Teaching What Matters

Written three years ago, but never posted.
Seems like a good time for it.

 

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery,

None but ourselves can free our minds.

Bob Marley

We're at that point now.
We have been there once or twice before in my lifetime. 

I know what fresh bread baked from wheat ground by my hands tastes like.
I know what blueberries off an early August bush taste like.
I know what wild dolphins sound like while I loll underwater in the Delaware Bay.
I know the moment of inevitability as I raise a stone above the eyes of a fish writhing under my hands.

I want to share this.

I know death of loved ones.
I know love.
I know fear in the eyes of a parent.
I know the look when a parent first learns her child is dead.
I know redemption.

I want to share this.

Time for us to stop looking at the one next to us, seeing what he will do.

Time to stop acting in fear.
We're lost, and knowing this liberates us.

Do what's right by your students, by their parents, by your town.
If we've lost the battle for democracy, and it's possible we may have, live well.

The children are watching us--we can, by our actions, give them faith that things will change.





Redemption.

"Blame" the blueberries I picked just a few moments ago.

And Jose Vilson.....

A seahorse tale

The tide was ebbing. The seahorse lay on the beach, just beyond the reach of the receding waves. I assumed it was dead--until I saw the tiniest movement of its tail.

I picked it up and let a few waves wash over my hand. Its head flicked a couple of times, spasmodically, without intention.

Then I felt its tail wrap around my finger.

Edge of the Delaware Bay, March 30, 2013

I do not presume that this seahorse had any awareness of me. It was in trouble, and may not have survived the day, but that's not why I am telling the story.

I am sharing the story because I felt its tail wrap around my finger with surprising strength, with an unexpected vitality.

 I do not believe that the seahorse was in any sense communicating with me--dying critters do not waste energy talking to alien beings. I had nothing to say to my seahorse, and the seahorse had even less to say to me.

The tail of this seahorse had wrapped on hundreds, maybe thousands, of things before me. It clung to eelgrass, to its lover, and if a male, grappled with other males who dare to separate him from his partner.

If this was the seahorse's last few living moments, the last thing it held was my finger.

***

Seahorses do not share language with humans, but if they did, their tales would be shared through their tails. If this particular seahorse felt any sense of vitality from the palm of my hand, the only way it could share this would be through doing just what it did--hugging my finger.

Another visitor from the bay

This is not why it did, of course, and that is not the point. But if the only way for a creature to share its world with us is a way that we dismiss as reflex, then we will forever see a mechanistic universe, and we will remain the lonely species we are.

***

We need evidence! Proof! Substantiation! Concrete facts!

Today much of the world rejoices over an event pieced together with the slimmest of evidence--the oldest of the Gospels, written more than a half century after the death of Jesus, ends with frightened women fleeing from an empty tomb (Mark 16:8). The rest is appended history.

I am not going to equate the curling of a dying critter's tail with the scantest of evidence that (in a perverse form) drove much of European history. Both evidence and faith have their place.

Still, if we cannot allow for the possibility that perhaps even a seahorse has a story to tell, then the slight tug of a seahorse's tail, a twitch of life on an early spring beach, means nothing, and everything is just noisy chaos.

Seahorses, it turns out, are monogamous.

Noisy chaos is cool, too, if you can enjoy the music....

Why are blueberries blue?

The dead brittle branches of February now hold hundreds of berries--most still a ghostly green blue. A few have ripened to the dark, deep blue depths of light that remind me of the very young, and the very old, of the transitional cyanosis of a newborn struggling with its new world.

Light is a funny thing--we see what's reflected, not what's absorbed, of course, but the reflected light becomes the object, at least in our minds. That's how we survived through millennia.

That berries change color is obvious. The how, less so, but we got fancy words and molecular structures to dazzle any child who dares ask. Answering the why is the tough one.

***

If a child asks "why are blueberries blue?"--not an unusual kind of question in a science class--how do you answer it?

This is not a trivial point. We live in a culture that defines knowledge as bits of information, and how I approach a child's questions helps shape how she sees the world.

Some possible answers follow, along with my issues with each.


