Thoughts on finding a mako's tooth

Found today at the edge of the ocean.

We are mammals, all of us, trapped by words of our creation, most of us.
We are human, all of us, trapped by technologies of our creation, most of us.
We are all mortal, all of us, trapped by belief we shall live forever, most of us.

Just a few hours ago I stumbled upon the tooth of a mako shark, a creature likely still very alive within a few miles of here, now sliding through the dark depths of the water, living in a universe as incomprehensible to us as iPhones are to the shark

This tooth has ripped the bodies of other living beings, its serrated edges cutting through flesh not all that different from our own.

An old horseshoe crab, just recently dead.

We credit ourselves with awareness, with knowledge, with wisdom, stored in books and hard drives and stories we share with each other.

If the stories focus on us, as they mostly do, we can still learn.
If they exclude everything but us, however, we'll become as ignorant as the machines that dominate our days.

We're losing our way.

***

[Update: a local biology teacher just told me that this may be a fossilized tooth--
how cool would that be!]

[Update 2: A geologist friend of mine assures me it is a fossil!]

I've never regretted a single moment outside.
Photos by Leslie.

Mitigating environmentalism: On quahogs and horseshoe crabs

My clam bed, our clam bed, has been severely damaged in the name of environmentalism. "Wetland mitigation" resembles The Inquisition--noble purpose, squiggly means, and disastrous consequences.

The quahogs left after Evergreen Environmental  "removed a portion of the old rail bed and restored 7 acres to marsh" are stressed. I'm stressed. The folks at Evergreen Environmental get blessed by the government to "improve" a patch of the planet that had just about recovered from the last time humans intervened.

I still managed to scrape up enough quahogs for a fine June meal, then wandered over to the bay to watch the sunset.

Dusk, June 22, Delaware  [credit: Leslie Doyle]

The water was high, and still rising under the Full Strawberry Moon--and along its edge, the annual orgy of horseshoe crabs, their shells glistening under the shared light of the setting sun and the rising moon. In this dreamy June twilight, anything is possible.

I had been worried about my horseshoe crab critters--Sandy had walloped us pretty good--but the writhing critters enjoying the June dusk reminded me there's a reason they have been around since before the rise and fall of the dinosaurs.

They will survive us, too.

Pixels and plastic

I've spent the last couple of days asking kids to look at horseshoe crab molts. The molts are (mostly) unfamiliar, with all kinds of tiny surprises. We're going to Sandy Hook in a few days to see some live ones in the bay.

I can't draw.

The vast majority of my students spend hours a day staring at screens, and why not? The screens dance and flash through millions of sounds and colors, a tiny world screaming how wonderful its user is, and how much more wonderful she can be if she only does this....

I can't draw.

The closer you look at a screen, the less you see. That's the world our children live in.
The toys they play with as children are made of plastic, the details of each one identical to thousands of other.

Details elude them, because, for most of what they see, details do not exist.

I can't draw.

 I don't argue with them. I don't care if they can draw. I care if they can see. It's not intuitive, not anymore.

Look again, what do you see. Trust me, look.

And several times today a smile broke out, and I heard the word.

Wow!

Siemens STEM Institute video

OK, I'm not sure I'm allowed to do this (but it's usually easier to be forgiven than get permission--my Mommy taught me that)--here's my video for the Siemens STEM Academy program this summer.

Mind you, it was edited on a cheap laptop running Vista Home Basic, about 17 hours of my life I won't get back.



But I like it anyway....

It's already banned in Germany--does anyone know Izzy's address?

Seeing thro' the eye...

We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro' the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.

William Blake 

I found the light above after it passed through the multiple lenses of a horseshoe crab that no longer needed them. The light was there whether or not I saw it, but I saw it, so now I share it.

It's been an interesting year. I sat directly across the Governor Christie in my school building, and next to the NJ Acting Commissioner Cerf in his.

I listened to both of them, and they both deigned to listen to me. I heard their words, then parsed the meaning of those words. I am blessed with moderate intelligence and keen curiosity, so I have little doubt of how they expected me to interpret their words.

And, sadly, there is nothing true from either meeting worth sharing.

It's been an odd year here in New Jersey.

I'm sticking to the classroom--where I can still effect change.

National Canine Latin Barking assessments

While immersed in the Krebs cycle in mid-January, pushing biochemical pathways on sophomores who have yet to learn chemistry, I marvel at their persistence, trying to grasp what I know they cannot, but I ask them to do it anyway. (There is something unethical about this....)

Should I ever train a dog to bark in Latin, I will be praised for my remarkable puppy and my methods of puppy training. I could write books about my methods, and others could train their pooches to recite Virgil as well.

