Mr. President, we "learn to live"

The 2nd repost today, again more for me than anything else.

"Through this plan we are setting an ambitious goal: All students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career – no matter who you are or where you come from."

President Obama, March 13, 2010

Mr. President, can we cut through the crap?

I'm a retired pediatrician. A lot of children are damaged--some by bad luck, many by bad choices made by others.

Yes, the photo is unsettling, yes, too many children have been lost because we did not acknowledge their potential, but your rhetoric is fanning a dangerous fire.

I teach healthy children, and I teach damaged children. I teach wealthy children, and I teach poor children. I teach children with fancy orthodontia, and children with rotting teeth.

I teach America, Mr. President. If you cannot see America from your perch in D.C., please spend a weekend back home in Chicago and remember the man you once were, or pretended to be.

Come to Bloomfield--our motto here is "Learn to live." Some of us have careers, some of us have jobs. Some of us went to college, some of us were apprenticed. Most of us are happy, even the good chunk of us who have neither careers nor degrees.

Focus on getting the jobs back, and towns like Bloomfield will fill them well. We send soldiers to war--our street signs carry the names of those killed and missing in action. We have young folks overseas now. We helped process uranium during World War II, and have the contaminated useless land to show for it.

Learn to live. Not learn to earn, not learn to serve Microsoft, but simply learn to live. Most of my students will leave BHS with decent academic skills and decent decency skills.

All the degrees in the world won't fix the plumbing. All the degrees in the world will not land a job that's now in Asia. All the degrees in the world will not make you a better citizen, friend, or lover.

Learn to live, Mr. President, and let us go about our business doing the same. And if you need the name of a decent carpenter, a decent bakery, a decent school, give me a call. We got them right here in Bloomfield, the America outside the Beltway.

The disturbing photo from Temple University is real, and it's human.
The classroom photo is from Bloomfield, 1914, found here, shared at the Bloomfield Historical site by David Petillo.

Local matters

The cherry blossom petals are gently falling now, as the faint fragrance and pink light give way to the green leaves. After the burst of sex, the trees get down to the business of living.

As old as I am compared to my students, I've only lived two extra years for each one of theirs, plenty of time to collect scars and wrinkles and gray hair, but not nearly enough time to pretend I've learned anything they do not already know, except that they, too, will be surprised at the older face staring back at them in the morning mirror.

One of my students was surprised to learn today that I had dissected a cadaver, that I had seen many people die, that all this is expected for anyone in medicine. Death still surprises them.

Death still surprises me, truth be told, but it's no longer novel.

The cherry blossoms, too, surprise me. They are exuberant beyond imagination. I cling to my incomplete memory of them every February, My catechism: Does spring exist? Yes, it does, and it will return to reign the Earth. Amen.

And each spring, we are blessed, again.

When I was a child, two things mattered--the weather report, and the tide table. I got real busy raising a couple of kids, and the weather reports and the tide tables no longer mattered. They matter again.

I suspect they always mattered.

***

New Jersey just signed up for  the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test. You won't find tide tables on a standardized test. Too parochial, too provincial. PARCC is part of Achieve, an organization supporting corporate interests "to make college and career readiness a national priority."

They don't pay our bills here--my salary is paid by my neighbors. They don't know about the cherry trees on Liberty, the turkeys that showed up on the Green a couple of years ago, the lichen on the ledge of our century old high school building.  They don't know about our children, nor, quite frankly, care about them, either.

I'd daresay most members of Achieve couldn't pass their own algebra test.

This is bull crap.

Local matters matter. We know this even if suits who gladly pull stakes and move from state to state dragging their itinerant clans about for the sake of "national priority" do not.

The Victory statue is ours, the photo borrowed from the NY Times--click on photo for link.
The cherry blossoms are from BranchBrook Park last spring, via NJ.com.

Schools are for our children, for our towns.

Twitter is creepy

I'm on my second go-round with Twitter¹. It's a marvelous place to share resources, and an even more marvelous place to waste time while pretending to share resources.

It's (again) failing my death bed conversion question--were your hours being a Twit worth the time?

***

An interesting "chat" developed last night. (Not sure anything limited to 140 character strings counts as a chat...)

A couple of online bright online folks who also teach science both challenged my belief that we need to draw strict boundaries between teachers and students online. I respect them; their opinions matter.

Here's the gist²:

Follow your students. Follow your parents. Twitter is useful. "But don't follow leaders and watch your parking meters."

I would never follow students here (creepy) and my parents are dead (creepier)

not creepy to "follow" students. more teachers need to follow their students intellectually here and there and everywhere.

It's creepy. I see them in town. I live here. They drop by when I'm on the stoop. But online is creepy.

/We need borders, strong borders, outside the classroom.

we are the same person "online" as "offline." not sure of the distinction you need to make.

Yep, we are, BUT I fart in the bathroom, use the vernacular at the bar, scream at the stadium, and pray in church.

/ When I'm on my stoop, the whole neighborhood sees me--online, mostly strangers.

/ I realize that in the tweetworld I sound like an anomaly--but that's the way most of human society works.

/ The online world is a phenomenally difficult place to draw social distinctions, a plus at times, but a huge negative if naive.

***

• You're an adult, your student a child.
• You're paid to be in school, the student is coerced.
• You hold the child's esteem in your classroom demeanor, and her future in your grade book.
• You are presumably wiser, the student more naive.

We wield phenomenal power over students. We forget this at our (and our students') peril.

***

Twitter is a public space, I get that. So is the Bloomfield Green. I occasionally bump into students there.

