What hour?

Yesterday the sun hung in the sky for 10 hours and 24 minutes in these parts.
Today the sun cheats us out of two minutes, only hanging around for 10 hours and 22 minutes.

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

What possible hour do we think we wrought last night?

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

Hiroshima

広島

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. ... It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. . . . What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.

Harry S. Truman

It happened on this date, this "greatest achievement."




New technology used to "solve" an old problem. We cannot help ourselves.

Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, suggested "we ought to stay out of the nuclei." Until we have a clue what we want, sounds like good advice.

You cannot separate tools from the critters who use them. Teaching science as some compartmentalized thought process without cultural context is a dangerous game.

What is our responsibility as teachers of science?
As citizens of the United States?
As human beings?

***

This morning I saw a wasp dragging paralyzed cricket along the edge of the driveway. The wasp was not much bigger than the cricket, and the wasp struggled. At one point she let go, stepped back a few inches, stroked her head a few times (much like a human facing a big task), and eventually dragged it down a hole by the driveway garden. The cricket was still alive, but paralyzed.

I did not intervene.

The wasp will lay her eggs in the cricket, and they will hatch in the cricket, still alive, and the cricket will, of course, suffer.

I did not intervene.

The larva wasp will use the the cricket, still alive, for food.

And still, I did not intervene.

Photo by Bruce Holderbaum

***

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

Ken Allan is a blogger on the other side of the Earth. ( Kia ora e Ken.) He's quirky, bright, thoughtful, and well worth reading.

He sent me the this video:

And now I teach science to (very) young adults. I have a responsibility to them, to the state, to myself.

Harry S. Truman called the bombing of Hiroshima "the greatest achievement of organized science." If that does not give you pause, you should not be teaching science.

You should not be teaching anything at all.

(Yes, this is from older posts, timeless ones.)
The photo is by Bruce Holderbaum and can be found here--used with permission.


This is posted every year, as a reminder to me.

May life, May death

Some years I fish, with joy and exuberance, ecstatic at the pull of an animal on the end of the line.
Other years, I avoid it, acknowledging the pain and cost of life to the fish. It's not something I'm ever going to resolve....

I tossed some plastic out at the setting sun on the Delaware. Striped bass are around, and as much fun as they are to catch, they are even more fun to eat.

Flapflapflapflap...

A large bunker had hurled itself out of the sea, away from the jaws of a striper, onto a slightly less inviting scenario, the edge of the surf. Were I a true striper angler, I'd have stuck a hook through it and tossed it back at the striper that precipitated its predicament.

I didn't. I tossed it back. It may well be striper poo by now.

And we had pesto for dinner.

***

I do not like to kill, but I'm pretty good at it. We all are. Every step we take, every spadeful of dirt, every short jaunt in our car, no matter how "green," results in destruction.

We mostly ignore this. This has not always been so.

People used to die at home. People used to get buried without embalming fluids contaminating the earth. People used to wake kin under a shared roof.

I know a lot of people who never witnessed death, except on a screen. Most of us have witnessed a lot of deaths on screens.

Witnessing the last hours of agonal breathing will change you. If nothing else, it puts things in perspective. Exxon and Pearson and Microsoft will be here long after I'm gone. My priorities should not be their priorities. If more of us realized we're mortal, we'd be a kinder culture.

There's a cemetery in Cape May county that still buries folks the old-fashioned way: no diesel backhoe, no embalming, and the casket is optional. The Steelmantown Cemetery has been this way for over three hundred years.

 

Steelmantown Cemetery--where the dead are treated as the dead

***

I find it ironic that my children must limit their intake of certain fish because of the chemicals they contain:

In coordination with the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services and agencies in six other states, the DEP updated its fish consumption advisories and is recommending that the public consume no more than one meal every other month (six meals per year) of bluefish larger than 24 inches.

DEP, June 3, 2009 (Source: StripersOnline)

For women of childbearing age, the recommendation is none. None.