I could develop a whole system of tests, the National Canine Latin Barking assessment system, and make those with less educated mutts feel shame. 

I would be rich, my puppies would gain universal acclaim, but truth be told (and truth has become a rare commodity), my trained terriers would no more about Latin than I know about the mind of a frisky horseshoe crab clasped onto its partner under a June moon.

My dogs would know nothing more than they did when they only barked, no matter what the NCLB assessment measures.

***

Come May, I will take a few busloads of young humans to watch horseshoe crabs mate at the edge of the bay, to remind them (and me) that there's a whole lot more going on than we can ever grasp in a lifetime, much of it as beautiful as it is incomprehensible.


And we will return to Bloomfield, our Bloomfield, different critters than the ones we were that morning, in ways no standardized test can measure.

Mid-January is as good a time as any to be cranky.

Photo by me using Leslie's point-n-shoot.

A late December walk

'Turn away no more;
Why wilt thou turn away
The starry floor,
The watery shore,
Is given thee till the break of day.'

William Blake

Today is the last day of the darkest two weeks of the year, the shadows stretched long on the beach like languid lovers unaware of the long darkness just hours away.

Leslie and I, shadows of each other, walked along the edge of the ocean, gathering whirly whelk skeletons tossed up by the tide. They look harmless enough, and are lovely enough to be our state shell. When alive, though, they tore at the insides of clams and oysters, slicing away at living flesh, as utterly cruel as anything, and everything, carnivorous.

I wandered over to the bay side, to see what I could see, and to feel what I could feel. It's late December, and I need light.

The beach is littered with dying comb jellies glinting like diamonds in the long light of the sun. Hundreds lie like lenses, highlighting the grains of sand that mark their morgues.

Crabs stare vacantly at their scattered parts, a few limbs here, a few more there, the sand pocked by the webbed prints of their murderers. Every calorie is precious now.

I see now what I fail to notice in summer--the delicate array of white dots outlining the dead crab's carapace, the ornate ridging of its body, the shadows cast by the undulating shell.

Every crab I saw today was dead. I saw a dead gull, a dead menhaden, a few dead horseshoe crabs, and hundreds of dying comb jellies.

The gulls barely moved to get out of the way. The sun has left us, the cost of useful energy is steep. The sunlight is useful for sight, but not much more now.

The few horseshoe crab shells look like they could walk back into the bay, their compound eyes seem to watch everything happening around them, Lazareths of the Sea.

They, too, are dead, their pointed armor useless now, allowing the weak winter light to penetrate.

The sun holds still in the south now. Soon it will creep northward again, bringing with it the unimaginably alive late spring beach, where the dying are ignored.

The last few moments of my walk I saw a fly on a jetty, a spirited reminder of the springs to come.

Now, though, the beach belongs to the dead, who will own all of us eventually, and despite the ragged edges, the broken bodies, the rank smell of decomposing flesh, the beauty of the beach will not allow me to turn away.

All photos taken today, North Cape May, along my favorite bay.

Dusk on the edge of the bay

The time between anniversaries of the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima, plutonium on Nagasaki, have the same off-center pull on me of the awful hours on Good Friday. Attaching this disequilibrium to specific times is, of course, a human conceit, as is dreading the inevitable.

Still....

***

 The mid-moon evening tide lets us wander out onto the tidal flats at dusk--there's still a hint of color on the western edge of the bay, but the sun sank a half hour ago.

I wander around collecting horseshoe crab molts, the exoskeletons split along the front edge, where the sea creature wriggled its way out of its shell, self actualization in action. The husks of these ancient creatures hold no flesh.

As I scuffled my feet in water only inches deep, a globular critter wiggled its way from the edge of the sea back to the depths, and I pondered whether it was a sally growler, a croaker, a northern star gazer, or something else.

As if a name matters to it, to me.

To anything.

The shells in the photo were collected two dusks ago.

The critters that once claimed them are likely wandering around in the brown cool depths of the Delaware at this moment, unaware of anniversaries, but not unaware.

Awareness is not what makes us human.

Horseshoe crab graveyard

 Horseshoe crabs and I have a long history.

 Theirs longer than ours.





These were tossed up on a huge hill of dredge waste, peering through the gray mud.




I have witnessed much, most unspoken, in my years, as I am sure you have, too.

I do not understand, or trust, my silence.

 

Their blood runs blue, copper grasps the same oxygen molecules that let us strip electrons from our food.

 Our blood runs red, the deep rust of iron, 

Most of us can see, most of us can talk.

Our stories remain as opaque as the mud deep below the waters of the Delaware Bay, where now in the darkness, a solitary horseshoe crab consumes a careless clam, neither ever seen by humans.

 

They have not changed much in hundreds of millions of years, their life perfect for their world.