Teachers have a responsibility to model reasonable behavior in a public space, I get that, too. You won't see me cavorting through the Green wearing a clown suit. OK, not more than once....

Teachers are models. Part of being an adult is recognizing social boundaries and knowing what behavior is appropriate when.

Children need to learn this. Apparently, some of us, do, too.

¹Twitter is an archived chat service that let's you yammer at others in 140 or less character bursts. You can choose which groups to join on the fly, and you can link to online resources. It can be a wonderful resource, just like alcohol can be a wonderful relaxant.

²I edited out a lot of extraneous nonsense, and the "/" represents breaks in the messages. The italicized print represents one of the two teachers, the plain text is me.

The Creeping Terror may be on my top 10 favorite movie theme songs list--image lifted from Apocalypse Later.

And the answer to the first question? No, not for me....I'm done with Twitter.

The Business Roundtable teaches biology

Vision: A quality science education fosters a population that...applies scientific knowledge and skills to increase economic productivity.

2009 NJ Core Curriculum Content Standards

I am a science teacher, and occasionally a good one. I am certified by the state of New Jersey (Liberty and Prosperity), and paid by the Township of Bloomfield, which was bought from the Yancetaw Indians. Our first public school opened in 1758.

This makes me a government agent.

Prosperity (from our state motto) keeps getting confused with economic productivity, which smells like part of the Business Roundtable's undemocratic take-over of a public institution.

***

Tonight I made a butter run (salted, of course) to the local A&P; I said hello to Michael, now a man whom I've known since he wore diapers, while he lassoed some carts, working at the same place his brother has for years. While in line at the checkout, a young child, perhaps 5 years old, shyly made eye contact.

I knew the checkout lady, she's been there forever. I've been going there forever. The store has been there forever. My grandfather, born in 1898, used to work at another A&P when he was still a young man. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company has been around forever.

Forever's about to end.

***

The Business Roundtable folks may know how to run a business (though the recent evidence suggests otherwise--we're in for a long slide), but they know jack snot about biology.

All economies are ultimately based on reality, on the natural world. Soil. Water. Wood. Oil. Corn. Cotton. Wool. You can still follow the price of pork bellies in the New York Times business section.

If we continue to define prosperity by growth, even prettied up "sustainable growth," our children will be harmed.

Carrying capacity is the number of organisms of a particular species a given patch of Earth can sustain indefinitely.

In class I try to make connect my lambs to the world, to what's real, to what matters. I do not, however, want to give them nightmares--there's time enough for that in early adulthood.

If the NJ DOE continues to kneel down to the Business Roundtable and Achieve, Inc., and other groups who do not have the best interests of my students at heart, then do not be upset if I start sharing the truth.

Humans are animals. The land, the seas, have limits. The economy cannot (and will not) grow indefinitely. The living world is collapsing, and it's going to get ugly, real ugly, in a generation or two if those with money do not pull their heads out of their collective (and full) sigmoid colon.

The young girl I saw tonight, smiling as the checkout lady chatted in a dying store, does not deserve the education the Business Roundtable wants.

She deserves better. She deserves the truth.

The Business Roundtable lifted from their site.
The Monopoly photo from Life collection at Google.
And yep, I'm serious....we cannot handle the truth.

"Arne, you're doing a heckuva job...."

Poor little rich kid.

Mr. Duncan is going to take a lot of flak for his Katrina komment, joining the Brownie School of Fixing by Diaspora, but he's already getting blog-flogged for that.

No, I'm more interested in the psychology of Duncan Dogooder, trying to anticipate how much damage this poor little rich kid is going to inflict on public education before he rides into the sunset, reading The Little Engine That Could to budding embryos in a Chicago church basement.

There are going to be a lot more losers than winners.
I know my popularity's going to plummet.

Arne, on the RttT grant awards

What an odd thing to say.

While I agree, Arne, that your playground popularity right now rests on the dollars you're tossing on the asphalt, I find it telling that your popularity plays into this at all.

Madeline Levine, a clinical psychologist, notes that children who were "indulged, coddled, pressured and micromanaged on the outside...appeared to be inadvertently deprived of the opportunity to develop an inside."

Let's see. Child of professor. Pro ("The Cobra") athlete. Home for a year mid-college to work in his mother's tutoring center.

More from Dr. Levine:

I think there's been a real ratcheting up of materialism, as opposed to an emphasis on making connections with people. Competition counts more than cooperation.

We don't need hurricanes and poor little rich kids to fix our schools. We need communities.

Community is an old word, and a good one. Communis. Shared by many.

New Jersey's RttT application is flawed enough to catch the Washington Post's attention. While we could certainly use the money, I am proud we did not completely capitulate to the whims of a manchild whose life has been framed by a fishbowl.

Until Arne can tell me how many squirrels live on the Bloomfield Green, that poor little rich kid can kiss my arse. He's taken class warfare to W's level.

Heckuva job, Arne.

Kudos to Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog for pointing out the original quote.

Essential questions

A few of my goldfish made the annual pilgrimage from my backyard puddles to classroom aquariums.

The classrooms were empty as I cajoled bubblers and filters to return to life. Saturday classrooms feel like midnight cemeteries.

Each classroom has a list of essential questions defining the ultimate goals of a unit. Our district spend gobs of money getting Grant Wiggins to talk to us, and by golly, we're going to keep posting the questions.

I have no problem with essential questions. I have no problem with Genesis, either. If we're serious about either, you might want to think twice before using them in a public school.