The less we know of death, the more ill we've become.

***

This morning I wandered out to the bay again, this time to the ferry jetty, as steel gray fog rolled in ahead of a thunderstorm. I got to the party a bit late.

Several old men dragged the limp bass carcasses like sacks of manure, leaving abraded scales on a jetty  that was not here 100 years ago, and will likely be gone before the hundred years pass.

The bellies of the bass are full of bunker, and one may have held the partially digested corpse of the bunker I heard slap against the sand last night.

Tomorrow an old man will excrete the undigested remains of a magnificent creature into a bowl, and the water will wash it away into the sewage below our streets, our River Styx now laden with the poisoned remains of animals we no longer dare to feed to our children.

The world is a wonderful and terrible place for all living creatures, incomprehensible in both its beauty and its entropy.

If we cannot teach this, we cannot truly teach biology, or really anything that matters.

The Steelmantown Cemetery picture from an article here. And yes, it is a green cemetery.
The woodcut by Gustave Dore, 1861, via Wikipedia

Sugar and spice and everything Zeiss

I had a chance to go to the Newark Museum planetarium, and I jumped on it. I fell in love with the Zeiss projector the last time I was there. Hard.

I spend most of my time in Bloomfield, NJ. I love my town, but we cannot see the stars. The Zeiss ZKP 3/B projector gives me as close a rep as I can get. It's a fine machine because it mimics what I have already experienced.

It's still there, but today's show was driven by "a state-of-the-art full dome digital projection system"--glitzy, flashy, sexy, and just plain wrong.

The Zeiss orbs sat there fixed at 180 degrees, useless as an astrolabe on a NASA Space Shuttle (or teats on a bull). Our students do not know what they missed. They have never truly seen the stars.

***

Our models have fallen prey to modern disease. We have forgotten that they are models, shadows of a greater universe. They now are the universe, a human universe, a limited universe.

My human hand is imperfect. My scrawl on the board betrays my age, my frailness, my humanness. I trust my drawings because they reflect something bigger than me. They are the shadows on Plato's cave, a means to a truth larger than the human that hopes to share the truth with yonger humans.

The SMART Board that replaced my whiteboard reduces the universe to human forms. It can translate my handwriting into perfect fonts. It professionalizes my humanness. The universe is not about us. Not even close.

My imperfect whiteboard  was a tool, not an end.

I love tools. I do not love my SMART Board.

***

What are we trying to do in the classroom? What do we need to get there?

OK, this one may not last long--just frustrated by our upward and onward dive into a very limited human universe.

Picure of the Zeiss ZKP 3/B from the Newark Museum.

Hubris and a biology classroom

We have lots of stuff going on in class.

We have a few carrots ready for eating, a bunch of fish fry less than two weeks old, a menagerie of sow bugs, slugs, and a centipede or two, planaria, daphnia, wheat berries, a few tomato plants, a healthy Brussels sprouts seedling, several tanks of pond water (two of which have hatching mosquitoes), goldfish, elodea (and a few other aquatic plants I have yet to identify).

We got dead stuff, too--horseshoe crab molts, a possum skull, a large femur that looks suspiciously human, a slice of human brain, skeletons of various small mammals and at least one huge bull frog, and all kinds of shells.

We got gazillions of microscopic critters, some the classic obvious ones, and a few that would challenge Dr. Seuss. We got pieces of trees and owl vomit and fetal pigs in various stages of undress.

We got old-school whiteboards and a fancy interactive electronic one; a class set of netbooks and a functioning typewriter; paper and pencils and compasses and microtomes and pipettes and all kinds of glassware.

I like walking into our classroom, and I think the kids do, too. And yep, we got a state biology exam to prep for, and we will, but despite that distraction, the kids leave here knowing a little more about life and uncertainty than they did when they walked in here September.

