The PARCC and the Pope

"When he listens to his conscience,
the prudent man can hear God speaking."

Catechism of the Catholic Church, "The Judgment of Conscience," Article 6, Section I

I'm a fallen-by-the-wayside Catholic with misgivings. I miss Confession and Communion, and there's still the hint of fear of eternal damnation--one does not easily escape the clutches of Sister Barbara Mary, even almost a half century later. Heck, I studied Latin.

If folks ask me now about Catholicism, I get a hazy warmth recalling its better aspects--it encourages fearless activism for social justice, it is a deep part of my Irish-American culture, and walking out into the sunshine after confession lit up my limbus.

But then there's the power thing--too few folks dictating deciding what's right for too many people. "The Judgment of Conscience" matters, of course, and for me it would be the heart of The Church, should I return, but in day-to-day living, culture trumps conscience. We hide in our unconsciousness.

***

A student asked me what I thought about the PARCC exams this week--our schedule has been bent out of shape, and will be for 5 more weeks later this year, and the kids are getting hammered taking an officious test that may (or may not) count.

The question is a loaded one, of course, especially for one charged with carrying out the will of the state--I am, after all, a government agent. Still, I promised my lambs I would not lie to them in a world where most adults do just that, so I answered.

The gist of the "new" standards, when viewed from a step or two back, are not awful--we want children to be able to figure things out through analysis of available evidence using the tools of language, logic, and mathematics. We all want that (so long as it, um, complements our magical views of capitalism). Who sitting in the pews could have a problem with article 1777?

But the The Church steps in with a few (mostly) white, (mostly) male, (mostly) pale power players, and Article 6 gets treated like a mouse nibbling on the Host in the Tabernacle.

Look at the folks who run Achieve, the National Governor's Association, the original players who wrote NGSS, and the money men at Pearson pushing the product. They'd fit right in at the Vatican.

Pope Glen Moreno, Chairman of Pearson

Oh, I'm sure there are a lot of good people with good intentions (with concomitant good salaries) doing what they believe is in the interest of the economy children, but while I'll buy their faith, I'm going to look hard before dropping a nickel on the collection basket.

"It is important for every person to be sufficiently present to himself in order to hear and follow the voice of his conscience.
This requirement of interiority is all the more necessary as life often distracts us from any reflection, self-examination or introspection:
Return to your conscience, question it. . . . Turn inward, brethren, and in everything you do, see God as your witness."
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1779

All learning is local

A slug creeping outside our back stoop.

I suspect that Spinoza was not in love with his God-Nature but rather with his own system of ideas, which, whether true, false, or somewhere in between (as in all systems), seem to be the product of the mind and the library, not of living engagement with persons, places, things, events, all the infinite variety and particularity of the world we actually know.

Edward Abbey, Postcards From Ed

I'd make a lousy teacher in July, not an issue so long as we have summers off. (Yes, folks, we do!) I can fool myself into believing that kids are investing their time wisely sitting under the hum of fluorescence in mid-February, but there is too much light to fool myself now in mid-summer.

I just came in from the edge of the bay--the osprey and the tern diving into the bay even after the sun settled below the horizon reminds me the days are shortening now. (In June, the birds are full by sunset.)

A mid-winter's sunset over the bay.

All living is local.  We can talk to folks many miles away, but when we do, we are talking into a machine that is right here, now. It works because we convince ourselves that that voice, that face, are real. Most of the time, it seems to be enough.

All learning is local. We can talk of alps and oceanic trenches and kookaburras and what once was Rhodesia, but the kids figure out quickly that none of that is more real than the hum of those same fluorescent lights.

I can teach better with a horseshoe crab's tail and a patch of sand than I can with a Smart Board. While part of that reflects my obstinacy, much of it reflects a larger truth. 

A very old clam rake--it still works.

I loved Spinoza back when I studied him, and I love the trappings of systems during our cold winters when the world feels dead outside--but I no longer know what it means to be learned. If I had to give up either my esoteric knowledge of philosophical systems or my ability to rake clams on a misty mudflat, I'd give up Spinoza.

What are we asking the kids to give up?

New worlds

As various factions wrestle with various standards for various (and occasionally dubious) reasons, I find myself in a classroom with a couple dozen young humans at various stages of cognitive development, learning about the world.

A drop of pond water sits on a slide now projected on the screen. A creature, too small to see naked eye, wraps itself around an even smaller one. Other critters scoot, slither, slide, and wiggle by.




My charges can "draw" mitochondria--the NJCCCS expect the children to "know' the major cell organelles by 6th grade, to "model and explain ways in which organelles work together to meet the cell’s needs." A few can tell an amoeba from a paramecium without my help. This impresses some people.

It shouldn't.

A child looks at the slide on the microscope, back up at the screen, then back at the slide again.

A single drop of water holds a world of life. The slide warms up from the lamp below. The critters under the cover glass start to fade as the oxygen level drops.

I could, of course, pontificate about aerobic respiration and diffusion and concentration gradients; I could give the children boxes to fill and diagrams to label; I could drag out one of our myriad models telling the kids what they can't quite see.  And on many days I do just that.

But not when a child see the world open a bit wider than it was just moments ago. There will be time, maybe enough, maybe not, to learn the human language that describes this new world to the satisfaction of the state of New Jersey.

The class remains mostly silent as the children take in what they cannot yet grasp.This impresses me.

As it should.

The video is from YouTube--our critter was not an amoeba, and truth be told, I did not know what it was.

"A Framework for K-12 Science Education" released today

A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas was just released.

One of my few frustrations with teaching science at the high school level are the misconceptions kids carry up from lower grades, or from life in general.

I spend a lot of time on misconceptionectomies, but they are resistant to quick cure, particularly if reinforced in the younger grades.