Grant Wiggins, the father of Understanding by Design, says that essential questions are "broad in scope and timeless by nature. They are perpetually arguable."

Indeed. I have only, alas, 48 minutes in a period.

My fish will intrigue a few students. My essential questions, which I love to develop, will not. I work with 15 year old man childs. Woman childs. Children lost in the magical thinking of brains seduced by sex hormones literally resetting their genomic activity, sex hormones that slide right past the phospholipid bilayers of their cell membranes, causing pieces of quiescent DNA to be transcribed, to wake up, to make proteins that will lead to bad decisions and dangerous behaviors that will usually result in another generation of human DNA.

Desire.

***

I watched my cockroach probe the edge of the Petri dish with its antennae, searching for a gap large enough to escape the scrutiny of young adult humans peering through the stereoscope. The same cockroach now sits in a bucket on my stoop on a wet, snowy night, waiting for me to figure out where to release it.

In science, we learn to avoid words like "want" and "desire," because we cannot assume that a, say, proton "wants" to be closer to an electron, though we can empirically see some sort of attraction. Everything made of stuff is attracted to everything else made of stuff--we call it gravity, and maybe it no longer amazes most folks, but it still amazes the poop out of me.

So when Doreen sees the cockroach clean its antenna by dragging it through its palps, I am supposed to correct her by explaining that cockroaches do not "want," they just "do."

I keep silent. This particular cockroach on this particular day clearly wanted to clean its antenna. I wasn't going to argue the point with a 15 year old H. sapiens, not when it took me two months to get her to trust her eyes over the words in a textbook.

***

And what is desire? What is attraction?

It is (perhaps) a uniquely human thing to imagine a better life, and work towards a long range goal. Immediate behaviors to attain long-term goals require either a fine imagination or the jackboot up the gluteus of instinct.

I remember very little about 15, but I remember this much--I wanted Desiree, desired her, was attracted to her, use whatever verb you care to use, beyond reason or imagination or sense.

I was like an electron trapped by a proton, and about as conscious.

If desire is reduced to seeking behaviors that reduce the ache of desire, then my cockroach is capable of desire. No surprise there, tautologous as it is. No, the surprise is recognizing that what I felt when I was 15, something I may have called "love" or "lust" or "friendship" was no more (or less) real than the need for the cockroach to escape its Petri prison.

Accepting that a cockroach may have desires is not elevating it to the hallowed plane of a Harvard professor searching her cerebral cortex for the phrase that will impress her suitor with her cleverness, her literateness, her, um, humanness.

And I do not mean to belittle the professor. But aren't there days when even the elite among us would like our desires to be as simple as the cockroach's.

(And here's the dirty little secret--on most days, they are.)

***

And what do we know of cockroach desire before the testosterone and estrogen warp us beyond our human nature?

We know thirst.

One of the biggest mistakes I made as a resident was letting a mother be a mother. Her baby was severely dehydrated, his salt concentrations dangerously imbalanced. Correcting the imbalances too quickly could lead to his death.

His mother let him drink. And drink. The baby boy sucked on the Pedialyte with all the urgency and need of Athena emerging from Zeus' head, the need electrons feel for protons, the need I felt for Desiree.

The baby seized. The baby, now in his twenties, may not be the same person he would have been had I thwarted his desires. I do not know how much brain damage was done.

Incomprehensible want, behaviors altered for unimagined (and unimaginable) ends, for no reason beyond the attraction of desire.

So when Doreen tells me the cockroach wants to clean itself, I do not correct her, because she is right.

***

My essential questions in class keep drifting back to matter and energy, and because I do not pretend to have a grasp of either, drift even further back to "why?"

I see essential questions like some see democracy--if either truly worked, they would be banned. Public schools cannot tolerate children seeking answers to essential questions. We expect them to sit (for 48 minutes, no more, no less) at a desk studying a subject they did not choose.

If I want to teach science, I need to go outside, and I need to be less vocal.

That I continue to teach inside, modulating my voice like an orator (or a clown), hoping to maintain their attention long enough to skewer them with the NJ Core Curriculum Standard 5.12.1.A3 or 5.12.4.B4, shows I am human, able to thwart real desires with imagined riches given to those who persevere.

And I am failing. I am a good teacher, but not a great one.

If I were a great one, a child (or two or three) would stand up on a beautiful day, and walk out into the sun and set herself by a pond or a tree and simply observe.

And if I were truly a science teacher, I would follow the children out the door.

Another badger moment

I grew up in a new suburb carved out of the woods near the Sandy Hook Bay. We spent most of our waking hours outdoors, not necessarily by choice. As soon as you got home from school, you changed out of your school clothes and went outside.

Every day.

And we stayed out until dinner, ate, then stayed out again until dark.

Our division was new enough then that we still had woods. We had our myths--the "strippers" would make you undress if they ever caught you. The murderers would kill you. We were more worried about the strippers.

We had tree forts. We learned not to saw off the limb we were sitting on, logical enough, but not so logical that we did not test it empirically. We gained wisdom through concussions our folks never knew about, mutual silence.

Every child on Bayberry Lane could find their way through Turtle Woods and Grasshopper Hill. We were the wild things our parents, most of them city children, and many of them immigrants, were not. We knew the moon, we knew the tides. We caught turtles and frogs and snakes and toads.

And then one day we cornered a badger.

***

Badgers did not read the ecology journals, and neither did we. I do not know how we figured out it was a badger, but at least two of us had the Zim's Golden Guide to Mammals. What we lacked in cell phones, iPods, and GPS's we had in time. If Zim's said it was a badger, it was a badger.

