The end of winter

Our crocuses bloomed today. A tiny horseshoe crab, smaller than my thumbnail, crawled out of the Delaware Bay. The day lilies are rising again, like Phoenixes from the snow's ashes.

All of this is more real than the nonsense that passes for discourse in the education world. I can still close my classroom door (though I rarely do) and tackle whatever problems we care to tackle that day.

Why is my plant wilting? Hey, sow bug babies! I think my slug drowned.
How come the starfish hasn't moved in three days? Are those mosquitoes?
Look! Peas!

We got kids from Somalia, from Sierra Leone, from Poland, from China, from Ghana. Not third generation, not second. We're talking off the airplane (Newark Liberty International Airport) and into the brink. I taught a child who spoke only Bengali.

And we thrive.

We thrive despite the mandates, the tests, the current climate that forgets the roots of the word public, "pertaining to the people." Our town supported the last budget, despite the struggles of family after family after family.


Families that come from desperate situations know education matters. Families that come from desperate situations value teachers who care about their children. They put their trust in our hands, in our classrooms.

So while the elite press on about this magnet school, that philosophy, the myriad ways to use (and abuse) technology, scouring the US News and World Report for college rankings (and the NJ Monthly for state rankings), most of the rest of us go about our business, getting children ready for loving, happy, and (yes) productive lives.

But never just productive.

I work for Bloomfield, and its families, and for its children. I do not work for Arne Duncan, I do not work for Governor Christie. I give my all every day, because I want my lambs to be happy, in the Jeffersonian sense, and I want them prepared to pursue whatever dreams they hope to pursue.

I wiled away a good chunk of the afternoon on a jetty poking into the bay. I stared at barnacles for a bit, mourned all the oysters scraped off the rocks by this year's ice. The water was exceptionally clear, revealing thousands of comb jellies, floating in with the tides, then floating out again.

My happiest moments are spent on the edges of the sea. 

I stumbled upon the horseshoe crab, not much different than its ancestors that wandered these same shores when dinosaurs still roared. It may be still alive, it may be in the belly of a gull now. Tomorrow I will share its story with my students, because for them, these stories still matter.

And then I will test them on meiosis and synapses and centromeres and chromatids, to get them ready for the state exam in May. Those who finish early will be allowed to study their terrariums, their aquariums, to see how their critters did over the weekend.

 And the day will not be completely wasted, the last Sunday of February, as the light returns, and all things, all things, again become possible.

All photos taken today.

 First one crocuses, then the tiny (and live) horseshoe crab, then the points of a dead horseshoe crab, 

then barnacles hanging out waiting for the next tide, 

and finally, light as seen through the compound eyes of a horseshoe crab.

February barnacles

We got our first decent beach walk in since the flu knocked me off my feet a couple of Saturdays ago. The February light was spectacularly gray. The brown-gray bay faded into steel-gray fog.

A few huge oyster shells littered the beach--I have yet to find the bed off our beach, but I will. Plenty of smaller oysters have chosen to live on the local jetties, a few destined to end up in our kitchen pot.

Clumps of reddish seaweed strewn at the tide line reeked of wet dog, unusually rank. A seagull sat on the beach, not bothering to move, maybe hurt, maybe not.

On the way back we stumbled on a piling tossed up just beyond the water's reach. Barnacles covered its lower half, some still alive, but not for much longer, bound for life to this piling.

No sense trying to figure out the why of the barnacle. It spends its early life swimming around until it finally glues itself to something, anything. They keep themselves protected with trap doors that snap open when conditions are right, allowing them to comb the sea for food. I've wiled away good chunks of time watching them sweep the water.

When we talk of barnacles in school, if we ever do, we talk of the wonderful adhesive that stick to varied surfaces, of its potential commercial value. Or we talk of they're unusually long sex organs. We might mention that Darwin studied them for 8 years, as if that should hold a student's interest.We could calculate the damage they do to the shipping industry.

We show the photo, maybe a quick video of barnacles eating or mating, then move on.