And now they rest on the spoils made by us, we who are impossibly foreign in our own skins, looking for something beyond this life.








When you walk the fissured hillock on a chilly April morning, the exoskeletons whisper what they know.

This is all, and all is enough.

Photos taken by me.

A response to a technophile

This post is a mess, an amalgam of several yet-born posts swirling about.

This is a tool, made by Takeshi Yamada,  an artist who saw visions while surveying horseshoe crabs on the shores of our bay.

It is a pen crafted from the tail of a horseshoe crab. Mr. Yamada uses it almost every day, to create stunning images.

Compared to some tools, his pen may be thought inefficient. It certainly lacks the precision of a YAG laser engraver , or even a Koh-I-Noor 5611 drafting pencil, but that's not the point. That's not the point at all.

Mr. Yamada is human, with the same frailties as any of us, with the same natural curiosity. He did not learn to use his telson in an American school. There is no place for it there.

Credit: Dennis B. Smith, Leadholder.com

Unique does not guarantee better. Unique things are often unique because they are not worth reproducing. Technology thrives on precise, efficient, reproducible results. There is little room for Mr. Yamada in the industrial world.

Mr. Yamada's work, however, gives me pleasure. His work pleases others as well. Someone shared it with me, now I share it with you.

***

Gerald Aungst, "a supervisor of gifted children," writes for Connected Principals, a shared blog written by school administrators, a blog well worth visiting. His recent post "Why 'I Don’t Do Technology' Isn’t Acceptable" raises some good points, and I have no qualms with the thesis of its title. His arguments within the article, however, reveal some interesting thoughts shared by many technophiles, and I'd like to offer some views from the other side of the aisle, an aisle I straddle with my Google + account in my right hand, my Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil in my left.

Go read the post. I'll go check my sundial and pick weeds from my garden while you read.

***

"Some people argue that technology is simply a tool to be applied where and how it’s appropriate. Others say no technology is neutral and we have to be deliberate in our choices to use it."

The two are not mutually exclusive--"appropriate" covers a lot of ground. We also should consider what is lost when a newer technology is used. Reel mower vs. gas-powered rotary. Pencil vs. pixels. Chalkboard vs. IWB.

I'm a retired doc--before I stopped succoring the afflicted I saw the mess high tech mania produced in medicine. Mr. Aungst's example of the CT machine is an interesting example, because of the quandaries it has created, and because of the change in skills that have resulted.

Classic appendicitis (and many subtle variants) can be diagnosed by history and physical exam alone if the practitioner has learned how to do this. CT scans are quite useful in certain situations, but are often superfluous, and can, at times, mislead. They certainly tangle up a few DNA molecules (which are usually repaired), and they are very expensive.

The obvious downsides to CT imaging is that it takes time (and time is an issue with appendicitis), and it requires tossing some radiation through a living critter. Less obvious is the erosion of skills in tech-dependent docs. By the time I left medicine, CT scans were evolving from an overused, nonessential tool to standard of care, partly because the less experienced docs felt no need to refine the clinical skills needed to accurately diagnose appendicitis--because they had CT machines....

High tech has supplanted the low tech history and physical examination--if you delve into the luverly world of Bayesian statistics, you start to grasp why this matters. I loved CT machines--but I used them judiciously. No, you do not need one just because you hit your head. But thanks for asking....

***

"Everything that we can do using digital technology can certainly be done in some other way. As I understand it, technology gives us three capabilities: to do things

• More efficiently
• More precisely
• More thoroughly"

Well, no, and no. Some things done with digital technology cannot be done any other way. I'll save that for another post. The second part, though, intrigues me because it gets a deeper question. Why the hurry?

Given the phenomenal information now (efficiently, precisely, thoroughly) available to all of us, does pedagogy require the same technical sleekness? Do our classrooms need to follow the industrial model of production? Is this even possible? The Slow School movement makes a nice counter-story to the frenzy spawned in Silicon Valley.

If you believe that our current cultural practices have had disastrous effects on our seas, our air, our children, maybe stepping back a bit to reflect on what matters, itself not a particularly efficient activity, then efficiency loses its luster. If we took the time to reflect on our practices, to appreciate the depth of consequences we make with our choices, would the shimmering cognitive dissonance awaken us enough to change? Or would it drive us back into the dull din of relentless data, back to our coffee and wine and the digital distractions of our [dis]connected lives.

 "Why you'll love a Mac. A Mac is as good as it looks."

***

"Technology advances give all of us—doctors, forensic scientists, teachers, and students—the ability to make better decisions...."

This is where our paths divide. "Better decisions" is a huge category--and "better" is as slippery as butter. The large cultural decisions we have made (or have had pressed onto us) the past few generations have had consequences, huge consequences.