Blueberries are blue because they have anthocyanins....

Unless you are teaching a post-doctoral botany student in grad school, this is like saying blueberries are blue, because they're, well, blue; saying anthocyanin adds nothing to the child's grasp of the universe. If she is satisfied by this answer (and she may well be given the way we teach "science"), she learns that what matters in the classroom are the words that signify the universe, not the universe itself.

The answer isn't wrong, it's just inane. It goes from inane to insane when we promote this as science. It may be cute to hear little ones parrot big sciency words, in the same perverse way it's cute to promote beauty via pageants for 5 year old children, but it's a dangerous pedagogical practice.

Blueberries are blue so we know they're ripe...

No doubt blue blueberries taste a lot better than the less mature green ones, and yes, there's a complicated relationship between seeds ready to germinate and the sweet juices surrounding them tempting animals to eat them. Raccoon scat around here can be loaded with seeds, and some gardeners will swear that blueberry seeds grow best after traveling through a mammal's gut.

If you have the time in class (days or weeks) to digress digest this, to pursue the bioenergetics of sugars and scat, to explore evolution, then this answer can go a long way. If you shorten it to "so we know they're ripe," you've just placed the child in the center of the natural universe, and set back her chances of grasping descent with modification later.

(Language matters--yes, we know they're ripe because the berries are blue, but that is not why the berries are blue, at least from the point of view of science. )

Blueberries are blue because God made them so...

The problems with this answer should be obvious, but these days some folks need it spelled out. Science does not dabble with the supernatural. It has no truck with miracles, either, for a variety of reasons.

Despite the noise from some corners, not all science teachers are godless atheists trying to subvert your child's mind. Atheism requires more faith than I have.

So how do we answer seemingly simple questions in class? Very carefully. Sometimes no answer is better than any answer. If I'm stuck, I'll often probe a bit to grasp what the child is really asking--and many time the child does not know either.

Uncertainty is fine with me--far more damage has been done by folks who know the truth than those of us plodding along the nooks and crannies of the natural world.

I have faith that my blueberries will ripen, and enough biochemistry background to grasp how they will ripen. I'll save pondering the why until the day's end, as I sit on the patio watching the nearly full moon inch up over the maple tree in back, sipping melomel made from last year's blueberry bounty.

The blueberries in the photo now sit in my gut. Yum!

Thoughts on seeing Andromeda on the anniversary of my sister's death

How much do I have left of the loyalty to earth,
which humans shame, and dislike of our own lives,
and others' deaths that take part of us with them,
wear out of us, as we go toward that moment
when we find out how we die: clinging and pleading,
or secretly relieved that it is all over,
or despising ourselves, knowing that death
is a punishment we deserve, or like an old dog,
off his feed, who is suddenly ravenous,
and eats the bowl clean, and the next day is a carcass.

Galway Kinnell
from "The Striped Snake and the Goldfinch"

This post is for me, again. November is a tough time.

Mary Beth, my sister and my soul, was killed by an errant Christian missionary a few years ago. Not sure his being Christian matters, but his views that God somehow had something to do with all this soured me on this whole Christian thing. (Something about God's will and my sister's liver being bench pressed by a tow bar left a distaste in my mouth....)

Soon after her death, Toledo Hospitals asked me what I though about her care there. She died, usually a minus, and they got her confused with some other Jane Doe the night she died, so my opinion of her hospital care did not garner the kind of support hospitals yearn for. (Goodness, they even got the date of her death wrong....if the CEO is reading this, and disagrees, chat with me...)

She's still dead, and the hospital still exists, so my answers on their quality assurance questionnaire really made no difference, though it did get me a nifty letter from their CEO.

In one of the saner moves in my life, I shredded both the missionary's and the CEO's letter regarding her death. I care not for the hospital's profit margin, and even less for errant Christian minister's views of entropy.

Life is life, and here we are.

***

Last night I saw the Andromeda Galaxy. Light that left there about 2 million years ago lit up a rod on the back of my retina.

About 2 million years ago, Homo habilus roamed the African plains, over a million years before H. sapiens developed. A few photons left a star or two from Andromeda, and headed our way.

