing and, yes, dying, one generation to the next?

How do we approach the mystery from the science end? How do we teach that we are just a tiny piece of consciousness in a long dance of life, and a longer dance of energy?

And if we should ever succeed in teaching this, how will we keep the children in the classroom on a lovely, lovely April afternoon?

The drawing was lifted from the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor--
there is an annual fundraiser there in my sister's name--go enjoy yourselves!

Ironically, my sister was killed by an errant self-identified Christian missionary.

The Choice

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.

W.B.Yeats

We just came back from overseas in a matter of hours, hurtling in an aluminum cocoon. It is easy to wax philosophical when staring at the Earth several miles below.

If you do not know all that grows within a yard or two from where you are sitting, and none of us do, then contemplating "life" while staring out a window 6 miles over the Earth is a mere conceit. Ireland does not exist in the sky.

Leslie and I walked a couple dozen miles on Inis Mór, part of the Aran Islands in the Galway Bay off Ireland. Each step was different. Each of hers was different from each of mine.

Walking in the the late blue dusk not long before midnight, surrounded by stone walls built by men long dead, the air thick with a blend of sea mist and pollen, we watched a black slug generate from the shadows, its presence daring us to mention Darwin.

I am, mostly, rational, and being rational, will let go of it when it is no longer useful. I am not going to pretend I heard crows talk, but if I had, I would not have been surprised. (And if I had, I would not mention it here.)

I teach science. I love science. I do not, however, idolize science. A choice.

Walking through the west of Ireland through muddy fields holding the kin of animals we ate for breakfast, under barbed wire and over electrified fence, stepping over (and occasionally into) shite, edging along cliff edges, the crashing breakers below called me like Sirens. A choice.

Ireland is an old country. The mist rolled off the hills a thousand years ago, and will a thousand years from now. Someone else saw it then, someone else will see it later. The Irish and their land tell the story again and again, in many forms. We are mortal, we make choices. The Irish know what bad choices may bring.

Poets and painters, musicians and priests, story-tellers all, producing nothing more than the black slug emerging in the Irish summer night, when measured by the rational.

When all that story's finished, what's the news?

Rationality is a tool, an effective but jealous one; we present it to our children as something sacred, and I suppose it is. That is not our mistake.

Our mistake is ignoring the other side--the lure of the cliffs, the stories of the dead, lives worth living that do not contribute to the gross domestic product.

The black slug serves a purpose, as we all do--
it eats pretty much anything in its path, including shite.
It's useful even without knowing a lick of advanced algebra.


The photo of the slug is by Paul J. Morris found at the Encyclopedia of Life, released under CC license.