It's OK to teach incomplete science in 2nd grade--it's incomplete even at the highest levels of formal education. Science will always be incomplete, a big part of its appeal. It's plain wrong, though, to teach bad science.

So I am heartened to see this:

"Clearly, incorrect beliefs—such as the perception that food or fuel is a form of energy—would lead to elementary grade students’ misunderstanding of the nature of energy. Hence, although the necessity for food or fuel can be discussed, the language of energy needs to be used with care so as not to further establish such misconceptions."

A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas

Italics added

If you teach science, go get this--it's free, and it will affect your classroom in the years to come.

Perennial projects

At the start of the school year, back when the sunlight was fading and squirrels were fattening up, each student picked a tree to watch. Call it phenology, call it botany, call it whatever you want, but it's really just observing, and few of us do that well. I call it the Perennial Project.


Some wise people back in the 1890's decided that biology should be the first course of science for high school students because biology was, back in the day, all about observing and categorizing living things. If you care to study the world, you need to learn how to look.

[T]he elements of biology serve specially well as a means to cultivate the power of accurate observation (i.e., the exercise of perception regulated and clarified through direct subordination to reflection)...work specially adapted to exercise of judgment.

Report of the Committee of Fifteen, p. 161

That biology is now taught as something else does not deny the wisdom of the Committee of Fifteen.   Learning how to look is particularly relevant in a culture that encourages others to do your observations for you. Judgment without observation may be good for a consumer economy, but has predictably disastrous results for a functioning democracy. (I said functioning....)

***

Kids occasionally need to be led by the nose, and asking them to spend a few minutes outside each week staring at a tree does require some external motivation, as prickly as that has become in the ultra-chic eduworld. I toggled the grades in a way that doing the observations helped a bit, but screwing up did not sink them.

Kids need room to screw up, lots of room, especially when asked to stand outside staring at a stupid tree making this stupid drawing for this stupid class. Most students trust me, as they trust most teachers, despite a steady stream of evidence that the trust may be misplaced; I take advantage of this.

This will go somewhere, I tell them. I promise.

Then winter comes, and the trees, mildly interesting to some in autumn, "die." Now the stupid teacher wants me to stand in the stupid cold to draw a stupid picture of a stupid dead tree.

A lot of them fake it. They do not know that I know, but (for the most part), I let it go. They put their drawings in a folder, and come mid-January, I stop asking for reports.


Early March, I started it up again. Find a bud on your tree, measure it, draw it.

They resist.What's a bud? I can't find one my tree doesn't have buds I can't reach it I have to catch a bus I have to babysit my little brother my tree is dead nothing is happening this is stupid it rained all week my tree is dead it's too small to measure I don't have a ruler....and I push back, a little. 

A small change--a bud gets a little bigger, a little tighter. Kids are inherently curious. They start to watch.

Then it happens--someone's bud blooms, and a child is astounded to see a flower from a tree, astounded enough to share it with the class. Then another child's tree blooms, then another. And they talk.

I'm not going to pretend that all of the children get excited, nor that more than a few continue to fake it (and I continue to pretend I don't know this), collecting a paltry 9 or 10 points each week.

Here's the unexpected part (for me): a few of the children are now writing voluminous reports, wonderfully descriptive logs with multiple drawings, because they want to, reminiscent of the meandering mind of Thoreau when he describes a particular plant:

I observe the peculiar steel bluish purple of the night shade i.e. the tips of the twigs while all beneath is green dotted with bright berries over the water.

from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau

This is how kids write when free from the 5 paragraph essay, from the fear of my grade book.

This is how kids write when they take a moment, a long moment, to observe something that interests them. The words matter, and they struggle to find the words, because the observation matters more.

***

 
We have a new superintendent here in Bloomfield, Jason Bing, who officially started less than 10 days ago. He's my 4th superintendent in the less than 5 years I've taught here. I expect good things from him, as he does from us, that's what professionals do.

I have a concern, though, and it's not about him, it's about his contract. According to the local news, and it's all I have to go by at the moment, he can earn up to 15% more (over $25,000) "if the district meets five state testing benchmarks set by the BOE."

State testing will not measure, cannot measure, the effects of my Perennial Project. Indeed, the flowery Thoreauesque descriptions interjected with pieces of a child's humanity could hurt a student on the writing portion of our state exams.

The superintendent has been "incentivized"(Arne's word) to push up scores. Scores matter, for some very good reasons, but some things not (yet) measured by the tests matter more.

Much more.

I would love to post some of the students' work here--I'll see if I can get permission.

Cheap tools for kindergarten (Part 6)

Yes, I know, and I will get back to part 5--language trumps all--but I'm jumping ahead for the moment.

I got to spend some time with a couple of Real Live Scientists^® yesterday, and it turns out that one of them does curriculum work for the pre-pubescent set.

We compared notes, and I'm stealing from her today.

I've known her husband for over 30 years. When we were younger, much younger, Joe (I'll call him Joe) used to take everything apart. Everything. He was pretty good at putting things back together, but not nearly as awesome as he was at taking them apart.

I scrabbled up some money, and bought me a Tekna regulator back in 1979--Tekna was da bomb. Joe got his hands on it while it was still in the box, and took it apart. That's what he did, and still does, though he gets paid handsomely now for figuring out how to put things back together.

***

Kristan (I'll call her Kristan) married a nut, but it's a shared trait. He builds Tesla coils, she sleeps in tepees, they both trek off to Antarctica more frequently than I leave new Jersey. She wants little ones to get to know the world better.

She lets her students take things apart. Here's the object, here's a screwdriver, take it apart. Kids quickly figure out that old stuff is a lot more interesting than the newer solid state stuff. The kids don;t even have to put things back together--it's all about figuring out how something works.

Brilliant!

(I'm going to start doing this at the high school level.)