The state is still trying to figure out what matters, the President and his puppet flash the word STEM like a talisman, but meanwhile my students, all of them still relatively recent arrivals here on Earth, peek and stare and snoop and lift up rocks and pat down seeds and go about the business of the curious mammals that they are.

Public education works for those who work at it. Many folks in Bloomfield have worked hard to make our schools what they are, and I am proud to be a part of it. We'll continue to teach biology, to expose the our lambs to the world that lies outside of words and politics.

Our school motto is "Learn to live." Not "learn to make money" or "learn to pass tests produced by for-profit companies" or even "learn in order to get into college."

I have thousands of critters that are living in our classroom, each one with a story to tell, stories far more interesting than those told by Duncan or Christie or Cerf, each bellowing like a Musician of Bremen.

All pictures from our classroom, taken today as the sun set.

Melomel, cosmos, and teaching biology

Yes, I know, same old same old...I write for Leslie.
When I walk, I walk with Leslie.
When I eat, I eat with Leslie.
When I sleep, I sleep with Leslie.
When I share melomel, I share it with Leslie.

This morning I watched a couple of bees trying to suck nectar from pink cosmos flowers. The breeze was topping 25 mph. I suspect the bees were spending more calories than they were getting, but they keep trying to get to the flowers, because that's what bees do.


And now I am writing stories about the bees, because that's what humans do.

And it's all good.

***

I'm drinking peach melomel--peaches from 2009 fermented with honey made from flowers in Michigan. A few dormant yeast rest in the bottom of the bottle, poisoned by the ethanol they created.




I took a walk on the today--October beaches have more carcasses than life. The light is fading, and life fades with it. We forget this when we pal around with modern 21st century humans. Except when we don't, and make a formalized ritual out of dying. Which is OK, I guess, but I think I can manage it on my own. I hope I die under the sun, and I hope I'm alone. But we don't talk about this in polite company.

We started farming about 10,000 years ago. It's why I can sit in a permanent structure sipping wine made from cultured peaches and cultured yeast.

I get a little sad when I reflect on the culture we pretend can be sated. It cannot. I get a little sad when I think about my death, too. Contemplating either, however, reflects an ingrained narcissistic and very human attitude contrary to this life thing.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
Without ever having felt sorry for itself.

-- D.H. Lawrence

***

I like being outside. Even when I think I won't, I always do. I have never regretted a single moment outside. And yet I teach my lambs inside.

I like walking barefoot. I am barefoot almost always, except when in school. I have rarely regretted a moment barefoot (though I have had the occasional spectacular bleed). And yet I wear shoes when I teach.

I like making bread, making beer, growing plants, singing, dancing. I have been sneaking parts of all of those into class. That I have to sneak them into the curriculum instead of trumpeting their presence in my classroom speaks to my cowardice and to my role as a government agent. It also speaks to a very weird social situation where I may talk more to a particular child than her parents.

I teach biology. It's messy. Always has been. It's wet, and chaotic, and real, and scary, and, ultimately, about death.

And life.

***

And what do I do?

I wear shoes in class.
I avoid death so I do not disturb my lambs.

But each and every one of us grows plants.
And every day, every day, I remind my students that the plants make stuff from their breath.
And in a few months, we will eat the fruit from the plants.

I do not, of course, call it communion, and would not for a whole lot of reasons.

But I will say this much. Though I have long given up on the Transubstantiation of the Host (but not the miracle of CO₂ and water to food), and though I will teach what I am hired to teach, I am closer to death than birth, and I will not lie to my students.

Ever.

You want a biology teacher? Someone who will put the logos (λέγω) of life in the classroom?

I'll do it.

A good biology course will change your child. If your child has not changed in my classroom, I've wasted her time.

The photos were taken today in North Cape May.
The cosmos were as alive as I'll ever be, and the crab as dead.

Hiroshima

広島

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. ... It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. . . . What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.

Harry S. Truman

It happened on this date, this "greatest achievement."