We chased one into its hole, found its alternate route, and started digging. And digging. And digging some more.

Dinner time approached. We were busy. We sent a scout to tell Mom and Dad what we were doing.

Our parents, being adults, didn't believe us. "There are no badgers in New Jersey."

But we knew better. There was, it turns out, at least one.

***

We see what we're trained to see.

My CP Biology classes are studying ecology now. Today I had one of my favorite labs. Various critters, some alive, some pickled, are placed on the lab tables. A live cockroach next to a scorpion trapped in acrylic, a live snail next to a pickled pig. Potatoes and young pea plants failed miserably trying to seduce my children from the siren song of strange critters.

I ask the kids to describe features of two organisms. Sharks and horseshoe crabs and sea horses and scorpions compete for their attention.

"It's an eye."
Pretend I'm an alien--I have no idea what an eye is--describe what you see.
"Uh, a circle with a black dot in the middle."
Great!

She walks away puzzled. This was too easy.

No questions, and I resist judging. These kids grew up surrounded by a human universe, I grew up in a larger one. I need to be kind.

I have a large, live cockroach in class. It's actually the second one I've gotten this year--the first one died from student exuberance and my clumsiness.

This one is very much alive.

It's long antennae search the borders of its universe under a stereoscope. A couple of girls watch it.

The antennae undulate, probing as delicately as snowflakes on a calm winter midnight. Then the cockroach does something unexpected. It cleans its antennae, like a cat licking its paws. The girls are mesmerized.

***

It took hours, but we finally caught it. One fierce, slashing badger, true to Zim's Golden Guide. We marched home, our prized mammal as badgery as a badger can be, and we were promptly told to return it to the woods.

I learned two big lessons:

Parents can be wrong, and badgers don't read books.

***

Last week my daughter and I continued our futile search for a legal striped bass. Saturday was a gorgeous late November day--we watched the sun settle over the ocean, snuggling far south of where it should be.

Just before the sun touched the horizon, when our shadows were longer than our imagination, the few minutes before sunset when a Jersey beach makes Alice look sane, my daughter screamed the triumphant cry of a child with a striper on the line.

But her line was slack.

A half foot creature writhed on the beach. It looked like a shrimp with an edge.

My daughter went to pick it up. I stopped her. And I'm glad I did.

On a late November Saturday, a very live and active mantis shrimp, as impossible as a badger in a Jersey suburban woods, tossed itself on the beach,creeping and clambering.

And I was again reminded of my badger.

***

My cockroach, our cockroach, sits in a Chinese take-out dish in Room B362. It will be released tomorrow, or maybe Monday if the promised snow arrives tomorrow.

My mantis shrimp, our mantis shrimp, may well be dead now--it's too far out of its range, and December has started acting like December, as it will.

The sun fades south. I am not sure it will return, and for some of us, it won't.

But today, a few children here in Bloomfield became attached to a creature that does not know they even exist.

It won't help their test scores. It won't even get them past the midterm. It might even be the only thing they remember three decades from now, long after they've wrestled with whatever homework comes home with their children from biology class.

But if they remember the casual cleaning of a cockroach's antennae years after I am dead, I will not have wasted my time here.

Public spaces

Yesterday I left the Bloomfield Public Library as the sun was setting, and ambled across the street to the Bloomfield Green. I sat on a public bench with my books, half reading, half dozing. A child no older than 12 months or so waddled up to me with an impossibly wide grin, no doubt impressed by her new walking legs, her mom and dad and "big" brother just a few feet behind her.

A young woman was camped on a blanket under a large oak tree, reading in the dappled shadows--she looked up to watch the errant cherub who had wandered in her direction.

A rumpled gentleman later passed by, talking at the sun. Apparently the sun talked back.

The Green is a public space, has been since militia trained there to fight in the Revolutionary War. The town bought the deed in 1797, a bargain at $200, and it has remained public since then.

A parade ends here every Memorial Day--Scouts and Kiwanis and Elks and fire companies and school bands and politicians and Brownies and veterans march down Broad Street. The usual collection of colorful townfolk show up, including the Cat Man, whose cat costume stopped fitting about 15 years and 40 pounds ago. Shop Rite sends a tractor trailer to join the parade. The local Shop Rite hires a lot of handicapped locals and contributes to the food bank--it has earned the right to be in our public parade.




Every fall we have the Harvest Fest with a carnival and lots of folks selling trinkets.

Three years ago Raymond died while sleeping on a bench on a very cold night, a local man known to the police as "a big drinker," an empty vodka bottle next to him. Folks had passed him earlier on their way to the churches bordering the Green, thinking he was just sleeping, if they thought about it at all.

The police knew Raymond had been hanging around the Green, but is is, after all, a public space. Public drunkenness is no longer a crime in the United States.

***

We are losing our concept of public.

The word comes from Latin publicus, derived from populus: people. People. All kinds qualify, as long as they're people. Toddlers, drunkards, plumbers, CEOs, teachers, cops and criminals--all people.

You can meet most anybody on the Green. You won't, however, meet Bill Gates or Arne Duncan or Michael Bloomberg or George Bush, all who consider themselves leaders in education. And they may be. If you can't find them on the Green, though, they should not be leading public education.

And that's a bloody inconvenience for the mighty in our culture.

***

(If the Duncans and the Gates of the world foisted their views on their ilk, in their private spaces, so be it--they have money and power, and can do what they will with it. When they come preaching to the town square, we need to remind them what public means.)