Few of us dare talk about barnacles just being barnacles, nor would most of us let a child stare for hours at a barnacle on a jetty, at least not during school hours. In the end, what we learn nothing about barnacles, although we do learn a little bit about humans--how we classify animals, how we use animals, how we reduce knowledge to trivia.

And in the end, it may not matter if a child is acquainted with barnacles or not. But I will say this much--if I take a tiny strand of my DNA, and spliced it into the DNA of a barnacle, the barnacle could conceivably make a human protein. If I take a tiny strand of the barnacle DNA, and place it within mine, I could conceivably make a barnacle protein.

We share the same basic DNA structure, the same sorts of amino acids, the same kinds or organelles--we are more alike than we are different. I learned little about the barnacle while in school, but I did learn a little while staring many living a foot or two below the surface of the bay.

The barnacles did what they needed to do, no more, no less. They ate when they could, clammed up when they needed to, reproduced when they wanted to, and eventually died.

As they have since before I was born, as they will long after I die. Barnacles as they relate to humans hardly interests me--I know almost as much about humans as I care to know. But barnacles as barnacles fascinates me, and they fascinate children who stumble upon them in the wild.

The drawing is by Darwin himself, found here at The Complete Work of Charles Darwin.

Barnacle philosophy

I found the largest barnacle I have ever seen while meandering along the bay's edge yesterday.

The barnacle has not been dead long--the sweet decay of death announces its presence. It still has enough spirit left to talk to me. And it does.

I was alive yesterday, I am not alive today.

My neighbor died last week. A friend of mine's father is very ill this week.
All living things die. All.

I forget this.
Half of my clan has died, and still I forget this.
The monitor lets me believe I am immortal.

***

Darwin studied barnacles, thousands and thousands of them. I have barely studied one, and a not-so-alive one. (I did spend a lot of time when I was younger watching barnacles sweep their feathers in the water, mesmerized by their rhythm.)

In one day I have learned about the life history of acorn barnacles, that it can see in its early stages, that at its cyprid larval stage it sniffs out adult barnacles, then touches them, then attaches its small body next to adults. It flips upside down, then forms the walls around itself, the walls so familiar to anyone who has scraped the bottom of a boat. I learned this all on the internet.

My barnacle friend sits on this desk, next to this monitor. I sniff it again. My nose teaches me what my eyes cannot.

My nose knows death.

***

And why do barnacles need to live so close each other? Why do young barnacles smell and feel other barnacles before settling down for their lifetime on a rock in Cape May?

Barnacles are intimate with each other. Unlike clams and oysters and striped bass and so many other creatures ecstatically tossing gametes into the sea, barnacles, um, have relations.

With each other.

Yes, their anatomy reflects this--take a peek below if you're insatiably curious.

***

My barnacle lived a good life--I found him on a plastic pipe that had been tossed on the beach by a recent tide. He had company, and I suspect they had relations. Empty wine glasses, burned candle stumps. I knocked off his carcass with my foot, and he will likely stay in my home until someone cremates me.

He will sit on the windowsill with the shells of oysters and clams and urchins and horseshoe crabs and whelks and mussels. I hope that someday they all get tossed back into the sea. I hope I get tossed back into the sea with them.

***

Dancing only makes sense if you're going to die. Dancing costs energy. We do it anyway.

I sniff my barnacle again. I smell the organic molecules breaking down, food for bacteria, energy caught but never used by the barnacle.

In our cultural drive to be more productive, more efficient, more more, the barnacle's rhythmic dance on the rocks reminds me that my children are not their test scores, and that what I teach matters, even the stuff not on the tests.

Darwin suffered losses while he studied the barnacles. He was plagued by illness, and lost his favorite child Annie. Somehow he got through it, and wrote The Origin of Species, an epic work that summed up a life.

I'd like to think the barnacles helped him get through the darkness.

If you want to see a wonderful video of barnacles in action (and beware, men, you may develop penis envy), click here.