Our current air of Western superiority is fueled by cheap calories pumped up from the ground, from finite sources. Our tremendous gains in growing food stem from our ability to fixate nitrogen through the Haber-Bosch process, also dependent on finite sources. We have the time to ruminate, though few of us do.

The same technology that allows us to chat with our "neighbors" half a world away allowed a British "Reaper" un-manned drone to kill civilians in Pakistan using digital communication from an airbase in Nevada. Yes, it was an accident. It wasn't the first time--two children were injured via remote control in 2009. No, it won't be the last.

High tech allows us to make quicker decisions--but if technology makes us capable of better decisions, I'd like to see the evidence.

***

At the end of each school year, I take over a hundred kids to see horseshoe crabs mating along the Sandy Hook Bay. While a few critters may end up frustrated by coitus interruptus sophomoribus, a few humans leave the tide's edge feeling a little bit more connected to the world, and, perhaps, a little bit more in love with the world.

Some of them may end up in Afghanistan, the ones least likely to find it on a map. The Japanese call the horseshoe crab kabuto-gani--"the warrior's helmet"--because of its similarity to the headgear worn by the samurai, a culture that forbid killing by stealth.

We don't dwell on these things, those of us protected by money and class here in the States. They make us uncomfortable.

Teaching science requires some cognitive dissonance, which is convenient, because allowing a child to become more aware of her universe will lead to huge doses of cognitive dissonance. If I aim for efficiency, the children in my class can hide from their dissonance.

Mr. Aungst's article and the subsequent discussion are a wonderful start to why technology matters in the classroom, and who can disagree with his assertion that "educators have accepted responsibility for the growth of the students in their care."

I think we need to discuss what "growth" needs--deeply, slowly, thoroughly, if not efficiently. We'll need some technology--comfortable chairs, maybe a glass or two of something brewed, perhaps a guitar, and artificial light if our chat extends past sunset. We mostly need ourselves and our love for what we do.

Care to join the discussion?

The Mac is from the Apple site.
The pencil is accredited above.
The telson pen is from Horseshoecrab.org.
The horseshoe crab photo is ours.

Another horseshoe crab story

I fished in thigh deep water today, surrounded by gazillions of horseshoe crab eggs, most of which will be eaten in the next day or two. A small fish, obviously versed in the Curly and the Oyster Stew episode, kept grabbing my lure just as I was pulling it out of the water, then gleefully letting go just as it broke the water's surface.

A rather exuberant male horseshoe crab got flipped in the waves as he tried to mount the love of his life. A small child, no higher than my waist, approached it, and an older, officious looking child warned him to stop, that the tail would sting.

I can hardly bare officiousness at any age, but it's particularly sad to see in a tween, so I broke away from the playful fish, picked up the horseshoe crab, and showed the child that the tail is perfectly safe. (Well, I guess I wouldn't run with a live horseshoe crab--I could trip and accidentally poke my eye out, I suppose.)

Myths matters. Decades ago I slaughtered dozens of horseshoe crabs on a very hot August afternoon, their blue blood covering us in our frenzy. The life guards had told us, a gang of 9 and 10-year-olds, that they were dangerous, and fearless as we were, we attacked the seemingly loathesome critters.

It does no good for me to tell the officious one that he was wrong. He saw what he saw today, and fear's a funny thing.

The younger child, however, gleefully touched the squirming horseshoe crab. He touched the tail, the shell, the tiny claws, the lucky bones, pretty much everything there is to touch on a horseshoe crab. Before the day is done, I bet he shows a few others his size that the critters are harmless.

The officious one stood off to the side. Not my intention to embarrass him. Maybe he will hold a horseshoe crab before his week here is up, maybe he won't, but he will be a little less certain in his fear next time one tumbles up out of the surf.

How many of my fears remain from my ignorance, even now, old as I am? How many do I unwittingly share with others?

Photo by one of my biology students on our annual Sandy Hook Horseshoe Crab trip.

Pssst...don't hold them by their tails.

Quick report

We took about 150 kids to Sandy Hook today, just as the high tide of the new moon of June was receding.

Horseshoe crabs, oblivious to our presence, did what horseshoe crabs have done for millennia.

A few dozen horseshoe crabs danced at the water's edge. Thousands upon thousands of impossibly blue-grey horseshoe crab eggs floated in the water.

Four huge, filleted drum littered the beach.

When the young of the H. sapiens species mix with the old of the L. polyphemus, good things can happen.

And they did.

Thank you PSEG, Bloomfield BEF, BHS administration, and all the chaperones for making this day a tremendous success.

Learning, truly learning, about horseshoe crabs (or any other form of life alien to our culture) will not help on any NCLB exam. But it will change a life, in a good way.