Exploded typewriter by Todd McLellan, permission pending--I was impatient.

Cheap tools for kindergarten (Part 5a)

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

Exodus 20:4-6

Whatever one's view of the Hebrew Bible may be, the words that survived countless generations of people who carried them likely reflects a sort of cultural wisdom. Just like the Bill of Rights, many people vehemently defend the Ten (or so) Commandments without having a clear understanding of what they are defending and in many cases, without having ever actually read them.)

Words and ideas, concepts that separate us from most of the other beasts, have both honed our views of the universe while separating us from the natural world. Sin is defined as turning away from God. We need a word for turning away from our natural history.

***

Notebooks, done right, make the visible world more so.

"Done right" does not mean a table of contents, or neat (and colorful) drawings, or proper tabs, or 1" margins, or a whole lot of other things you'll find on rubrics. If the point is clarifying the world to the very young journalist, then the rest is piffle. (Yes, there is a point to organizing "thoughts" and there is a point to legibility and there is a point to following directions--but that's not the point of an observer's notebook....)

Piffle kills learning, and has no place in public education. Before diving into the power and simplicity of having children create notebooks detailing their personal excursions into the natural world, I want to lay out their dangers.

Notebooks change a child's perception of the world, as they do ours. Language both describes and defines what we perceive. We ignore this, of course, most of the time, and most of the time, this is fine. (Well, maybe not so fine given our cultural madness where we pay more attention to imaginary stock indices than the natural world.)

Some powerful things happen when we scribble:

Our words and our pictures create models of what's "out there," but can never (with the exception of mathematical models of natural laws) truly convey what we see. The first couple billion years (or so) of our ancestors had no reason to doubt what they perceived, they did not play the role of Creator. We now define our worlds. Our words, our images, have become our universe.

Our words and our pictures assume an immediacy and power that beguile us; we mistake the words for what they represent. In schools we pledge allegiances to flags, "study" polar bears in magazines, pretend that concepts like "global community" exist.

The physical manifestations of our words--textbooks, worksheets, notebooks--become identified with learning. We grade notebooks, judge their worth by their heft, and ritually toss them out when the school year ends.

Just as teachers who have little grasp of what "matter" or "energy" mean should not teach science, teachers who have little grasp of how language influences our perceptions should not use science journals.

I'd rather teach adolescents who have never been exposed to any formal science training at all than teach those who carry deep misconceptions sown through years of schooling.

***

The National Science Teachers Association promotes the use of notebooks in the early grades, and they should be an integral part of any science education, even before a child can write, if we insist on teaching the young science.

I hope to develop a series of posts that encourage rabid debate on what it means to teach science, what it means to learn science, in the early grades, focusing on how we encourage children to learn about the natural world, through their eyes and ears, their Pacinian corpuscles, their taste buds, their noses.

I think it requires keeping journals, as I will share, but I also think much of what passes for journals needs to be tossed into the heap of inkwells and filmstrips littering our public school junkyards. I hope you join the discussion.

Cheap tools for kindergarten (Part 4)

Newton's cradle is a toy.

Isaac Newton did not invent it, nor did he invent the Laws of Motion. They just are. He uncovered what always, as far as we know, existed.

If you use this in class, do not show the kids the various permutations--they will find them if you let them be. Do not tell them it models the Law of Conservation of Momentum.

And if they ask for an explanation, tell them that everything moving (which is everything) has a certain amount of oomph, depending on how much stuff it has, and which direction it's moving. If they ask for more, tell them that we have just so much oomph in the world, no less, no more, and that it can be passed along between things.

If they ask why, tell them no one knows why. If you tell them otherwise, you will confuse them. Mutatio motus just is.

Just let them play, touching and seeing and hearing the world as it is.

You can play with a computerized version here, using different numbers of balls. 

But why not just use the real thing?
Yes, I know Newton was reporting what others had already shown.... 

The cradle pictured is by Dominique Toussaint from Wikimedia.

Cheap tools for kindergarten (Part 3)

This is an old post, but it fits right in my kindergarten instructional materials series, so I'm tossing it in, slightly modified.

In the olden days, a camera (like a car motor) could be grasped with a little bit of sense and a dollop of curiosity.

Light traveled through a piece of glass, a lens you could screw off the camera. Hold the lens a foot or two away, and the image flipped.

The lens was attached to a box that had a shutter you opened and closed to let in the light. You could vary the time it was open. You could vary how large the opening was.

The light was focused on film, a strip of plastic (originally a wet concoction of cellulose and other stuff to make "dope"), that reacted to the light. High school kids could hang out in dark rooms developing film (and a finer sense of anatomy).

The whole process was tangible. (That the dark room featured a red light added to the, um, tangibility.)

For kicks you could make a shoe box pinhole camera, and take interesting photos with unreal depth of field. Cool and cheap, when cheap was cool.

So what does this have to do with today's savvy kindergarten set?


First, though, all you young'uns who never saw a pinhole camera before need to gather a toilet paper roll, a piece of waxed paper, a piece of aluminum foil, and a couple of rubber bands.

(No, you can't do this digitally...you get to use all 10 fingers for this. That's a pun, son....)

Put a small hole in the foil, attach it to one end of the tube, with the hole centered. Fold the waxed paper over the other end. Yep, use the rubber bands to hold it all together.

Point the aluminum side at a bright light source, focus on the waxed paper screen, and tell me what you see. Move it around a bit, what happens?

[OK, for those who cannot help themselves, I'll save you the trip to Google--you will see an upside-down image that moves oppositee to the direction you move the camera.]

That's the observation, now here's the question--how can an image flip if there are no lenses? What can you infer about the property of light (at least here in our Newtonian sensate universe)?

And I will leave this open for now....

An oatmeal box with a translucent lid works even better! Just put a pinhole in the bottom.