Last night they lit up my brain.




Mary Beth was a descendant of H. habilus, as are you and me. I would have liked her to remain alive long enough to share photons from Andromeda last night, but that was not to be. God's will, according to the person directly responsible for her death, but I can hardly blame Her for the piss poor driving of one of Her agents.

And so (as Vonnegut said) it goes.

***

I am getting older.

That I can still see Andromeda naked eye is no small feat.

Those photons traveled a long way to get to me. I was ready for them. I lay on the grass, my back wet from the dew, and I absorbed the photons. I feel a little bit guilty that I did not stay all night. A whole lot of photons traveled a long, long way just to hit the imprint of my back on a lawn that defines entropy.

***

The more try I to teach, the more I realize that teaching is, well, impossible, unless you're propagandizing.

This is not good.

***

Professional astronomers made a huge announcement this week, one that went mostly unnoticed.

Huge gamma ray "bubbles" are emanating from the center of the Milky Way, our galaxy. Vast amounts of energy (a term few of us understand, and I certainly don't) are flowing off the galaxy.

This is a big deal.

I like science. I also like theology, even if some scientists believe our beliefs are genetically programmed. (I suspect happiness erupts whenever we pursue our genetics, and I may be the happiest fool on the planet.)

I think we discovered heaven. And I think maybe Mary Beth's presence there bumped up the gamma ray production up a magnitude or two.

***

I teach a lot of nonsense. Right now I am teaching about functional groups to children who have no grasp of chemistry. This is like teaching color to a blind woman.

I am an agent of the state. Not sure that's a good enough justification for what I do, but the benefits are good.

***

The darkest 12 weeks of the year start now. That my sister got killed right when the sun fails us is not her fault, but messes me up just the same.

The love of her life grows apples. Apples. And bees.

I love apples, and I love bees. And I love Dave, a man who grows both apples and bees, and who keeps the few solid parts of Mary Beth left on his land.

Enough said.

***

I saw a few bees today. They're frantic.

How do I know? I watched them.

If you (unfortunately) believe in a mechanistic view of the universe, you would expect bees to be ponderous today, moving slowly, governed by the laws of kinetics and thermal energy.

Turns out the bees in mid-November have more energy than Richard Simmons on Red Bull.

Despite the low temperatures, despite the lack of nectar (or maybe because of the lack) in local flowers, doomed as they are as the sunlight fails, the bees are zinging along like they're mainlining amphetamines.

How do I know.
I watched them.

I could read about it, I suppose, or watch a YouTube, or maybe dive into Wikipedia, but I have the intelligence of at least an ant, and I trust my senses. Do you trust yours?

***

I am old enough to (finally) realize I am going to die. This is shocking news to me.

If I do nothing else this year, I hope to instill in each of my students that they will die, too, that everything eventually falls apart, that they should pursue things that matter. They are surrounded by voices that pretend humans are immortal.

One voice reminding them otherwise won't hurt, and it might, just might, push a child to pursue a path she would not have, because her father said she should be a nurse, because his father said he should become an

If I do that much, they will not have wasted their time in Room B362.

When they're my age, or even decades younger, knowing that a carboxyl group makes a molecule more acidic will not matter a whit.

***

I saw Andromeda last night, naked eye.
I saw a 40" striped bass rotting on the beach today.
I saw bees struggle to grab some nectar from cosmos flowers in November.
I am alive when my younger sister, my brilliant sister, my loving sister, is not.
I made a batch of beer today.

All of this is related. I'll name this ale Entropy.

***

We know nothing.

Gamma rays, death, rotting striped bass carcasses on the beach, it's all the same.
Something happened 15 billion years ago. I hope it happens again.

In the meantime I'll brew, sing, bake, rake, and dance.

I don't get it, but I'm glad I'm part of it. How about you?

The brightest man I know never finished high school. But he can grow apples, raise bees, play slide guitar, and think.
The most loving woman I know got killed by a Christian missionary.
The farthest thing I can see, Andromeda, I can still see.

The Andromeda photo is by Boris Štromar