Daylight Saving Time, again....

An hour shorter makes for a longer week... 

"...[T]he shift to Daylight Saving Time (DST) results in a dramatic increase in cyberloafing behavior at the national level."

DT Wagner et al, J Appl Psychol. 2012 Sep;97(5):1068-76

A quarter of the world's population will be groggy tomorrow. A few people will die traumatically. Students' test skills will deteriorate. A few more people will die of heart attacks. The stock market may crash.

And yet we still do it.

Stonehenge time

You cannot save time.

You cannot add an hour of sunshine to your day.

You can, though, manipulate human conceits. If nothing else, Daylight Saving Time is an excellent way to demonstrate to children the folly and the real consequences of humans believing they control more than they control.

Tomorrow my 1st period lambs will trudge through before dawn through blackened banks of snow to get to school. Broad Street in Bloomfield will look like the zombie apocalypse. We'll tell them to keep their heads up (or at least wipe the drool of their desks before they leave), but we are bucking millions of years of evolution.

Photo by Eugene Ter-Avakyan, cc-2.0

Humans need sleep. Adolescents (still considered by most to be humans) need more than the 97 minutes my kids average on Sunday nights.

And why not? What better way to prep for college and career readiness in the global economy than making students take life-altering assessments while comatose? Have kids knock down a few Xanax pills, and chase it with gin and Adderall cocktails to make it really authentic.

"About 1 in every 6 high school seniors in the United States has ever had some exposure to prescription stimulants, either medically or nonmedically."

Stonehenge photo by Resk, released to PD

Yep, a repeat--I ilke cycles....

Aerial bombing of America, 1921

106 years ago an enthusiastic Italian reconnaissance pilot snuck a few grenades aboard his bird, and threw them out of his open cockpit aiming to harm a few Turks.

No one was hurt, but a lot of folks were shaken up by his audacity.

One of the earliest bombers, the Taube
[indirectly via National Geographic]

Less than 10 years later, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was more effectively bombed--though even the local historical society has no comment on that.

“I could see planes circling in mid-air. They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from their top.”  Buck Colbert Franklin via the Smithsonian.

It's called the Race Riot of 1921. It was not. It was a pogrom.

Tulsa burning from the top down

 Several hundred people of color were killed, over 6,000 were interned, and their town was destroyed, deliberately, from the air.

Reading two books that have been synergistic, and highly recommended.

Inequality in the Promised Land by R. L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy, and Air Traffic, by Gregory Pardlo--I got lucky and a pre-release copy fell into my hands.

My pinkie

I have a lot to talk about.

Education. Race. Pedagogy of science. EduCon. Wayward black backed gulls. Planting. Harvesting Brussels sprouts in February. Gaping oysters. Planting beets. Brewing my child's honey. Life.

February kale in the garden.

And here I am playing with my pink spaldeen. Bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce.

And it's become (bounce) apparent (bounce) about seven years (bounce) too late for this teacher (bounce) that the kids (bounce) who play with balls (bounce bounce bounce) do so because (bounce) they want to.

Not to challenge, not to distract.

Just to bounce the fookin' ball because, well, it's play.
And we're mammals.

I'm in my 6th decade. I'll likely die before you.
I like my pinkie (bounce bounce).
Reason enough.

Somehow this is related to Passover seder, but I've yet to figure out why--I'm open to suggestions.

Why I left Twitter....

This is (mostly) for me....

Mortal clams, mortal words.

This is an experiment.

I am mortal. So are you. My heart's been bouncy this week, nothing extreme, more like a polite panhandler trying to get my attention, nothing threatening, and it did.

I no longer pretend I know what's real--the dulling of age, the explosion of what's possible, it all becomes confusing. (I've had a lot of concussions.) But I know who I trust.

I have more time for the guitar, for the uke, for learning French (we're traveling to Paris in a few months), for raising Brussels sprouts, for clamming, for dancing and singing and living.

No one gives a fuck on Twitter who I am. But I do.
And so do a few folk I care about.

My blog started out as a public diary.
And it's ending the same way.

I could blame the switch from 140 characters to 280--I truly loved the game, the succinctness, the love of the value of a single word.

But that's not it.

It's the mortality.

You want to meet, want a postcard, want to connect, send me an email, and I'll respond with an old-fashioned letter.

Off the beaten trail (again)....

A dead drum, Delaware Bay.

Facebook is immortal.
Twitter is immortal.
I am not.

David Knuffke asked a simple question on Facebook recently. Is the benefit of a tool worth its cost? The question has been asked before, and humanfolk have dived into its implications for, well, literally thousands of years.