New technology used to "solve" an old problem. We cannot help ourselves.

Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, suggested "we ought to stay out of the nuclei." Until we have a clue what we want, sounds like good advice.

You cannot separate tools from the critters who use them. Teaching science as some compartmentalized thought process without cultural context is a dangerous game.

What is our responsibility as teachers of science?
As citizens of the United States?
As human beings?

***

This morning I saw a wasp dragging paralyzed cricket along the edge of the driveway. The wasp was not much bigger than the cricket, and the wasp struggled. At one point she let go, stepped back a few inches, stroked her head a few times (much like a human facing a big task), and eventually dragged it down a hole by the driveway garden. The cricket was still alive, but paralyzed.

I did not intervene.

The wasp will lay her eggs in the cricket, and they will hatch in the cricket, still alive, and the cricket will, of course, suffer.

I did not intervene.

The larva wasp will use the the cricket, still alive, for food.

And still, I did not intervene.

Photo by Bruce Holderbaum

***

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

Ken Allan is a blogger on the other side of the Earth. ( Kia ora e Ken.) He's quirky, bright, thoughtful, and well worth reading.

He sent me the this video:




And now I teach science to (very) young adults. I have a responsibility to them, to the state, to myself.

Harry S. Truman called the bombing of Hiroshima "the greatest achievement of organized science." If that does not give you pause, you should not be teaching science.

You should not be teaching anything at all.

(Yes, this is from older posts, timeless ones.)

The photo is by Bruce Holderbaum and can be found here--used with permission.

Arne's "quiet revolution"

As part of the show-and-tell of working in grant funded projects taking care of very poor kids in very devastated cities. I got to meet CEO's, sit in boardrooms, greet national politicians--I even got to spend a couple of days in the White House sitting on some sub-committee of some sub-committee.

A few things I learned:

• Powerful people don't pay for coffee--it's just always there.
• Powerful people have pretty fingernails. (I get bored easily at meetings.)
  
• Poor kids of color with bright smiles on their faces loosen checkbooks.
• Nobody really wants to hear the truth.
• It's easy, real easy, to be seduced to join the other side.
  

I had a bad day now and again.

On one such bad day, someone got shot close to our clinic. He died, his blood on my clothes. A few hours later I was sitting with the number two person of a large, local non-profit, an agency that does good work, trying to develop a grant.

I grumbled about something, and the meeting deteriorated.

So I learned to stop grumbling. I learned to stop screaming. I learned to behave civilly. I learned how to do "that smile." And I kept reminding myself why, so I could glom money to keep us in business, caring for children few people cared about.

Our project got the money, the pols and corporations got the pretty press, and I got a lesson in prostitution.

***

I got a few minutes of face to face time with Al Gore, with just 3 others in the room, back when he was running for VP in 1990. He was bright, knowledgeable, and very different from the man who gave a speech just minutes later, when he was hustled out by his people.

I went home confused--how can someone separate themselves like that?

In 2000 he flat gave up the election. Maybe he was tired, maybe someone had something on him, or maybe he wanted to be that private Al Gore, the one I got to meet when he wasn't on camera.

***

Bill Gates. Eli Broad. Arne Duncan. Barack Obama.
None of these men spend any time listening to anyone who has not been filtered through boardrooms and golf courses, anyone who has not perfect the wile and smile needed to gain access to power.

Oh, they'll pose for the photo ops. They'll hand out the checks. They'll do all things possible to get their way.



On Thursday, Mr. Duncan will give a speech on the "quiet revolution" moving through schools. Powerful folks like "quiet." I know that. I kept quiet too many times when jumping on the corporate table screaming out the truth would ended my work, because I liked doing what I did.

And looking back, I'm not sure I changed a thing.

The Arne photo is from ABC News--the child is reading a thank you letter.

The board room belongs to International Flavors and Fragrances--
they polluted a local lake near where I grew up, but boy, look at that room!

Are you too edu-conventional?