Cheap tools for kindergaten (Part 2)

rLots of children grow plants, a worthy endeavor. A child observes the development of a seed to seedling to flower back to seedling. Whole university courses could revolve around this. The whole living universe does.

It's a start....a good one. Let's push it a bit.

Where does the stuff of plants come from?

Ask a child. Heck, ask an adult. An oak tree can weigh over a couple of tons. Most people think its stuff comes from the ground. If it did, most trees would be sunken into the ground. But they're not.

Weigh the seed and the dirt that holds it, then in a few months, weigh the plant and the dirt again. It will weigh a bit more. No need to get into the "science"--noting the difference in mass is the science, plenty for a young child.


If the child should want more, though, here's a fun thing you can do with your numberless scale mentioned in the last post:

Place a small cup of vinegar and a dollop of baking soda next to it on one side,a few pebbles of equivalent mass on the other so that the scale is balanced. Now drop the baking powder into the vinegar. Watch the scale.

The cup of vinegar and baking soda will start to rise. If the child has been using the scale before this, she will realize something interesting is happening. The pebbles have not changed, the fizzing vinegar obviously has. Where did it stuff go?

***

What happens if you plant a seed upside down? We (the adult folk) don't think much about this, because it's not an issue. But it's an interesting question. What happens if you turn a seedling upside down? A nearly grown plant?

If you tell a child she must put this seed in exactly that position, well, you may as well stick with the PearsonEducation package.

What happens if you use blue light? What happens if you water it with milk? What happens if you pluck off a leaf? What happens what happens what happens what happens.....?

Let's see! Let's see!

And if a child would rather stare at the ant wending its way of the stem, then let her watch. Language and mathematics help define our world, help define the Platonic shadows that surround us, but if we push language before a child has a chance to recognize the world, she will be trapped chasing shadows of shadows, as so many of us do.

There's was beauty long before there was language, before there were numbers, a beauty many of us can no longer see because of language and numbers.

The wildflowers were found in Ireland, the eggplants in our backyard. Either Leslie or I took them.

Cheap "science" tools for kindergarten (Part 1)

Blank thermometer:

No numbers, no calibration marks, just a blank thermometer--essentially a thermoscope. A child can follow changes in temperature by watching the fluid rise and fall.

Everybody alive today was born into a world with calibrated thermometers--they're so obvious as to seem intuitive. Thermoscopes were invented long before Celsius and Fahrenheit got their names attached to them.

The thermoscope itself poses interesting questions. Why does the fluid inside change shape? How fast can you make it rise and fall? Does it always go down when things get colder? (A brilliant child might even ponder what it means to say "colder.")

Over time, children will get familiar with patterns. Ask a child if something is warmer (or colder) than something else. Is today warmer than yesterday?

At some point a child might think to put a mark on the thermoscope, maybe using a piece of tape, to compare one reading with another.

Eventually, of course, the thermoscope becomes more useful with its suit of numbers. Until a child needs the numbers, though, I suspect they just get in the way.


A blank balance:

My first chemistry set came with a super cheap plastic balance with tiny tin pans. A pointer indicated when the the two pans were level, but it couldn't measure anything, all it could do is compare.

The "all it can do" liability taught me more than a Ohaus Adventurer Pro AV64 Analytical Balance ever could--it was also about $1600 cheaper.

All any scale does is compare masses--a cheap balance just makes it more obvious what you're comparing. The fancy scale is comparing numbers based on a slab of platininum-iridium alloy sitting in Paris somewhere, slowly losing mass to entropy and time.

My cheap balance did not need a numerical reference. Either something had more (or less) mass than something else. It measured the relative pull of gravity of each item, nothing I would have understood when in kindergarten, and nothing I truly understand now.

Which is, of course, the point.

When we use unimaginably fine scales to measure (and the mass of 0.1 mg, the limit of the Ohaus scale, is truly unimaginable), we are dealing with an abstract precision that, at some level, detracts from our understanding of the world.

A child could learn more comparing a bowling ball and a duck using a large, simple balance than she appears to know when she reads 12.1213 grams on the Ohaus scale. She might sound smarter reading the fancy scale, especially in a culture that confounds the abstract with the real, and she might even impress a few administrators and BOE members along the way.

But she won't know a lick more science.

The photo is of the kilogram protoype in Paris.
The old thermometers is from the 1832 Edinburgh Encyclopaedia via  Engines of Our Ingenuity

Elementary education science, Part 1

I am sitting on a committee put together to help redesign our elementary school science curriculum.
I'll be tossing out various posts on the topic. The posts do not reflect the views of anyone except me.

By the end of Grade 4:

Science has unique norms for participation. These include adopting a critical stance, demonstrating a willingness to ask questions and seek help, and developing a sense of trust and skepticism. 

NJ Core Curriculum Content Standards, 5.1.4.D.1, Science

A few of us in the district have a wonderful opportunity to help draft the science curriculum guidelines for early elementary students. We--teachers from various grade levels-- have been given professional time to work together to develop science education at the elementary level.

While I am a high school science teacher, I am leaning heavily on my former life as a pediatrician. You cannot separate science from perception, and perception gets colored by development.

Separating science as a discipline separate from language development does not make sense to me, at least not for the lunchbox crowd. It may be a subset of language, as fairy tales are a subset of story telling, but until children can master mathematics, Boolean logic, and other developmentally challenging tasks, pretending that they are little scientists is, well, ridiculous.

A lot of people are getting paid good money to promote the ridiculous.

***

What can a child know?

She can know what she observes, of course, but what she observes depends, in large part, on what she knows.  We frame our world more than we might realize.

Many of our children come to high school with what seem to be nonsensical ideas, but which reflect the thoughts of thousands of years of human thought--if  these thoughts are not consistent with the last few hundred years, we tell the children, without offering  much evidence, that they are wrong.