I teach children. Today was a good day. Photos taken by the kids.

Bleeding on Memorial Day

My hands were awash with  patriotic colors this morning. Blue blood of a lovely lady horseshoe crab, hooked by a lad whose enthusiasm, alas, could not compensate for his ignorance. Red blood of a dogfish, also hooked by the exuberant one. His first fish. Ever.

I landed and unhooked the fish. The child posed with it, two feet of shimmering muscle wrapped in sandpaper.

Can you eat it? 
Sure, if you bleed it first--

The father never acknowledged me; he refused to let the child take home and eat the fish.

"Nobody eats those things," he muttered. His eyes flashed fear when the dogfish had first broken through the surface.

The child looked at me. I had already shown him horseshoe crabs were harmless, letting the child brush his hands along the wriggly harmless claws. I had already shown him how to  handle a "shark," letting him run his fingers along the sandpaper skin. He trusted me.

You can eat it, I said once again, quietly--no reason to embarrass the child or his father. But it'll be fine if you let it go gently.

 He believed me.

***

Both the dogfish and the horseshoe crab had real reasons for fear. The milky blue blood oozing from the injured horseshoe crab may marks its doom. The bright red drops of blood on the handle of my net, now a dull burgundy, will cost the dogfish.

Neither knows of Memorial Day, when we splash red, white, and blue on our homes celebrating the brave young folks fighting over in lands we cannot be bothered to learn how to pronounce, battling ideologies in a futile attempt to defeat fear.

We fear, and we slaughter, those things we do not understand. The father has chosen ignorance, his child is still open to learning.

The child learned a little bit about fishing today, a little bit about the critters of our bay. He learned a much bigger lesson about ignorance, and he has a picture of himself holding a magnificent animal he feared moments before the photo was taken.

Our ignorance kills us. The local jetties are missing a few young men and women who are thousands of miles away. We barbecue and play in their names.

How many of us really know their stories? How many of us  want to know?

Yes, I am aware of the inconsistencies--fishing is complicated, and it's not.
 The horseshoe crab photo taken this past February.

Just to see stuff...

I wasted a day today prepping my lambs for the New Jersey Biology Competency Test. I will waste another day on Monday.

I have no idea what it means to be competent in biology, and judging by the practice questions, I am not alone. If a child passes the biology competency test, is she a biologist?

I chased a herd of daphnia today in one of my tanks--we have about 10 in the room. A child from another class came to visit today, just to see stuff.

We have a generation of children who do not see stuff. We have a generation of adults who do not see stuff. We can't even blame the gods-we've gone done outsourced hubris.

***

In a couple of weeks I will lead almost 200 kids on a trip to Sandy Hook. We will hold fiddler crabs and grass shrimp and pipefish and horseshoe crabs. We will get too much sun, and a few of us will lose some red blood cells. Children will watch the tide fall--we cannot stay long enough to watch it rise again.

We will hunt for hermit crabs and whelks and killies and mussels.

The children will see that the world is for them, of them, and that it is, ultimately, incomprehensible. Science is, to paraphrase Richard Feynman, understanding how nature behaves. The "why" I leave to the priests, the astrologers, the charlatans--grasping the how is more than enough for a thousand lifetimes.

And what, really, will help a larval human "get" science? Prepping for a test given to meet the demands of a few aged men sitting in fancy buildings just over a couple hundred miles away? Or walking along Sandy Hook Bay in early June?

A shame I even need to pose the question. A bloody shame....

Formalizing informal science

I got an email from Education Week this morning that prompted this.

Conclusion 1: Across the life span, from infancy to late adulthood, individuals learn about the natural world and develop important skills for science learning.

I'm taking my lambs to Sandy Hook in a month to watch horseshoe crabs mate, to hold a few fiddler crabs, to seine the bay and see what they find, and to pick up a little trash while they're there.


For at least one day, I do not fret over my biggest classroom fear--killing curiosity. (I fret over a bazillion other things--bleeding, sunburned, and drowning dreams will haunt me for the next month.)

A 2009 National Resource Council report suggests that informal science--going to museums, watching Mythbusters, or looking under rocks in the backyard--matters if the goal is to spark lifetime interest in science.

But we have a problem--no immediate way to measure the effects of informal science, at least in a way that compels the data-driven drones who have co-opted our schools:

Without a common framework specifying outcomes and approaches, it is difficult to show gains in learning that occur across localities or across time frames, and attempts to portray the contributions of infrastructure for science learning that exists across varied institutions and activities will continue to be hindered

Our data-driven ed culture does not  accept what it cannot effectively ostensibly measure. So we continue to do what we know doesn't work! How do we know? We have a decade's worth of NCLB data....