My salary is paid by my neighbors; they support the public schools even though our town is not particularly wealthy and is largely working class. Many of my students are first generation.

Very few of them want their children to move to Seattle to work for Bill.

So what do they want from public school?

They want their kids to learn how to read, how to write, how to think. They want football and proms and Key Clubs and star parties. They want a public space for local events and local clubs. They want volley ball and driver's ed and classes that teach life skills. They want their children to be useful and productive and happy in this experiment call America.

Public places can be quiet, can be rowdy. They can be festive and at times dangerous. Public spaces are where everyone in town can run into anybody else from town on equal footing.

The Declaration of Independence continues to be read on town squares across our country every Fourth of July. Truths are not so self-evident anymore. If we are going to recapture what it means to be America, it's going to happen in our public spaces.

(If the Duncans and the Gates of the world foisted their views on their ilk, in their private spaces, so be it--they have money and power, and can do what they will with it. When they come preaching to the town square, we need to remind them what public means.)

The first picture was lifted from The Bloomfield Life, one of two local papers;
the second is from the First Baptist Church,right here in Bloomfield,

My daughter's blog

Yep, a plug.

Digging a Hole

Both of my kids did the public school thing. Both are loving, decent human beings who get what citizenship is about.

What else could a Dad ask for?

Separating the wheat from the chaff

Bloomfield, New Jersey, sits on the border of Newark, part of the urban fringe. No commercial farms exist here now, and if someone pursued such a quixotic venture, they would not grow wheat. We already have Kansas for that.

Still, given the rabid efforts of many Americans in these parts to grow lawn grass, it seemed a reasonable proposition to grow some wheat in a tiny patch of the backyard. Wheat is just grass all grown up.

One May afternoon, I scattered a handful or two worth of seeds over a 20 square foot patch, scritched the earth with a rake, and then went about my business. Three months later, I had my very own amber waves of grain fluttering in the warm August breeze.

I carefully cut down my wheat, tied it up into stooks and let it dry. A little pride crept in as I admired my stook, my connection to the past, smug as an urban Luddite can be. My smugness would soon be cured.

Separating the wheat from the chaff.

A quaint Biblical expression, easy enough to interpret. The wheat is the solid, good stuff. The chaff is the fluffy bad stuff. Throw the wheat in the air, and the heavier wheat berries fall straight down, while the chaff wafts away with the wind.

In the olden days, the collected chaff would be burned, not out of some symbolic representation of Hell, but just as a quick way to get rid of bulky waste.

So on Sabbath you head off to church, root for the the good guys (Yay, wheat!), tsk, tsk the bad guys (Boo, chaff!), pat yourself on the back for falling in with the wheat crowd, then go home and munch on some bagels made from, well, wheat.

Turns out it's not so simple. While today's pastor can glibly warn his flock to avoid the chaff types, any farmer back in Biblical times knew that wheat did not come in two parts. The chaff is an integral part of the wheat plant, the dry husk surrounding the wheat berry, the part used for food.

Before winnowing the chaff from the wheat berries, you need to thresh the wheat. Threshing is basically knocking the wheat kernels off the rest of the plant. Today this is done with a combination reaper/thresher (called combine for short), a machine that can cost well over a million dollars.

I was not going to invest a million dollars to harvest a tiny patch of wheat. I got to do it the old-fashioned way--beating the wheat until my arms were ready to fall off.

Initially I tried a Wiffle ball bat. Little success.

I made a flail--two sticks tied together end-to-end, allowing me to beat the heads of wheat much more efficiently. A flail looks like nunchaku, or nunchucks, for a good reason. Nunchaku were initially farming tools.

Flailing is very hard work. I pounded and pounded my small stook. I once shoveled scrap metal on ships in Port Newark. I'm not sure which is harder.

The chaff is an integral part of the plant, not some sinister fluff stalking the grain. Separating the wheat from the chaff is not about separating good folks from bad. That's too easy.

Before separating a part from itself, you need to break it. Threshing wheat requires violence. The wheat plant is broken. Separating the wheat from the chaff involves breaking one's lesser tendencies from the better.

Indeed, the actual separating part is easy. Once the grain is threshed, just wait for a breezy day and toss the threshed grain in the air. The wheat berries will bounce at your feet, the chaff blown away. People once knew this. Wheat and chaff were not distinct elements until after the threshing.

The parabolic statement about wheat and chaff reminds us not only that the community is mixed but also that each of us have our own good and bad elements. There is for each of us chaff that needs to be blown away and burned. There is a separation here of good and bad, useful and useless; but it is not like the difference between apples and oranges. Each of us individually is wheat and chaff.

The Very Rev. Dennis J.J. Schmidt, from The Wheat and the Chaff, December 9, 2001

I will not likely grow wheat again; I have too little land, and the work of threshing by hand is a bit much for a man in his fifth sixth decade.

What do I have to show for it? Well, I have a half pint of homegrown wheat sitting in a Mason jar, enough for a couple of bagels should I grind it into flour.

More importantly, I have a better grasp of "separating the wheat from the chaff," and what a loaf of bread meant to my forebears, and still means to most of the people alive today.

The thrashing woodcut is from a Czech tourism site. My Czech is a bit limited.
The wheat stook photo form the National Archives.

The Orion Nebula shines on an old neighborhood

I got to show a few people the Orion Nebula tonight. Our astronomy club at the high school prides itself on urban viewing, and we have adopted John Dobson's approach to stargazing--we even call ourselves the Bloomfield High Sidewalk Astronomers.