If a child believes she can see in absolute darkness, and many believe as much, telling her that is simply not so is not science education, it's indoctrination.

At the early grade levels, the standard listed above does not hold water. "Adopting a critical stance, demonstrating a willingness to ask questions and seek help, and developing a sense of trust and skepticism" should be the heart of all education, not the box labeled "science."

The photo has nothing to do with the post--I just like it.

 

6:38 P.M.

6:38 P.M. here--the sun stood still, shifted its mass^*, and headed back north.

6 months ago, when we sat on the opposite side of the sun, I celebrated the summer solstice, a joy tinged with the weight of knowing the sun would start its slow, long course southward.

Winter is only hours old, and winters can be brutal here. The light, however is returning.

When I was a child, winter meant cold, summer heat. I did not, could not, grasp why the elders got so excited late December, at the cusp of winter, when we faced long wintry days.

I get it now.

***

I stood outside last night in the chill with my youngest, now a quarter century old, watching our shadow drift across the moon, a wavering copper-gold washing in from the moon's left.

My mom used to tell me she could see me as an infant even as I stood before her as a man. I laughed, of course. I am big--over 200# big.

I get it now.

***

I still give tests, more out of habit than sense now. Performance on science tests a few days before the Christmas break follow a predictable pattern, and my students did not fail to fail.

We do a lot of things because we do them. If mastery's the goal, then a class average of low 70's with a bell-shaped curve, a science teacher's dream a generation ago, marks my failure.

On my board today two-foot numbers announced the time of the solstice--6:38 P.M. Solstice literally means the sun stands still.

Very few students notice how far the sun has shifted since class started just 3 1/2 months ago. There's no need. Food comes in boxes, heat in radiators. The whole world of technique is magic to them.

In Ireland this morning, the sun rose, as it has, as it will. A shaft of sunlight flashed through a chamber in Newgrange built thousands of years ago, before the Great Pyramids, before the Celts arrived, before Stone Henge.

We will not study this in science, nor will our students study this in history class. We will create a class ready for the 21st century, for the abstract, for a culture that confuses bank profits with economy.

***

If children owned the winter solstice, the dying light, knowing what waits for each of us before a 100 winter solstices pass, would they come to school?

Would you?

I believe schools can be worth the time children invest in them. I am not convinced we're there yet.

At least not as long as I keep practicing education as religion, using a script written generations before me.



*The sun may indeed change direction if we use Earth as the reference point, but "shifted its mass" is, of course, incorrect, since it implies uneven forces were applied to it. Since I have yet to find a better explanation for "mass" beyond "the amount of inertia stuff has," even a poetic license does not give me permission to spew such nonsense.

Science pr0n

No 8 year old in her right mind is curious about Neptune.
She does like to make Mommy happy, though.

If a young adult told you in class that she does not believe that the Earth revolves around the sun, what would you say?

Who's the better scientist, the child who accepts heliocentrism by the time she's out of elementary school, or the high school student who trusts her eyes over her teachers?

It's all relative, this motion thing, and, of course, heliocentrism works well for those who have the background to understand it.

But geocentrism works, too. It's just slightly more complicated.

The ancient Greeks could predict eclipses. As far as I know, none of my lambs can (yet):

A piece of science shatters each time child builds a model of our solar system while still in grade school. We are asking children to accept something beyond their comprehension on faith alone, surrounded with rites developed in school, rites that preclude thought.

Children have more evidence that Santa exists (cookies eaten, NORAD, and, of course, presents) than that the sun is the center of our world (pictures in books, balls on wires, and the teacher's word).

None of my students believes in Santa Claus anymore, but just about all of them believe the Earth revolves around the sun. Many of them also believe we never landed on the moon, that the world will end in 2012, and that evolution is bunk.

Because people of authority told them so.

Google "solar system science fair projects." You will find pictures of children, smiling with that I-made-an-adult-proud grin, standing next to their work. The projects are flash and glitter, science pr0n, rites of passage that reward children who bleat baaa.

My young student lives in the universe of Aristotle and Tycho Brahe. She's still thinking.
Despite being trained not to....

Again, Tom Hoffman's "In My Head" got me going this morning, this time a link to here.
Image of solar system model from CraftCritique.com here.

Thoughts shared after hearing Galwall Kinnell speak in his 9th decade

19° degrees outside, and the furnace decided to nap. A reminder, but not an omen. There's a difference.

I love Galway Kinnell. I am fascinated by snot. The two are not unrelated. I saw Galway speak last night, which is like saying I saw Pavarotti sing, or Frank Lloyd draft.

I last saw him over three decades ago. We're both still here. We'll both be gone a few decades from now. When I remember this, I behave differently.

***

Eating is part of the deal.
Defecating is part of the deal.
Chlorinating is not....



I grab my rake when the tide and the winds are low. I paddle my plastic boat out to the flats, lugging a rake older than me.

I work the mud knowing that it will give up its secrets.

Quahogs quietly eat, quietly grow, quietly drag tiny organisms into their guts. Do zooplankton ("wandering animals") drifting in light, suddenly tossed into the dark, struggle against the siphon's current?

Before the sun rises again, a few clams will be killed, and eaten, and then shat. Bacteria will feed on the remnants of molecules spliced together by plants and clams. My shit will pass under the street in ancient pipes, delivered to a wastewater treatment plant, and slaughtered as the chlorine rips through the lipids in the cell's membrane.

The clam gave its life, as I will, as you will, knowing that it will remain, in pieces, part of the whole of life.

I pray no one pumps my veins with formaldehyde when I die. I want my carcass to burst from corpulence as the bacteria, freed from the tyranny of my immune system, rip the energy from complex molecules I will no longer use.

***

Chlorination works. I like safe water. I am not against chlorinating our water. (Don't get me started on fluoridation, though....)