*** 

Conclusion 8: Designers and educators can make science more accessible to learners when they portray science as a social, lived experience, when they portray science in contexts that are relevant to learners, and when they are mindful of diverse learners’ existing relationships with science and institutions of science learning.

Conclusion 14: Learning experiences across informal environments may positively influence children’s science learning in school, their attitudes toward science, and the likelihood that they will consider science-related occupations or engage in lifelong science learning through hobbies and other everyday pursuits.

Here's an idea--why not try this inside the school building? We have the students for a good chunk of their awake hours.

Every science teacher, and every school administrator, should read the report. You can read it free online.

The conclusions were lifted directly from the 2009 report Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits,

Horseshoe crabs redux

I saw that someone Googled "can you pick up a horseshoe crab" today to find my blog.

I found a half dozen tiny horseshoe crabmolts on the beach today, the smallest the size of my thumbnail.

I rescued an ancient old female, caught high on the beach, twice today. Flies had settled on her the first time around, she shoved off the second. This may well be her last year, but not her last day.

So I brought this back....

Spiders, really.
And like spiders, feared.

Kids, really.
And like kids, fearless.

I was 8, old enough to know better. The lifeguard, bronzed and confident, draped in red, asked us to slaughter the horseshoe crabs.

"Hold them by the tail so they can't sting you, then smash them on the wall."

The wall--a creosote bulkhead jutting into the beach, already slimy with the blue blood and cracked shells of these fearsome creatures.

It was mating season. Not yet old enough to understand a desire that drove these beasts onto my beach, Ideal Beach, I smashed one creature on top of the others, picking the same one up over and over until the shells splintered and the sky blue blood soaked the shells underneath.

Sea gulls pecked into the soft flesh of our dying prey as the legs were still scratching at the sky.

When we were done, tired, stinking, and proud of our aching muscles, we jumped back into the water, washed ourselves, then went home.

---

Hemocyanin: blue blood. We wore it that day like war paint--stinking of death, sweating under the early July sun.

20 mg of high purity hemocyanin will fetch $175.00

20 milligrams.
Less than the weight of a fat housefly. Less than the weight of our soul. Our blood runs red from the iron in hemoglobin; a horseshoe crab's blood runs blue from copper.

Hemoglobin is cheaper.

---

Every spring the she crabs come to the beach, several smaller males trailing behind. The bayshore teems with horseshoe crab eggs, tiny bean curds at the lip of the beach. Millions upon millions, so many that none mean anything at all to me. Birds crowd along the beach, feasting. I used to think the birds were what mattered.

A female crab can lay 80,000 eggs in a season. She creeps up onto the beach, riding the spring tide on the full moon. She crabs reach sexual maturity in 9 to 12 years, not much younger than when humans do. May is crazy with life everywhere. Within 2 to 4 weeks, they are ready to hatch. I never really looked at the eggs closely, until last year.

It took me a long moment to believe what I was seeing. Horseshoe crab eggs do not remain opaque. Soon before they egg splits, the tiny pale crab spins wildly. Half the egg is clear, the other half white from the curled embryo. If you look carefully, you can tell that this tiny critter is a curled up horseshoe crab. As it spins, it looks like a tiny blinking eye.

If you watch one long enough, you will catch its birth. It will already have survived longer than most of its siblings. And it will not likely survive the next high tide.

Still, catching the exuberance of a newly hatched critter the size of an ice cream sprinkle on a warm, June afternoon changed me. Strangers saw a wild-haired middle-aged man squatting by the water's edge, staring intently at nothing, gesticulating a bit too much for others to come share his excitement.

I would not have let my kids close to me, either, had our roles been switched. Fortunately for my kids, I am not a stranger.

---

The smell of a dead or dying crustaceans can overwhelm a kitchen. On an open beach, however, mixed in with the salty life-teeming spray, a balance is reached. At high tide, the smell is almost too clean; at low tide, whiffs of the decaying mud is sharp, but not repulsive. The tide washes over us twice a day, the rhythm of mortality.

I occasionally find horseshoe crabs stranded on the beach. I will gently pick them up, and return them to the water. I may have returned thousands by now. I cannot make up for the hundred I slaughtered. That is not why I do it.

Every summer I show children how to pick up a horseshoe crab. Cradle the carapace with your hand. Do not carry them by their tails. I touch the point of the tail, show a child there is no stinger. They are gentle creatures. Omnivorous, true--clams, worms, and algae, so perhaps not so gentle, but certainly not harmful to humans.

Young loggerhead turtles snack on horseshoe crabs. Humans use their blood in medical research. Otherwise, they have few "enemies." Not sure being higher up in the food chain makes one an enemy. Someday I will feed the worms, unless some stranger stuffs my veins with formaldehyde and buries me too deep to be useful.