Ancient Greek phoilosopher? David Knuffke?

But not this time. The AP Bio FB group circled the wagons, defending their group without considering the question.

And then I knew it was time to go....

You want to share thoughts, drop me a line.

If not, that's fine, too.

Death on the Delaware Bay

The fish after losing consciousness....and yes, fish are conscious.

I looked for crocuses, but found none, so I went to the north side of the Cape May ferry jetty today, one of my pondering places, maybe the pondering place. The afternoon was February bleak.

The south breeze was about 8 or 9 knots, but the water was flat next to the rocks. I was hoping to find a seal (and I'm always hoping I'll see the spout of a whale again).

I saw a swirl, I thought. Then I saw it again.

A small striped bass, maybe 4 or 5 pounds, was cutting across the surface. It was not well.

A ferry was on its way in. Ferries cause a lot of current on both sides of the jetty. I know because I watch. (I do not understand the physics, but I know what I see.)

The bass fought against the surge, and when the surge reversed, as it does, the bass slammed headfirst into the rocks.

It floated sideways unconscious, the gills still weakly moving.
And then nothing.

I've watched a lot of humans die, including my parents. I've killed a lot of the living, and some would argue I killed my Mom as I eased her pain with increasing doses of morphine and Fentanyl.

I watched a manchild die on his 18th birthday, back when cystic fibrosis meant early death, when he was finally old enough to demand his breathing tube be removed.

And I am always, always shocked by death's finality. The myth of the soul helps us grasp death's final incomprehensibility, but it's just that. A myth.

I went home and picked some kale, in the middle of winter. We will eat it this week.
This is not a metaphor, a fable, a parable.

It's just life.

Maybe I needed the reminder. 

Your screen or your knife?

An essential quality of technology, from the spear to Skype, is action at a distance. Technology enables us to have an effect on people and things far away. In general, the more advanced the technology, the further away it is able to impose an effect. 

Doug Hill, author of Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology

Our lives cost the lives of others. That's always been true, and will be so long as we breathe.

Technology allows us to forget this.
Technology encourages us to forget this.

Experts spew on about a global community, but their hands never touch the blood and feces of the life around them. They barely touch their own.

You want every child "connected"? So do I.
It's what's at the other end of the connection that matters.

I have killed other living things, deliberately, but not slowly.
I have slaughtered animals with stones, with knives, with awareness.

We pretend the machines bring us knowledge.
We confound information with awareness.

I wish we spent as much time teaching a child how to use a knife as we do a Chromebook.

I could live without my computer a lot easier than living without my knife.
Modified from a few years ago.

The lighter side of teaching....

"Looks like the National [White] Teacher of the Year awards are back in full effect. I figured (and may have even predicted!) in 2016 when three of the four finalists were teachers of color that pendulum would swing back quickly. ::heavy sigh::" Melinda Anderson

I came back with something flippant, along the lines of

"What will it take to make you people happy?"

It was meant as sarcasm, but I soon deleted it, because, well, I feared it might be misunderstood. Or maybe I feared it would be understood, a *wink wink* as an ally.

But here we are.

In 2016, three of the four finalists for the CCSSO Teacher of the Year Award were people of color.
Since then, all of the eight finalists have been white.

Of those, only two are even brown-eyed. (I'd be more specific, but I'm a tad color blind--in the physiological sense, not the I-am-better-than-you-as-a-non-racist *we* carry as our shield.)

This year's finalists are all worthy. That is not the issue. That is not a defense.

TOTY Finalists, via Twitter (@ATLtrackclub)

And yes, the teaching profession has a remarkable lack of melanin and y chromosomes. (*We* pretend not to notice, unless you're a black male teacher, in which case it is expected you will go save young black men.)

The finalists mean well, they do good work and work hard, and they fill the role of saviors that make for good stories. Still....

Listen up, *my* people.

Mandy Manning is the Washington State Teacher of the Year and one of this year's finalists for the national award. She helps refugees adapt to life in the States, and talks about a boy from Tanzania who undergoes a remarkable transformation under her guidance. I have no doubt she is that good at what she does, and that she works hard at doing the right thing.

“District leaders, campus resource officers, community members of color, and professional writers have also visited my classroom. The visits help my students learn about school and city rules and laws, cultural expectations in terms of behavior and hygiene, our school system, and how to express themselves effectively.”  

On its face, that makes a nice soundbite, but it bothers me, because it's what *we* do, what I have done, and what so many allies continue to do. That "community members of color" is separated from the others is telling.