If a lot of mammals squeeze themselves into small areas, excrement and water find each other. Excrement is dangerous because it's alive. Given a chance, the critters in scat will eat, grow, and reproduce, living life with the same impunity and unawareness we all do. Holy shit.

Humans are special, true. Only humans have the ability to consciously and utterly remove ourselves and other critters from the cycle of life. Formaldehyde, mercury salts, and chlorine mark our progress.

Chlorinating water works. It was developed by the U.S. Army as a way to make a lot of water safe in a hurry for our soldiers as they wandered away from the American tap water we take for granted. 3 ampules of calcium hypochlorite are added to 36 gallons of water in a Lyster bag, releasing chlorine gas.



Proteins work because of their specific shapes. Any function in a live organism that requires a particular shape, which is just about everything, requires proteins. Change the shape ("denature"), and the protein no longer does what it's designed to do.

Chlorine changes the shape of proteins in bacteria, changes their nature, and they die. The proteins in humans are made of the same stuff as bacterial proteins.

On April 22, 1915, in Ypres, France, thousands of men, and innumerable other creatures, had their proteins denatured by a yellow-green cloud smelling of "pepper and pineapple." The gas destroyed the cells lining the airways.

Suddenly down the road from the Yser Canal came a galloping team of horses, the riders goading on their mounts in a frenzied way; then another and another, till the road became a seething mass with a pall of dust over all.

Plainly something terrible was happening. What was it? Officers, and Staff officers too, stood gazing at the scene, awestruck and dumbfounded; for in the northerly breeze there came a pungent nauseating smell that tickled the throat and made our eyes smart. The horses and men were still pouring down the road. two or three men on a horse, I saw, while over the fields streamed mobs of infantry, the dusky warriors of French Africa; away went their rifles, equipment, even their tunics that they might run the faster.

One man came stumbling through our lines. An officer of ours held him up with levelled revolver, "What's the matter, you bloody lot of cowards?" says he. The Zouave was frothing at the mouth, his eyes started from their sockets, and he fell writhing at the officer's feet.

Anthony R. Hossacks memoirs
Soldier, Queen Victoria's Rifles, 1915

Chlorine gas strips away functioning proteins, irreversibly disabling your cells. It is not an easy death.

One nurse described the death of one soldier who had been in the trenches during a chlorine gas attack. “He was sitting on the bed, fighting for breath, his lips plum coloured. He was a magnificent young Canadian past all hope in the asphyxia of chlorine. I shall never forget the look in his eyes as he turned to me and gasped: I can’t die! Is it possible that nothing can be done for me?”

John Simkin, Spartacus Educational

***

Leslie and I love to paddle. We have kayaked as far up the Passaic River as you can, until the water becomes too shallow to allow even a 10" draft.

A few miles before you reach the shallows, we pass a sign facing away from the river, just above an active discharge pipe.

The pipe belches out sickeningly sweet water, pepper and pineapple. The smell reminds me of a mall, where the aroma of too perfect cookies mixes with the aroma of too perfect perfumes and too perfect people.

I beached my kayak so I could get out and read the sign.

The sign announced that the effluuent was the shit and pee and spit and snot and blood of the good citizens of Livingston, caressed with chemicals, now safe for the river.

I got back in the kayak and headed upstream, my paddles dredging through the shallow muddy bed. I dragged my fingers over the paddle blade, the mud sliding back into the water, and then held my hands to my face, the mortal mud's smell reminding me who we are.

***

One of my lambs ran an experiment to see if water would start to smell if left out for a week. He was startled to find that water smells right out of the tap, like, well, chlorine. In a day or two, the chlorine smell dissipated.

Decades from now, I doubt he'll remember much of anything in class, but he will remember that.

We do not talk about "shit" in class. We talk of excrement and E. coli and waste, but never of shit, sacred shit, Holy Shit.

If high biology were truly the study of life, of death, of cycles, we'd read Galway Kinnell's Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, or Mary Oliver's poem "Oxygen," or W.B. Yeats, who asks the essential question of science, of life: "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

I would give up an eyetooth (or two) to have Galway Kinnell teach my students biology. I talk of ecology, Galway talks of life:

The black bear who swatted down the apples
from the lower branches began before first light
expelling foot-long cylinders of apple-chompings
—some apple nectar removed, some bear nectar added—
which could almost be served up in a restaurant
in Lyons or Paris as Compote de Pommes des Dieux.

Galway Kinnell
From "Holy Shit" (Imperfect Thirst)

Until we teach biology as the study of life, we have no real hope of pretending we are not those young men who tossed the chlorine gas at other men, and whoever else happened to be in the way, back in 1915.

Until then, I will sink into tidal mud flats, filling the air with the molecules of the dead, a pungent smell we've been trained to fear, scratching for clams, each one reminding me of impermanence, of what matters.

In May, I will again be trekking over a hundred young humans to Sandy Hook Bay,
where many will smell tidal mud for the first time.
Biology cannot be taught indoors.

Lyster bag photo from Olive-Drab, which posted the photo
"courtesy Family of Jack Chriss, veteran of Co. B, 129th Airborne Engineer Bn., 13th Airborne Div."

Clam and tomato photo taken on my windowsill. Both were eaten soon after.

A response to a technophile

Whenever I post about the ludicrousness of using tools at inappropriately young ages, I get animated responses with similar themes. These replies are often anonymous, and often thoughtless.

I got one from my previous post that was neither anonymous nor thoughtless, and I thought it was worth carrying the discussion out in the open. Thank you, David!

Computers are the most powerful tool we have at our disposal and you want our kids to be ignorant of how they are used?

"Computers are the most powerful we have at our disposal" is dubious at best--I'd argue that the power of the tool depends on the task at hand (try hammering a nail with a mouse--yes, I'm an idiot).