The high school security lights make star-hopping an act of faith, and through faith we manage to find the nebula--we sort of could see Orion's sword, and from there we bumbled our way to the nebula.

Light that traveled over 1,200 years hit the eyes of several people here in Bloomfield tonight. Charlemagne was Emperor of the West when those photons left their source.

An older security guard born in another land, a young man who's fought a disability that he will not let define him, and a student transferring from our high school tomorrow all got to catch some old, old photons.

Earlier today, a spectacular winter day when the mercury rose to the mid-sixties, I chatted with a colleague, sharing the joys of drinking beer on the stoop on a day like today.

On a day like today, a few folks will sit on their stoops, drinking beer, telling tales.

"White trash," she said.

No, no, not trash. And on this side of town, not mostly white, either. I may be black Irish, but I am not white trash, nor are my neighbors. There's something civil and democratic about beers shared on stoops. Ben Franklin would have fit right in.

So on a warm night in February, using a telescope bought by citizens of a town not blessed by extravagance but blessed with a sense of enough, a few more people gasped at the unexpected and the inexplicable beauty of our universe.

And, yeah, we drink beer.

December skeeters

A local donated a good-sized octagonal tank. If Π is still about 3.14, then the tank is about 90 gallons.

I filled it with tap water just before Thanksgiving, let it sit for a few days, then tossed in elodea from the puddle in my backyard. I found a stray leech in my prep room tank, so I tossed that in as well.

We have yet to put together a filter from the variety of pumps and tubes that accumulate in ancient school building, so the tiny critters that hitched a ride on the elodea are still flitting about the tank.

Today we had a hatching--a few mosquitoes clung to the glass under the aquarium cover.

Tomorrow I will show the kids--want to guess who the stars will be in the classroom tomorrow? And not one of the skeeters holds a Certificate of Eligibility with Advanced Standing.

Skeeter image from Agrichemical and Environmental News, December 2002.

I love the sound of breaking glass

A colleague mentioned today how difficult it was to teach Pascal's law in an era when children don't know what a piston is. (Who works on cars anymore?)

I threw out the ol' hit-the-bottle-with-a-rubber-mallet demo which is a lot of fun. I love the sound of breaking glass!




Not sure how well Pascal's law shines through the chaos (and I'm sure there are better ways to demo this), but it's a quick and dirty way to show it.

I wish I could--I don't have time. We need to get through the curriculum.

And he's right. He's teaching a college prep class, and must cover a lot of ground mandated by the state.

I have the luxury of teaching the low level students. No one expects a lot, and as a result, I can get a lot more done. Oh, I have a curriculum, and we have standards, but success at this level means getting through the year without bloodshed or conceptions in the classroom; it helps I'm an administrative write-up miser.

I joked that at least I get to teach science. I'm not sure he was amused, and I don't blame him. But it's true. Teaching science (in the sense of inquiry by the students) takes more time than the current curricula allow.

I can break as many bottles as I need to to rouse up love for Pascal. I can simultaneously drop a bowling ball and a penny a dozen times or more in one period to show that they do, indeed, hit the ground at the same time if released from the same height. And I can practice my craft in the literal sense. Practice this, try that--modify, assess, and modify again.

Evidence I can practice at the low level?

I am starting a wiki project in one of my classes. Not an honors class. Not even a college prep class.

Nope. Level 1 CP Physical Science. (Don't let the "CP" fool you--any class with a name longer than the District of Columbia betrays the subterranean level of the class.)

I can take chances with kids a good chunk of the education world wishes would just go away.

***

Problems? Oh, yeah!

Anyone who has worked in the basement knows that teaching kids at this level puts a whole new spin to the word "interesting." Sick parents. Nieces to care for. Dying grandparents. Food security issues. A perpetual lack of eyeglasses. Toothaches untended. Glassy eyes.

Tards. Morons. Idiots. Bad. Poor. Stupid. Illegals. Low class. Violent. No boundaries. Dumb.

You hear it often enough, you'd believe it to. And act it.

Do I have problems in my classroom? You bet...even had a, um, minor fire lit under a student's desk last year. (His defense? "It was a laser, I swear!") I had a pregnant true freshman. I've had kids with bruises they'll never explain.

I'm not going to sugarcoat and romanticize a whole class of kids that knows better than we do that they are not destined for Wall Street, for Harvard, for medicine, law, or even a decent union job at factories long closed.

Charms Candy Company, General Electric, Westinghouse, Scientific Glass--decent wages for hard work, now gone from our town.

I'm not going to get my kids interested in science by waving a blank parchment in front of them. Diplomas matter, as does science education. The mistake is believing that they matter for the same reason.

The Charms Candy photograph is from the Retro Sweet Candy Shop.

Mr. Clam goes to BHS

I have a clam in room B360.

Every now and again it pokes it foot out. If you move the beaker, it pulls it right back in again.

The students are fascinated. A live clam in their class. Imagine that. While it's a little disheartening that a clam's foot can compete with my, um, well-crafted lesson plans, I put up with its insouciance.

Descent with modification led to this--a clam in a beaker with a strip of elodea, me with a laser pointer and a sometimes functioning SMART Board. Both of us are out of our elements. My hands are designed to pick basil seeds. The clam's foot is designed to pull itself deeper into the mud.

Descent with modification. To call it "evolution" presupposes I am more perfect than my shelled classroom buddy. Neither one of us is enhancing our reproductive strategies in B360. Neither one of us is particularly fit for our new environment.