What *we* teach becomes what we enforce:

• School and city rules and laws: Which ones are enforced? 
• Cultural expectations: Who's culture? The dominant culture in Spokane, Washington?
• Hygiene: Refugee children may well have the knowledge without having the practice. 
• Behavior: How do *we* expect kids of color to behave? Is "acting white" a thing *we* even recognize? 

So here we are. 

Our President of color replaced by a white man who supports white supremacy.

Our Teachers of the Year finalists are back to storybook savior roles.

We can all be colorblind again.

Why always a boy from Tanzania?

Do yourself a favor, and follow Melinda Anderson on Twitter.

New Year's Eve

A couple of year's ago on New Year's eve.
Closest thing I come to resolutions these days.

I watched the sun as it set yesterday.
I watched the sun as it rose again this morning.

I don't do this often enough, few of us do.

Just a few minutes after the sun broke through this morning, a twitchy squirrel sat on top of a fence post, still, facing the sun, then resumed his twitchiness.

A vulture flew within 20 feet of me, its under feathers reflecting the sunlight as it banked.

I just watched.
It would have happened anyway.
And it's happening anyway.

And it will keep on happening....

Saccharin or sugar?

A letter to *us*:

It really does not matter if you proudly proclaim your allyship, wear Malcolm X t-shirts, march with thousands of others, or openly weep for fallen social warriors.

It really does not matter if you count your friends of color on more than one hand, count your tax deductions to the NAACP, count the number of people killed by angry, frightened cops.

It really does not matter if you groove to the Sun Ra Arkestra, Kendrick Lamar, or The Ink Spots.
.
None of it matters unless you do the things that need doing, in your loop, right now.

Ms. Garner had a more poetic way of summing this up--she got straight to the point, one of her many strengths.

Erica Garner (credit Aaron Stewart-Ahn via Twitter)

Yep, it may cost you more than that psychic hairshirt you wear a tad too proudly. Nope, you don't get any points.

Yep, your social circle may cinch up a bit. Nope, no one cares. Erica Garner reminded us what it means to hurt, to fight, to live.

Want to be sugar? Do what you need to do. What you already know needs to be done (but keep asking anyway hoping maybe saccharine is enough).

You can still wear that Malcolm X t-shirt, but keep it hidden under your clothes. Might make you feel a little bit like Clark Kent. You got the power, but nobody needs to know it.

Except you.

The arc of teaching

If you're preparing her for next year's class, and that is all you have to offer her when she asks why she's doing this, you are not doing this right.

If your biggest goal is to get her past the PARCC, the NJ ASK,  the NJSLA-S, the Regents, the SBAC, you are not doing this right.

If you're getting her set for college, polishing her essays, tutoring her for her SATs, writing her recommendation letters, and think that's enough, you're not doing this right.

If you're setting up internships, bringing in astronauts and engineers and lawyers and entrepreneurs into your school to inspire her to do similar work, you're not doing this right.

If you can imagine her in her last few years, aged, slower and in declining health, yet see her looking back at her life's arc with some serenity and peace, and your life had even a little something to do with this, well, then, you've earned your due.

You did it right....

Teaching isn't about you....

Some stuff on my windowsill,
given freely by the world.

It's not about passion of the teacher, finding the soul of a child, or lighting a fire in a kid's brain. It never was.

 It's simply showing a child the world that's herenow beyond the human noise.

The recent rush to classroom love-fests fails to acknowledge the value of the old curmudgeon who taught a few decades ago, gruff yet beloved, because she was not the point of class.

The world was.

Why do you think books matter to children so much?

Solstice salad

Late autumn sunset on the Delaware Bay

I do not do well with the shorter days. Chances are, you feel the same.

Despite bathing in the glow of electric light, the sun still matters physiologically and psychologically (and that great gray area between). And it has been disappearing slowly for several months now.

Lettuce in the cold frame.

With less sun I grow more tired and less food.

I cannot control the sun, but turns out a lot of plants are tougher than I realized. With no help, the parsley, arugula, and Brussels sprouts are doing just fine through the dying sun. They're taking things a little slower, of course, but there's pretty good advice for all of us with the dying light.

I've got lettuce and baby kale tucked in the cold frames I made back when I had a bit more energy, and even a very determined bean plant that's plastered itself along the cold frame window.

So last night we ate from a mid-December garden.

"And it was very good."

A Christmas story

Not Daphne--but the same desperate stare.
(Photo Credit: AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

The saddest patient I ever had was dying of AIDS, before we knew what was going on. Her family was afraid of her, and much of the staff.

