A New Year's Resolution

I do not need to count how many clams I rake up in a year, how many times I listen to a favorite song, how many basil plants bloomed in my garden.

I do not need to know Eli Manning's quarterback rating, my town's place on a top 100 places to live list, the graduation rate of my students at Bloomfield High School.

I do not care how much you make, the horsepower of your car (or its correlation to your genitalia), the square footage of your home, how much you pay in property taxes or for that bottle of wine you hoped I'd enjoy.

I trust my tongue and my ears, my eyes and my fingers. I particularly trust my nose. And I trust I am mortal.

I have one New Year's resolution, and it has nothing to do with numbers, with ratings, with scores, with any measures of success as defined by our culture.

It is simply this:

Teach kids what matters.

If you cannot do that because of external constraints, well, I get that.
If you cannot do that because you have no idea what matters, find another job.

If I am not mortal, please forgive me--my behavior, if we're immortal, makes me one huge asshole.
Photos by me.

Curious thoughts

I have had it up to my ears with folks reminding me about the natural curiosity of children, as though teachers spend their idle hours dreaming of ways to squelch it.

Unless the definition of curiosity has evolved (which is quite possible in an ed world that confounds "tolerance" and "love"), pretty much anything furry with nipples has natural curiosity, and as good as I am, I'm not going to be able to teach a marmoset much.

Curiosity is what made Jerry Springer a superstar. Every time we reduce science to something that flashes, fizzes, or booms in a classroom, we've Springerized science.

Science  defies hashing patterns we think we know. That's why it works. It kicks our ass over and over again each and every time we think we know everything about the natural world.

Children are also naturally religious superstitious. They see patterns where none logically naturally exist. 

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If you want a child to care about the natural world more than, say, angels, witches, and aliens (all interesting in their own right), you're going to need to introduce her to what's real.

Toss out the television, ditch the iPad, chuck the earbuds, and, most important, stop feeding her fear. Big Macs kill a lot more people than mud pies ever did.

It's not lack of curiosity that kills interest in the natural world, it's lack of exposure.

Heck, even toss out the books if your child has never turned over a rock to see what lies underneath.