In class we both lack purpose--no seeds to cull, no mud to muck in. Neither of us will last more than a lifetime. I was planning to eat the clam at the end of the school year.

I can't. Come next June Mr. Clam will be back in wild water, sowing his oats. I'll be back in my garden, sowing mine. And a few of my kids will remember the tentative foot of a clam during science class decades after memories of covalent bonds fade from their lives.

A Bloomfield menagerie: praying mantis

Praying mantis, Visitors of the Prayerful Sort, taken by Scott Robinson

(This is a continuation of the Bloomfield menagerie series, describing various beasties living right here within our borders, easily seen if you pay attention. It's to remind me and my students that nature isn't just something that happens somewhere else. )

I heard a small commotion next to the old whiskey barrel holding basil and tarragon. I crept over, expecting to find a small mammal, maybe a vole. As I knelt to get a closer look, I saw a large praying mantis hanging upside down, an unusual position, at least for the mantises that live in my garden.

I followed the mantis' gaze down through the forest of mint that grew near the barrel. In the aromatic shadows, a brown snake lay poised to strike. The snake lunged, the mantis struck back, Jackie Chan against the giant serpent. The snake fell back, but did not leave. Again it set to strike, and the mantis cocked its head with the steady grace of an aging dancer. Another flash of movement, again the snake quickly repelled.

The snake started to rise again, and then slowly, as though accepting defeat, lowered its head and slowly slithered away.

Praying mantises can scoot, and if particularly perturbed, can even take flight. This one held her ground. Maybe its a praying mantis trait, taking umbrage at hungry brown snakes. Maybe it was peculiar to the mantis in my garden that day. No way to know.

When the snake had gone, the mantis straightened herself back to her usual position, head up, legs folded in front; she regarded me for a moment, her head slowly moving through an impossible angle, then apparently dismissed me as harmless as she went about her business.

In my days in my backyard I have seen a dragonfly merge from its nymph shell, only to die an hour or so later next to its casing. I have seen a lightning bug successfully woo her mate as the two exchanged brilliant flashes, she half-hidden on a brandywine tomato vine, he drawing out a "J" in flight with each flash (perhaps her name was Juliet?). My children regard me as a little odd, "But it's OK, Dad, you're odd in a good way...."

On warm, sunny days, my adult daughter sometimes spends hours staring at the life on the edge of a pond, just for the sheer joy of it. It is one of the few times I allow myself to believe I was a competent parent.

All of this in Bloomfield, an old town bordering on Newark.

A Bloomfield menagerie: paper wasp

I have been reading an anthology of articles and letters from Nature, a weekly British science journal which started in the Victorian age, and continues to serve as a major publication for scientists around the world.

Throughout the decades, Nature has continued to publish letters of all sorts, including a few that purport intelligence in beasts other than humans and the few others (dolphins, whales, primates) popularly accepted to have some level of intelligence.

Throughout school I was told over and over and over again not to anthropomorphize animal behavior. While my teachers (correctly) asserted that humans were animals, and that humans had some behavior similar to other mammals, one should not infer specifically human characteristics in animal behavior.

"Well, why not?"
"Because you are assuming the behavior reflects something human--that's anthropomorphizing!"

The circularity in the reasoning bothered me a bit, but teachers still carried the weight of authority, which I accepted.

In Nature, there have been all kinds of letters ascribing human characteristics inferred through observing behaviors of critters as varied as sea urchins, dung beetles, dogs, pigeons, and scorpions (credited with committing suicide to avoid life not worth living).

So here is my story--the observations are true, the inferences, of course, up for discussion. Since I have been on a Galileo kick, I will mention his take on using analogies in science.

Galileo was referring specifically to sunspots, and used clouds as an analogy to describe them. He was challenged on this, and Galileo explained why he used the analogy:

I do not assert on this account that the spots are clouds of the same material as ours, or aqueous vapors raised from the earth and attracted by the sun. I merely say that we have no knowledge of anything that more closely resembles them. Let them be vapors or exhalations then, or clouds, or fumes sent out from the sun's globe or attracted there from other places; I do not decide on this--and they may be any of a thoudand other things not perceived by us.

Galileo, "Letter on Sunspots," again quoted in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, translated by Stillman Drake, Anchor Books, New York, 1957, p. 100.

So here's my first in a series of observations of animal behavior that my teachers told me to interpret without relying on analogous human behavior. It occurred April 20, 2003, and I wrote down what I saw:

Today, I spent a good bit of a warm Easter afternoon watching a wasp make the third cell of her nest, creating paper walls from her mouth. I mentioned it to my wife; she reminded me of the wasp problems the summer before, so I decided to knock the nest out now, before the fish held a colony of wasps. I felt ridiculous caring about the work the wasp had already done.

When the wasp had gone to gather more water, I took the fish down off the fence post, and knocked off the new nest, as well as the larger nest left from last summer. I set the fish upside down on our patio table, a good 10 feet from where it had hung, and forgot about it. The little sadness I had felt for the wasp dissipated with a shake of my head, reprimanding myself for my silly sentimentality.

I spent the rest of the afternoon wrestling with a grape vine--I want it to go one way, it insists on following the sun. As I walked past the patio table, I noticed the lone wasp walking back and forth on the overturned fish. It looked frantic. It rapidly walked one way, then the other. It clearly was looking for the nest I had knocked off.

I called my wife--the wasp had clearly identified the fish as the home of its nest. My wife is rational, and a good empiricist--she keeps me sane. She could not understand why I got so agitated.