But let's suppose for a moment that the computer is indeed the most powerful tool we have. Is its innate "power" your argument for why young children should be taught how to use them?

My car is the most powerful way for me to get around, but I'd rather the children keep away from the wheel until they can peer over the dashboard.

Do you think kids' parents, most of them anyway, have any clue how to use a computer as a tool?

Yes, I do, insofar as they need them for what parents do day to day, which is to say, live.

To be fair, they use computers every time they drive, use a microwave, an elevator, a video game, or EZ Pass, each a different task.

Maybe I am misunderstanding the thrust of your question. I do that a lot.

If you mean more esoteric stuff, like designing a database from scratch, well, maybe not. We got high school for that. I'd rather teach the kids how to bake from scratch--as in here's a bag of seeds, bake me a pie in 9 months, but I tend to be a bit extreme.

We do spend too much time in front of computers, this I agree with.

How do we fix this? I cannot control what happens in the child's home. What is the damage done by this? Are we contributing to the damage by reinforcing the activity in school?

However, what's the difference in health between sitting with a computer in front of you, or sitting with some paper to take notes? In either case, you are sitting instead of moving.

A great question--there's a couple of distinct points there, and I'll take each in turn:

Neither has great risks aside from physical inactivity that we know of--I suppose you could stab yourself in the eye and get paper cuts with the pencil and paper, and there have been case reports of children causing damage to their thighs from prolonged contact with hot laptops, and more than a few visits to the ER after tripping over wires, but I know those are not what you mean.

Some real longterm concerns may exist--two big ones in the past, monitor radiation and carpal tunnel syndrome, have been ameliorated. Longterm exposure to light may be a subtle issue not adequately explored, but again, I know these are not what you mean either.

There is a difference, though--a child pursuing an activity on paper has only the paper to deal with. Paper is mostly quiet unless you rustle it, and doesn't have flash or sizzle or anything else except sit there. It has, alas, no bling.

A child, when not doing her paper homework, will get up and do something else wrestled to the ground by an adult, both of which expend energy. A child on a computer wanders away, too, to online games, to FaceBook, to ESPN, to a whole shiny digital world that distracts her like a magpie.

The real crime is the number of physical education programs which are being cut and the lack of outdoor education programs in most schools.

Here in New Jersey, physical education remains mandatory. Getting kids outside is, indeed, important. There are only so many hours in a day. If we both agree that children are spending too much time on computers and not enough time outdoors, well, it doesn't take a computer to mesh out a rational solution to that.

I agree completely, by the way, with Stephen Downes 10 things that you really need to learn. I work in a school where those 10 things are our primary curriculum and our content is secondary to them.

Do send a link to your school--while I am blessed to work in a great department in a wonderful school, we still have the state curriculum and an annual end of course here to contend with.

And yes, I accept emails.

That's King Ludd in the picture--I assume it's old enough to be PD.

The widening gyre

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats, from "The Second Coming"

The dark days. Again.

My imagination fails me, as it will, surrounded by human light, human sounds, human smells. I cannot remember the smell of honeysuckle or the soft glow of lightning bugs or the warmth that wrapped around me in early summer.

I keep a small jar of rich soil dug from my compost pile on my desk in school. Now and then, in the middle of class, I take a whiff. The children see my joy I get from the earthy aroma.

My lambs know by December that I want them to have happy, useful lives. They know I want this for every one of them.

Why else bother teaching?

***

Thomas Jefferson got the tone just right when he penned "the pursuit of happiness." It is not an idle phrase, though it does sound a bit embarrassing in context of the modern classroom, the modern office, the modern mall.

Jefferson lived before we learned how to distract ourselves with twisted visions of immortality. We have become our own gods. Mortal illness comes as a surprise, dismissed as an inconvenience. Our cultural psychosis belittles those among us who dare to expose our mortality--if they only believed hard enough, they would be cured.

Ironically, the generation closest to achieving immortality is least equipped to deal with it. Time spent on-line chasing zombies or aliens or a Nazi nation long since quelled hardly seems worth all the fuss.

We no longer seek a life worth living. We'd just rather avoid death.

Death is inevitable. Pursuing happiness is not.

***

I sound sanctimonious. Would I drink from the Fountain of Youth? Of course, and for the wrong reasons.

I want to see what happens next, I want to breathe the air of a thousand Junes, I want, I want, and I want some more, and I miss the moment, this moment, the only moment that has ever existed. My fear of what awaits robs me of the joy of the present.

***

Yesterday one of my students came running up to me with a pot of tiny basil plants she had sowed a few weeks before.

"Smell it! Smell it!"

I did. And I glowed. Growing a plant in a classroom fits in the curriculum. A child sharing her joy at its sensuousness is not.

The seed, no larger than the head of a pin, darker than a cloudy December night, grew in a pot of peat. Shiny green leaves erupted from the seeds, now effusively shedding aromatic molecules that made me grin in December.

Something from nothing, at least nothing we could see. The poets have something to say, but so do the biologists. The aroma released from the leafs was made of carbon captured from the breaths of the same student clutching the pot.

If you've never sown a seed before, this is a big deal. If you've sown seeds for much of your life, it's still a big deal.

A hundred years from now, the human world may be very different, but seeds will still grow when planted.

***

None of us know what this world is all about. A few among us will tell you to live a certain way in order to reach worlds that no one has seen. A few among us will tell our children to live a certain way to strengthen abstract concepts like country, or economy, or success.

Success is a slippery word, but happiness is not. You know when you're happy, even when you're not sure how you got there.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--how many of these fit into your district's curriculum? How many fit in your classroom?

If we continue to raise our kids for a better economy, a better nation, a better world while neglecting their inalienable right to their pursuit of happiness, we risk the "blood-dimmed tide" Yeats spoke of.