Truth be told, I was a little bit scared, too, but was so deep into a ward full of children dying back in the early 90s that I figured if it was that contagious, I was doomed as well.

So I spent a lot of time with her.
And I did a lot of things to her that hurt her anyway.

And now as I slowly descend the same arc she traveled too quickly, as we all are traveling, I think of her.

Her name was Daphne.

I can blather on about how I learned from her, how she was heroic, how what we learned from her helped us help other children later.

But that's all noise.

The Christmas story is a powerful one, and part of its power is the juxtaposition of a baby and a fate we know too well.

I am not sure what the point to this story is--maybe there is no point.
But I know this much--what we do not do matters as much as what we do.

Live.

Sunsets and the solstice

Sunset on the Delaware Bay

The earliest sunset of the year (in these parts anyway) happened a couple of sunsets ago ago. The sun is setting later today than it did yesterday.

Folks will argue the point, but I am not so interested in their arguments as their need to have the discussion at all.

We are truly trapped in an abstract of our own making. Noon once meant the time the sun is as high as its going to get on a particular day, and solar noon still means just that, but the sun peaking at noon only happens four times a year now.

And despite what my teachers told me, the sun is never directly overhead in this part of the world.

So I can point folks to the United States Naval Observatory to support my claim, and I often do.

North Cape May winter beach

Here's a better idea, though. Go outside (or at least to a window) and look. Tomorrow do the same. Do it for a week or two. Do the same for sunrise.

I guess it really doesn't matter if someone knows the sunsets are getting later. It may be trivial to most of us. But that's not the point.

If we can so easily fool ourselves about the rise and fall of the sun, imagine the nonsense we do not know that we do not know....

What we believe becomes who we are.

Anyone up for a good book burning?

The Bible of biology

"I think the Bible ought to be ceremoniously and reverently burned every Easter, in faith that we need it no more because the spirit is with us. It is a dangerous book, and to worship it is a far more dangerous idolatry than bowing down to images of wood and stone."

Alan Watts, Myth and Religion

I think we ought to do the same with our biology textbooks, except  burn them on Darwin Day instead--I'll get enough grief burning books without adding apostasy to the fire.

It's early December, way too warm for the season. I am still wandering around barefoot, murdering cabbage worms picked off the Brussels sprouts. I'll wander along the edge of the sea later today, stumbling across live critters going about their lives, and fossils of those long gone.

In biology we worship the mitochondrion and the chloroplast, require children to draw them, learn words like "cristae" and "thylakoids," and use analogies for which children have no reference.

Ask a child what a powerhouse is. Ask anyone.

Basil on my windowsill this morning

The children should be the ones murdering caterpillars, getting muddied and bloodied on ridiculously warm December days. Biology, the study of life, is a mandatory course in New Jersey public high schools.

Living life, apparently, is optional.

Fuck it, I'm going outside.

The pleasure of feeling

A reminder for me....

Backyard basil in September

November crept in on us again, as it will. The shadows lengthen as the daylight dwindles. We talk about the cold and the rain, but we rarely dark of the darkness. Many of us don't see it, our eyes fed by the steady glow of pixels.

Those who see shadow, feel it deep in our bones, have learned not to talk of it. Among the dying it feels rude to talk about death.

Gardeners know.

Countertop sweet potatoes last week

I had a small patch of sand in back, tossed in compost and manure last June, and threw in a few slips of sweet potatoes, bought cheap because bought late, just to see what would happen.

Sweet potato leaves are lovely to look at and almost as lovely to nibble on, and sweet potatoes need about as much care a a patch of dandelions (also lovely to look at and nibble on).

Summer rolled into fall, the sweet potatoes sprawled out of their patch, even flowered at one point. I left them alone, occasionally watering them, more out of habit than out of need. 

I pulled a "test" plant out late October, found no tubers. I set the roots in a bottle, and it sits on my sill for winter now. The first hard frost was coming a weeks later, so I left the rest alone.

Windowsill sweet potato this morning

Last Friday, with the hard frost coming on in before the next sunrise, I went out to my tiny tater patch, not particularly hopeful, but I had already gotten more than I earned. The air was chilly, but the ground still warm and welcoming. 

I pulled up a plant--scraggly roots, no tubers. Oh, well.

The warmth invited my fingers to dawdle in the dirt. I was already on my knees, in no hurry to get up, and digging in dirt with the sun warming my back was what I wanted to do at that moment.

So I did.