"Maybe it can smell the nest." The nest lay a good 15 feet away. I have a habit of saving wasp nests, shells, acorns, anything of interest not made by humans. "How do you know it's the same wasp?" she wondered.

I brought the tiny nest back to the iron fish. I laid it next to the wasp. A breeze blew the nest away. A moment later, the wasp left.

I was shaken. The wasp clearly recognized the fish, upside down on the table, more than 10 feet away from its original site. She clearly exhibited an increase in movements. At the risk of anthropomorphizing, the wasp was clearly distressed.

There is more to this world than I can ever hope to understand.

I'm not claiming that wasps "feel" what we do, far from it--but I would not be so quick to dismiss any and all animal behavior because it might, somehow, resemble human behavior.

It's not that we're not special--we are. But we're not the only things special in this universe.

My town and the Manhattan Project: incomplete thoughts for a lesson

This is going to be a bit long, and a bit local. It is for my students and those of us who teach them. It is about technology and memory, about abstract concepts of global community (nationalism/internationalism) and a more manageable concept of local community.

It is not about plutonium, at least not directly. “Fat Man,” the bomb dropped over Nagasaki, was a plutonium bomb, the second ever to be detonated (the first one was tested in the States). There was not enough uranium for more than one uranium bomb used on Japan (“Little Boy”), at least that's the story.

I am not convinced that evoking images of the destructive power of a nuclear weapon, then associating it with a contaminated site just over a mile away from my classroom, is a great idea with 14 year olds. It would make a good anticipatory set, though, and it does make the lesson more tangible.

I worry that one of my wackadoodles (an affectionate term) will spend an afternoon wandering around the site, then bring in a sample to check with a Geiger counter at school, with the subsequent evacuation of the building when the needle snaps through the gauge.

At any rate, these are notes for a lesson plan not yet developed. We live in the town where uranium was first commercially enriched specifically to build the atom bomb.

Next day Prof Wigner asked me to find another source of uranium metal. After some hours in the library, I cam back with the news that two people at Westinghouse, Marden and Rentschler, had made pure uranium metal for lamp filaments at the Westinghouse plant in Bloomfield, New Jersey. They held a patent on the process. Bloomfield was just outside New York City, only fifty miles away.

Ed Creutz went to Bloomfield a few days later and was remarkably persuasive. Westinghouse soon found itself committed to delivering enough uranium metal to make many, many lamp filaments. It was the beginning of their rapidly growing role as a major supplier on the Manhattan Project.

Dr. George Cowan: Personal Reflections on the Manhattan Project ,The Atomic Heritage Foundation

Dr. Cowan's interests now lie in early child development. He is also "a patron of the arts." He helped found a bank. He is obviously a bright man, with a well-rounded background, blessed with the best formal education our culture can provide.

He frightens me. Not because of who he is--I bet I'd love him as a neighbor, nor because of anything he's done to me. It's not fair for me to single him out just because googling "Bloomfield" and "Manhattan Project" happens to land him on the front page.

He serves merely as an icon in this post, an icon revered by our culture, the scientists who come to our rescue developing dangerous technologies for the (our) common good. We are blinded by reverence.

And here is what he has to say about his work, and others like him:

The lesson that remains most vividly in my mind from my wartime experiences is that teams of highly gifted, dedicated people working together on extremely difficult problems, given great resources, motivated by an overwhelming threat to national survival, and blessed with good luck, can work apparent miracles!

--also from Personal Reflections on the Manhattan Project ,The Atomic Heritage Foundation

I could spell out my several difficulties with this seemingly innocuous passage, but before I do, I must confess that my antennae vibrate whenever I see the words "national survival", "blessed", and "miracles" in the same thought.

Some of my kids live in the Watsessing part of town, a section sliced by the Garden State Parkway a few decades ago. The area has a remarkable neighborhood alliance (Watsessing Heights Neighborhood Association) that has battled, among other things, the use of a local park to serve as the staging area for a radium clean-up site in a completely different (and wealthier) town.

They know a bit about radiation, and a bit more about local politics. They can be a real thorn in the town's side, a huge plus in my book of how a democracy should work.

They put out a neat newsletter. And they remember history.

Not surprisingly, the Westinghouse site in Bloomfield was contaminated
with residual radiation from the work that was done there.
After the plant closed, the buildings on the site were razed and the
radioactive contamination removed to the satisfaction of the Federal
Government. However, the contamination is still above the acceptable
level for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
Westinghouse's successor, Viacom, hopes to lease the land to a
developer but cannot do so until the contamination is addressed. The
story of the Manhattan Project in Bloomfield still does not have an
ending!

Mimi Michalski , “Westinghouse and World War II” Watsessing Heights Newsletter, Spring 2004

And if we remember not to forget, never will have an ending.

A Bloomfield menagerie: leopard slug

Capturing critters for the classroom is, understandably, frowned upon. I'm more concerned for the critters than the students, not because I'm a heartless educator, but because there a few ways most of the local critters are going to inflict anything more than an adrenaline surge in the classroom

This is a slug found in my garden. While it is "humongous" as far as slugs go, just about all of my students outweigh it by at least a few stone.

This particular one is a Limax maximus, a leopard slug, but telling the kids that really tells them nothing about it. Seeing a picture of one doesn't tell them a whole lot either. Handling one changes the picture, and the slime will last well into 5th period.

And maybe mention to them that the slugs are hermaphrodites. And that they lick each other while circling end to end before mating. A lot.

Not sure my kids will remember the Krebs cycle, but slugs will take on a whole new life for them.