Staying grounded

Patch of backyard, moments ago

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. T.S. Eliot, from The Waste Land

In the end, of course, it all falls apart, reason enough to take care of each other.

The sun is just starting its journey back to the shadows, and you can smell, again, wafts of the dead and the dying among the exuberance left over from June. By fall, the air smells like rich earth again.

The ground beneath us holds a universe of stories, of critters both unimaginably complex and foreign, spinning life-stuff from the air, nitrogen to ammonia to nitrates. The story of us starts with the dust on our soles, the dust of our souls.

(We are not defined by DNA anymore than a house is defined by its blueprint--protein is what makes me me, and you you. )

Science as taught today no longer grounds us--high school science is an amalgam of abstractions, magic formulas that, if mastered well, help gain entrance to institutions that increase your odds of making a livable wage.

The Gospel of the NGSS tells us so:

"Beyond the needs of the economy, an education grounded in acquiring and applying knowledge positions students to improve their options in a rapidly changing menu of jobs, where few students will stay in the same job throughout their working lives."

NGSS, Appendix C – College and Career Readiness 

My classroom extends out to our school garden, our town's Green, physical extensions of the more important extensions to the earth and life, to the dust and death. In English classes, these themes are metaphorical.

In biology, when done right, a child should have moments of, well, terror, as she realizes that this human world of images and screens and light is as empty as the promises made by the false prophets around us.

Our children need to be grounded, in the literal sense. They need mud between their toes, they need to grow flowers from seed, they need to wile away afternoons staring at the life in a square foot patch of grass, or they will be lost, as so many of the adults around them already are.

Bee by the driveway, a year or two ago.

Science starts with what's real, and nothing less.
So do a few other things that should matter.

Education should start with a clue about what matters.

A seahorse tale

The tide was ebbing. The seahorse lay on the beach, just beyond the reach of the receding waves. I assumed it was dead--until I saw the tiniest movement of its tail.

I picked it up and let a few waves wash over my hand. Its head flicked a couple of times, spasmodically, without intention.

Then I felt its tail wrap around my finger.

Edge of the Delaware Bay, March 30, 2013

I do not presume that this seahorse had any awareness of me. It was in trouble, and may not have survived the day, but that's not why I am telling the story.

I am sharing the story because I felt its tail wrap around my finger with surprising strength, with an unexpected vitality.

 I do not believe that the seahorse was in any sense communicating with me--dying critters do not waste energy talking to alien beings. I had nothing to say to my seahorse, and the seahorse had even less to say to me.

The tail of this seahorse had wrapped on hundreds, maybe thousands, of things before me. It clung to eelgrass, to its lover, and if a male, grappled with other males who dare to separate him from his partner.

If this was the seahorse's last few living moments, the last thing it held was my finger.

***

Seahorses do not share language with humans, but if they did, their tales would be shared through their tails. If this particular seahorse felt any sense of vitality from the palm of my hand, the only way it could share this would be through doing just what it did--hugging my finger.

Another visitor from the bay

This is not why it did, of course, and that is not the point. But if the only way for a creature to share its world with us is a way that we dismiss as reflex, then we will forever see a mechanistic universe, and we will remain the lonely species we are.

***

We need evidence! Proof! Substantiation! Concrete facts!

Today much of the world rejoices over an event pieced together with the slimmest of evidence--the oldest of the Gospels, written more than a half century after the death of Jesus, ends with frightened women fleeing from an empty tomb (Mark 16:8). The rest is appended history.

I am not going to equate the curling of a dying critter's tail with the scantest of evidence that (in a perverse form) drove much of European history. Both evidence and faith have their place.

Still, if we cannot allow for the possibility that perhaps even a seahorse has a story to tell, then the slight tug of a seahorse's tail, a twitch of life on an early spring beach, means nothing, and everything is just noisy chaos.

Seahorses, it turns out, are monogamous.

Noisy chaos is cool, too, if you can enjoy the music....

Slaughtering science in the classroom

It's planting time--as has been for the past few weeks. I poke a small hole in the earth, drop in a seed, push dirt over the hole, then go on to the next.

It is an act of faith that each seed will erupt into a growing organism, thrusting it roots deep into the dark, its leaves arching towards the sun. It is through acts of science that we "know" how.

I can tell you the science behind germination, a complex and fascinating dance, and if I'm feeling particularly cognitive, grasping this complexity brings joy. That's not what I think about though when sowing, when I think at all.

I pick up each basil seed one by one from my palm, each seed felt as it clings to my moist finger. Live seeds, even tiny ones, have a vital heft. I know this through experience, something I have done for years because I enjoy it, and because I like to eat fresh basil.

It's a good reason to pray, so I do.

***

I do not believe in science. A lot of folks do, but a lot of folks are confused. Science is not so much about the "real" world as it is the natural world--and therein lies a world of difference.

Science is not a belief system, it is a process, a particular process of  story-telling to help us understand the events we're capable of perceiving in the natural world. Science is not based on faith of any sort except that there is some kind of underlying universal order, without which science would not work.

And science works.

***

No one has seen an atom's nucleus, though we all know the story. No one has measured the gravity imposed on us by a random star 12 billion light years away, but we trust that the mathematical expression of gravity applies. We cannot visualize chemical bonds, yet our students draw stick figures of molecules using a line to represent what they call a "bond."

We test these things regularly--and most of our kids mindlessly pass those tests.

We fetishize science, finding huge meaning in facts when what really matters is how we write the stories, how we enhance our senses to see what is part of the natural world, and what is simply part of us. (The two are similar, but not identical.)

Praying for a basil seed's being makes at least as much sense as drawing stick figures of molecules. The stories of science are meant, simply, to understand what we can perceive. My prayers acknowledge that I cannot perceive everything that matters through senses alone.

When we fail to make these distinctions, when science defines reality and everything else dissolves into mere fictions, we not only demean the arts--we kill science.

The basil is from our classroom.

The stick formula drawing from Joachim Schummer, "The Chemical Core of Chemistry I: A Conceptual Approach"

 HYLE--International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol. 4 (1998), No.2, pp. 129-162

A non-NCLB test for your students

This graphic from Adbusters was shared by someone on the AP Biology listserve.

Issue #84: Nihilism and Revolution

There's not much to say.
Not much at all.

I have never regretted a single moment spent outside, even those times an instant before impact.

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.

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.