Horseshoe crabs live an average of 19 years, or so the scientists will tell you. I doubt the average longevity matters to a horseshoe crab--the mad, exuberant spinning of horseshoe crab embryos one June afternoon reminded me what matters.

Ask me someday....ask me in June. I will show you. Words will not do. I bet you smile like an idiot, too.... 

Sources:

Personal observations.
"The Horseshoe Crab,(Limulus polyphemus)," Maryland Sea Grant Schools Online Network
A.G. Scientific, Inc., Product Catalog,

The end of winter

Our crocuses bloomed today. A tiny horseshoe crab, smaller than my thumbnail, crawled out of the Delaware Bay. The day lilies are rising again, like Phoenixes from the snow's ashes.

All of this is more real than the nonsense that passes for discourse in the education world. I can still close my classroom door (though I rarely do) and tackle whatever problems we care to tackle that day.

Why is my plant wilting? Hey, sow bug babies! I think my slug drowned.
How come the starfish hasn't moved in three days? Are those mosquitoes?
Look! Peas!

We got kids from Somalia, from Sierra Leone, from Poland, from China, from Ghana. Not third generation, not second. We're talking off the airplane (Newark Liberty International Airport) and into the brink. I taught a child who spoke only Bengali.

And we thrive.

We thrive despite the mandates, the tests, the current climate that forgets the roots of the word public, "pertaining to the people." Our town supported the last budget, despite the struggles of family after family after family.


Families that come from desperate situations know education matters. Families that come from desperate situations value teachers who care about their children. They put their trust in our hands, in our classrooms.

So while the elite press on about this magnet school, that philosophy, the myriad ways to use (and abuse) technology, scouring the US News and World Report for college rankings (and the NJ Monthly for state rankings), most of the rest of us go about our business, getting children ready for loving, happy, and (yes) productive lives.

But never just productive.

I work for Bloomfield, and its families, and for its children. I do not work for Arne Duncan, I do not work for Governor Christie. I give my all every day, because I want my lambs to be happy, in the Jeffersonian sense, and I want them prepared to pursue whatever dreams they hope to pursue.

I wiled away a good chunk of the afternoon on a jetty poking into the bay. I stared at barnacles for a bit, mourned all the oysters scraped off the rocks by this year's ice. The water was exceptionally clear, revealing thousands of comb jellies, floating in with the tides, then floating out again.

My happiest moments are spent on the edges of the sea. 

I stumbled upon the horseshoe crab, not much different than its ancestors that wandered these same shores when dinosaurs still roared. It may be still alive, it may be in the belly of a gull now. Tomorrow I will share its story with my students, because for them, these stories still matter.

And then I will test them on meiosis and synapses and centromeres and chromatids, to get them ready for the state exam in May. Those who finish early will be allowed to study their terrariums, their aquariums, to see how their critters did over the weekend.

 And the day will not be completely wasted, the last Sunday of February, as the light returns, and all things, all things, again become possible.

All photos taken today.

 First one crocuses, then the tiny (and live) horseshoe crab, then the points of a dead horseshoe crab, 

then barnacles hanging out waiting for the next tide, 

and finally, light as seen through the compound eyes of a horseshoe crab.

February horseshoe crab

Leslie and I found the tiny shell of a young horseshoe crab this afternoon while walking on the edge of the Delaware Bay.

The shell is backlit by our sun, the source of just about all our energy, whatever "energy" means.

I can construct all kinds of things on computers, create all kinds of worlds, live all kinds of lives, and none of it, none, can compare to the miracles we find with each step we take on the beach outside.

A loon surface no more than 10 feet away from us today. The water was clear. The sanderlings are gone.

A February horseshoe crab

I love this picture.

My wife has tiny feet--that is the tip of her tiny shoe. The tracks were made by a tiny horseshoe crab last February. Chances are pretty good no one else has seen this particular horseshoe crab, and chances are pretty good it is no longer alive.

But it might be. It might be just a mile off our beach, poking along mud 30 feet below the bay's surface, bigger now, munching on whelk. No way to know.

If it lives a few more years, it may return to our beach to mate. A curious child may squat next to it, an ignorant child may run away screaming. A fisherman may snag it with a morsel of squid, his hands washed in creamy blue blood as he struggles to dislodge the hook. A wave may flip it over, and before it rights itself, a gull may peck at its gills as it flings its telson (not a "stinger"),  into the wet sand, trying to right itself.

But last February, it sauntered along our beach, no more than an inch long, feeling its way along a world I cannot imagine.

***

Horseshoe crabs see light we cannot. They have 10 eyes, the two obvious ones sitting on top of the shell--they are used to find mates in the gloom of the bay.