I've been spending too much time eavesdropping on edutech conversations--I'm having oral surgery in less than a week, and Twitter provides a diversion that allows me to pretend I'm actually doing something.

"Every child MUST tweet! Blog! Skype! Wiki! Ning!"

While much of it involves bleating and breast-beating tweeting, some gems break through. Bud Hunt and the EC Ning Webstitute are both gems.

Bud Hunt opened up a Google doc to the world today, and posted the following questions:

• Who is in your circle? Your network?
• Who's listening in?
• What's worth talking about? What's worth sharing?
• How are you purposefully and transparently modeling learning in your work?
• How are you being purposeful about the behaviors and habits you model?
• What "productive eavesdropping" are you engaged in, or helping to foster?

Guess which two questions jumped out at me.

What's worth talking about?
What's worth sharing?

This is the heart of learning, of teaching, in both PD and in the classroom. We create a lot of noise when we fail to address these questions first.

These are scary questions--not so much because of where they lead us, but because they expose what we have not been doing. If we cannot answer these questions faithfully (and I use that word deliberately), we are stealing time from our students.

They're should be a place in Dante's Circles of Hell for those of us who mindlessly teach.

These are the essential questions of education, and require a level of intimacy that leaves us exposed. Works great with the right partners, disastrous otherwise.

What's worth talking about?--For all the chatter we generate on Twitter, Delicious, Ning, Facebook, or whatever else passes for community these days, not a whole lot gets said.

What's worth sharing?--We are all pretty good at bookmarking. Oooh! Look here!!!! We're all pretty good at sharing (and borrowing) ideas. We're too quick to get lost in all the shiny objects without asking whether its worth our time.

Collaboration between folks responsible for educating children will require an intimacy that should make us blush. We are exposed, splayed open for others to see. This is hard enough even in the best of circumstances. Even a good marriage leaves behind a road of hurt and repair.

And we're expected to do this with strangers, in 2 night stands in far-away cities, sleeping in strange beds. We drink too much coffee in the day, too much alcohol at night. We leave with the rush of early love, lusting to get back to the classrooms with our new ideas. We live in a fantasy world for 3 days, where everyone believes everything is good and possible.

And then we wonder why our evangelism falls short. We return to our districts, where good people have worked hard for a long time, gray-haired and tired, leery of change.

Don't tell them everything, don't share everything--just share what is worth talking about. What happens at EduMashTechCon 2.43a stays at EduMashTechCon 2.43a, most of it anyway. As frustrating as that is as the techno-pioneers ride back home into their districts, most of what you think is valuable might not be.

If the only thing you share are things worth sharing, you will always have an audience.

Painting is the Great Orator, 1944 by Irving Norman, via Poor Leonard's Almanack.

Craig Venter: Cautionary Tale One

Chemistry still struck particular fear in my heart. The subject was crucial for a career in medicine, and yet high school had left me allergic even to the thought of grappling with the world of atoms and molecules.

Craig Venter
A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life

Craig Venter almost ended his life by swimming out to sea off the coast of Viet Nam. He was a medic during the Tet offensive, when the Viet Cong and the NVA pushed over 80,000 soldiers south. He lost many lives, and chose to end his own.

A shark circling around him, like Jonah's great fish,changed his mind and he swam through miles of dark water back to the bloody shores of Nam.

Three decades later he would be instrumental in developing the human genome. This week Science announced that Venter has successfully placed an artificially made DNA molecule into an organism, and it replicated. If DNA is the soul of life, Venter is now God.

While I am a Luddite who fears powerful folks sashaying with hubris, I cannot help but wonder:
Which came closer to preventing Dr. Venter from venturing this far?

A near suicidal act to wash away the blood of hundreds of men he could not save? Or was it a high school science class that nearly killed an innate love of untangling the unknown?

Drawing of Prometheus by Henry Fuseli, 1770-1771 via Tate Museum.