Happiness is not happenstance, nor is it trivial.
Mortality is not happenstance, nor is it trivial.

Why did you walk into your classroom today? Did you give your lambs at least as good as reason?

Photos are mine, and yours (CC, yadda yadda)....

More "New Jersey World Class Standards"

5.2.2.A.2
By the end of Grade 2:
Identify common objects as solids, liquids, or gases.

Throw plasma in there, the most common state of matter known in the universe. You have common examples in the classroom, the incessant hum of fluorescent lights above. You have great examples outside, the sun and the stars. Some students may have plasma televisions at home.

How many teachers have been tripped up by this "simple" question: what is the sun made of?

If you want to keep a state of matter up your sleeve, save the Bose-Einstein condensate for high school.

5.2.4.A.3
By the end of Grade 4:
Objects and substances have properties, such as weight and volume, that can be measured using appropriate tools.

I spent weeks teasing apart weight and mass in a freshman science class. Mass is, at this level anyway, the amount of matter (call it "stuff") in something.

Weight is a measure of the force of gravity on the stuff you are measuring. It depends on where all the other objects in the universe happen to be at that moment, since everything is pulling on everything else.

The closest huge ball of stuff is the Earth, so weight and mass seem synonymous.

They're not--your mass does not change on the moon, but your weight does--but you knew this already. Even 2nd graders know this. You can show them astronauts jumping around the moon and ask them why they can jump so high. They'll parrot the standard answer ("less gravity").

I suspect most of us are afraid to touch gravity because we just plain don't get it.

I would love to start the year with a class full of young adults who get that we don't get it.
That's how science starts.

Really.....

The states of matter graphic comes from Chem4Kids.com.
The moon clip from YouTube, uploaded by Amontai Yagala

It gets worse...

More "science" from the NJ Core Curriculum Content Standards:

5.3B: Matter and energy transformation: Food is required for energy and building cellular materials. Organisms in an ecosystem have different ways of obtaining food, and some organisms obtain their food directly from other organisms. [So far so, good...]
By the end of Grade 4
Content:

Almost all energy (food) and matter can be traced to the Sun.

No, it can't.

The sun is hydrogen busy fusing into helium. Maybe the committee meant "Almost all food (energy and matter) can be traced to the sun." Still not quite correct, but not blatantly wrong.

The sun is not massive enough to go supernova. It's not going to meld protons into carbon or oxygen or any number of other elements essential to life. It will make lots of helium, which is good for birthday parties, funny voices, and the Large Hadron Collider, but it's unlikely we'll ever get it, unless Earth getting eaten up by a red giant counts.

We are made of elements produced by unimaginably energetic events, exploding stars much more massive than our local sun.

Anybody in Trenton paying attention?

The photo shows the remnants of a supernova, a composite photo made using a 48" telescope,
found here at NASA's "Astronomy Photo of the Day"

Michael Heinz and Lisa Solmose have worked hard to improve things here in New Jersey.
I've met them both, and they both are bright and personable, faced with a daunting task.

Un-teaching "science"

I am a high school un-teacher. I spend more time un-teaching than I do teaching.

I cannot hope to get kids to think if they walk around life believing much of the nonsense they learned during their impressionable years.

The idea of teaching a room full of children who still have reason (at least economic) to trust the tooth fairy makes my eyeballs quiver. Good Lord, somebody has to do it, and I respect anyone possessing the gadolinium gonads needed to teach larval humans. If you're going to dabble in science, though, please put away the textbooks. and get it right.

Children are sent to school earlier and earlier ("please wipe your feet, hang up your coat, and dry your umbilical stump") and expected to perform more and more. A child reciting a list of organelles before he's sprouted an axillary hair is about as learned as an Irish dancing monkey but not nearly as entertaining. My lambs come to high school spewing content without understanding, and have been rewarded for this. How can this be?*

I've complained about this long enough to get myself attached to a committee, and we're looking at science into the early grades, which means perusing the state standards. Uh-oh.

***

Language matters. I am trying to parse the state standards. The first one below applies to children before they finish second grade. We're talking about 7 years olds. A lot of them will be bored hanging around the old folks weekend. Go chat with one.

The Sun is a star that can only be seen during the day.

New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards

True, I suppose, but tautological. It says nothing. A young child never asks why we can see the sun during the day. The interesting question is why can't we see the other stars.

Worry not--we'll jam some science in the young'uns:

Determine a set of general rules describing when the Sun and Moon are visible based on actual sky observations.

New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards

Asking second graders to do "actual" sun observations can lead to "actual" blindness.

Part of me loves this idea. Let the kids find patterns. Let them observe periodicity in nature. Don't expect them, however, to come up with a set of general rules. Really. Go talk to one. Even one who does the Irish monkey thing well. (She's the one with the report card on the refrigerator.)

Here's one for the Pre-K crowd:

Experiments and explorations provide opportunities for young learners to use science vocabulary and scientific terms.

New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards
t

No, no, no, no, no, no, no!!!

Children are magical thinkers--words have tremendous power. Telling a child that things "fall" because of gravity is catechism, not science. We have enough of that already.

Instead, focus on the word "fall"--what does it mean to fall? If a child asks why things always fall "down", work on the word down. If you have an ambitiously curious child, tell them that stuff is attracted to other stuff and no one knows why. Do not use a science vocabulary term until the child has a chance to discover what it means.

I'd rather ban the word gravity in elementary school than "provide opportunities for young learners to use science vocabulary." They got plenty of other things to grasp before throwing talismans at them.

I look forward to the committee meetings.

*Turns out our state standards are designed by "educators and experts
recognized for their content area expertise. [italics mine]" Gulp.

The Einstein acceptance speech wordle was found at Ptak Science Books here.

The cartoon is from, of course, Toothpaste For Dinner....