And there it was--an inch or two deeper than I expected, the unexpected flesh. I tried to pull it out. It held its ground much as a clam does, snug in its world, not resistance its only defense.

I wiggled it out and ran to get Leslie, and a minute later two happy and excited humans rooted through the dirt, finding tuber after tuber, joyfully sharing our finds with each other.

Fresh dug sweet potatoes

I grew up hearing the Aesop's tale of the dutiful ant and the lazy grasshopper. The ant worked and worked all summer, the grasshopper played. The shadows lengthened, the days grew chilly, the grasshopper knew it was in trouble.

"Making music, were you?" the ants cried. "Very well; now dance!" And they turned their backs on the Grasshopper and went on with their work.

"The Ant and the Grasshopper," Aesop

The moral? "There's a time for work and a time for play." It's an awful parable because of its awful message, and it took me decades to throw off its chains. 

There is no need to distinguish work from play or play from work. Turns out the things in life that bring me the most joy mingle  together, and fingers feeling the earth need no justification.

But we will enjoy feasting on the sweet potatoes just the same....

Bugs, children, and compliance

"Disobedience is not an issue
if obedience is not the goal."

Daron Quinlan via Teacher Tom

The Liberty Science Center was crowded this past Tuesday--tribes of human larvae were running, laughing, pushing through the exhibits, while other organisms prowled and stewed in their tiny glass homes.

I stumbled upon a small glass cage teeming with Australian spiny leaf insects. Most were munching  leaves on twigs, a few were just hanging out, but one was standing on the topmost twig, stretching upwards as though trying to reach the sky.

Photo by Thomas Bresson, CC 3.0

I like watching critters, and this one looked interesting, so I sat down on the small bench next to the terrarium to watch.

The top of the terrarium was covered with a transparent plate, probably acrylic, clearly solid. I could see this one tapping the acrylic.

And then I realized what this critter was doing. After each tap, it moved its foot slightly over, tapped, moved again, tapped, then again, tap, along a line perpendicular to its body. When it reached across as far as it could, the critter then stretched a little more, and started tapping another line.

By the time I left, the insect was fully stretched out, precariously clinging to the twig by just three legs, reaching, searching, aware of something beyond the cramped cage.

I got kids like this in school. Not many. Most have stopped trying to find the gaps, because we knock them down pretty much every time they try. Look at your procedures, look at your school policies, look at your schedule, look at what you are asking your students to do day after day after day.

If one of my lambs keeps tapping the glass, no need to ask why. I'd rather know why the others have stopped trying.

Yes, I am romanticizing and anthropomorphizing a bug.

Maybe it's time we anthropomorphize our students as well.

EDT cannot save us

A yearly reminder....

Yesterday the sun hung in the sky for 10 hours and 25 minutes in these parts.
Today the sun cheats us out of two minutes, only hanging around for 10 hours and 23 minutes.

Way I figure it, I lost two minutes of Ra time as he travels on his night-barque. 
The eggplants, now barren, cast long November shadows as the world dims.

What possible hour do we think we wrought last night?

If I must chose betwen the sun and hubris, I choose the sun.

Samhain, again

I have spent, in the basest sense of that word, hours
of my God-given life working on a document required of teachers here in Jersey.
That I do these things speaks to a cultural insanity, and mine as well.

And here it is a year later, and I'm doing it again.

Do ghosts exist?

I've lived  long enough to know that they don't.
I've lived long enough to know that they do.

That odd, inexplicable events happen, and happen daily, is evident to anyone paying attention. The shame is that so few of us are paying attention to the natural world, we miss the rhythms and the mysteries that  envelop our modern minds every moment.

Tomorrow is All Saints Day, to celebrate the sanctified among us, as though following some moral order could save us from the coming dark, a world in which wasp larvae eat hornworms alive, from the inside out, and humans die monstrous deaths lying in ICUs with multiple tubes pierced into the body, hoping that like St. Sebastian, we will miraculously recover.

If you need a video to be convinced ghosts exist, you don't truly know what it means to know that the dead are among us.

The question of ghosts is not an idle one. We follow spirits of our own making all the time. We follow rules and rhythms of our own making now, wrapping ourselves in a sad cocoon of  hubris, wiling away our hours fulfilling nothing more than deadlines upon deadlines without a hint of irony.

I'm headed out to a mudflat in an hour or so, under a wet and wild early winter sky, to rake up a few clams, alive as I am, and as alive as I am, I will be as dead as those clams will be tonight in less than a lifetime.

Until you believe in the ghost you will be, you cannot truly live.
Originally posted 3 years ago. I like rhythms.