They can "see" light with their telsons, their "tails." They have tiny eye-spots on the front of their shells, designed to see ultraviolet light from the sun, from the moon. They know when the moon is new, when the moon is full. Such news is obvious on the edge of the shore, of course, but not so obvious deeper in the bay. The horseshoe crabs time their orgies to the moon.

They also have eyes underneath, next to the mouth--to see what?

We can pretend to know what it means to have 10 eyes, to sense UV light, to rise from the depths to mate under moonlight, but it's all pretending. We cannot know the universe of the horseshoe crab. But we can know that it exists.

***

I have a classroom set of netbooks, from very generous donations by the Roche Foundation, by the Bloomfield Education Foundation, and by our local Home and School Association.

I love what we can do with them: students can collaborate on projects, we can grab information on the fly, and there is a huge gee whiz factor built into these tiny machines that can liven up a classroom. They are not, however, a window into the world.

The only world visible on a monitor is the human world. Even high resolution photographs of exotic life are just that--human inventions, pixels flashed through electronic streams. They are not real.

A human framed the moment. A human cropped the photograph. A human machine translates the signal into the image on the screen. It is flat. It is manipulable. It is not real.

Oh, but think of the children who do not have access to these wonderful creatures!

I'd rather think of our reluctance to let the children get access to what lives among us.


My daughter, very young at the time, once found a pigeon's nest under the creek bridge that led to our closest park. She watched it for weeks, first eggs, then tiny critters, then fledglings, then gone.

She wrote no reports, took no photos. She just watched.

We keep roly polies ("pill bugs") in our room--harmless crustaceans that bumble around in a few of our terrariums, going about the business of the living, sometimes doing a whole lot of nothing.

My kids can learn all kinds of facts about them from the internet, but the only thing they really need to know for now is what to feed them, how to keep them healthy. Kids ask me, and I explain that I really don't know, because, well, I really don't.

We see that they only shed half of their shells at a time. We see that they tend to hang in groups. We see their antennae busily working the world immediately in front of them. Occasionally some die, occasionally new ones appear.

No pixels, no chips, no pressure. Just our classroom companions, who will be brought back to the outside world when the sun returns.

***

And what do the children take home with them? I do not know, I'll have to ask them years from now.

I do know that if the kids do not see life beyond the human walls now, it is unlikely to happen later.
I also know that most children (and most adults) confound the world we created with the world that exists. Our economy depends on the fantasy.

So I teach biology. Life. And life cannot be found in a chip.

Great article on hoseshoe crab eyes and other bits of anatomy can be found at the Maryland DNR here.

Photo by Leslie.

National Lab Rat Day

We all have a vested interest in advancing our country’s proficiency in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math as a means to driving innovation and jobs — which are key to fueling our economic growth and global competitiveness.

Steve Ballmer
CEO, Microsoft

Yesterday was National Lab Day--major corporations, foundations, politicians, and business folks got together to fuel a national PR project to push technology under the guise of science. Again.

Technology serves the self, science is another beast altogether.

We teach mostly technology in high school--it's what the corporations want, it's what the Feds want, it's what parents want. Get edumacated, get a degree, get a career, get fed, get laid, maybe have kids, and eventually get dead. I'm not saying that's a bad plan, at least not publicly, but it does require limited vision. Thankfully, we live in a culture that's designed to provide the blinders.

Science, unlike technology, serves no one. It is selfless. Peek beyond the hoopla of equations and models and jargon and the floor falls out of the universe.

Or rather, the universe, it seems, has no floor.

If I could teach this to 15 year old brains, bad things would happen. Fortunately, their brains are not mature enough to grasp this, and I'm not half the teacher needed to teach this. Even with tenure, I'm not sure my career could survive a class of children grasping how tenuous reality is.

***

Pick up an object you know, one that gives you comfort, maybe an old shell. It feels solid, has some heft, it's real.

Yet it's mostly empty space.
Yet is is tugged by every other object that exists in the universe.
Yet its elements were fused in the vast gravitational depths of some unknown star.
And maybe most stunning, the oyster was once alive, a sentient creature, and no longer is.

I do not teach religion in class, I teach science. You get to the edges of it, though, and words fall apart. When words fall apart, walls, which are mostly space anyway, fall apart as well.

If a child is locked in a human universe, culturally bound to the myths that will help her become the successful careerist she's been taught to want, grasping even basic physics may ruin her as surely as mainlining heroin.

Thankfully, a child can fly through school "knowing" all kinds of equations without truly understanding their implications. We keep science safe.

Steve Ballmer wants your kid's brain wrapped in gauze. I want your kid's brain so open to possibilities that it oozes all over the universe. I admit his version is more likely to lead to financial success.

But I bet my version is happier.

Photo via ayacop on wikipedia, CC