January beach walk

The air warmed up, the beach did not--ice and snow lay just beneath the sand. I went barefoot anyway.

Not much to say, except to say words cannot say what I would want to say. Four scoters waddling by, occasionally dipping under for food. A gull slamming a dying crab on the sandbar. A tiny flock of five sand pipers sharing nine legs.

Oysters scattered on the beach, torn off the rocks by last week's ice, still alive. The sand will swallow them up if the birds don't get them first.

Death all around, but death is always all around--it's easier to see when the living retreat for the season.

The deep January colors and long shadows reminded me not who I am as much as what we are part of--but that's a conceit. There was no me for long moments. Or maybe everything was me, which is impossible, of course. Words fail.

When I came back, my tracks had filled with water, which then sought the bay, as water will.

This one is for me.

Limbaugh and technology: a cautionary tale

A cautionary tale for me....

We're about a day away from the end of the darkest three weeks of the year.
The light has been surreal--grey upon grey.
There are no shadows, there are no edges to the light.
Winter is here.

I listened to some chatter on the radio today, some guy named Rush Limbaugh. I was fascinated.

The disconnect between reality and fantasy feeds a frothing class of folks who have been removed from the land, who fuel a suspect economy based on abstraction and fear, who know something is missing, and will use hate to fill the void.

Our science is about to let us manipulate genomes with impunity.
We are not ready, and I doubt that we ever will be.

Wes Jackson said it best--"we ought to stay out of the nuclei."
We won't so long as we can. of course.

I teach science, and I'm reasonably good at it, but there are days when I'd rather not think of what actually occurs in my classroom.

• Jellyfish genes end up in bacteria, by the hands of young humans, mostly for the wow effect of seeing bacteria fluoresce.
• Frogs and fetal pigs are sliced open with too little regard for the place their hearts last beat.
• Pill bugs occasionally die through the carelessness of a young scientist.

\

The simplest, most powerful fight I have against our culture's unrestrained love of technological power may be letting students  plant basil seeds they harvested from dried flower heads using their fingers for something their fingers were meant to do.

The story of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge is a myth, of course, but it is a deep and disturbing old story that resonates today. I'm not sure the tiny black seeds of last summer's basil flowers can ever compete with the siren song of high tech, but I have seen the joy a germinating plant can bring to a child who has never sown a seed before.

So much of what we require our kids to do today has little to do with the mammalian body that blesses each of us.

We need more wildness.

We need more us.

Happy New Year, everyone. 

We are hol(e)y

Thoughts while waiting for the light to return.....

While science rests on models, abstract shadows of patterns drawn out of noise, the models ultimately depend on nature.

Nature is the concrete stuff around us, in us, of us. Our children do not know this because we do not know it ourselves, so we do not teach this.

If we knew (and made a deliberate effort to remain conscious of what we know) our relationship with the natural world, we would change in ways that would make us happier. But that's never been the point of public education, no matter how much we pretend otherwise.

***

Our deepest selves, in the literal sense, take in molecules from this concrete world with each breath--our skin is a holey border revered by our sense of self, an ego that believes we are something separate from this stuff around us--but every living cell needs to interact with the world beyond ourselves or else it will die.

When we bleed, we mourn the tear in our border, but not the thousands of white blood cells, of us, writhing in a drop of blood that falls from a pricked finger into the rich earth of the garden. A few bacteria may be caught in the unseen drama before our cells ultimately lose the fight, themselves consumed by life unseen in the dirt.

While the story is abstract, the reality is not.

We are holey, we are not one.

***

Living (for most critters on this planet), means doing the things you need to do to get the stuff and energy required to keep your pieces together in some sort of organized way that lets you stay alive. While your physical being (a cell, a body, a colony, whatever) eventually crumbles, this living process called life continues through generations, life that is as much a part of you eons ago as it may be eons from now. We all share this with all other living things, reason enough to rejoice.

As we crumble and rebuild, crumble and rebuild, it becomes obvious that you and me are put together from stuff outside of our holy selves. Plants knit together the carbon, and we take it from there. What is not as obvious is that we are crumbling and rebuilding moment by moment, so that the stuff of you today is hardly the stuff of you just a few years ago, stuff that was once part of the nonliving, stuff of the dead, stuff of the still living.

We are holy, we are one.

***

The stuff we have here on Earth doesn't change much day to day--we get a few hundred tons of space dust every day, and we're losing hundreds of tons of hydrogen gas at the same time, but neither has much to do with day to day living here on Earth.

We are literally recycled stuff, bits and pieces put together in orderly fashion through the living before us, using the grace of free energy released by the sun.


We live (and die) by cycles, the cycles of stuff, and the cycles of seasons (which ultimately depend on the waxing and waning of available sunlight.

The great religions, at their best, have shared these truths with us for thousands of years. Science is starting to get there now, after a dark period of reductionist thought that still dominates our thinking in the western world.

So take a breath--feel the oxygen enter your lungs, imagine it coursing through your arteries to your cells, know that it will be transformed to water as it rejoins protons and electrons stripped from water by a plant not so long ago.

Eat an orange--feel the food surge down your esophagus, to be broken down into tinier and tinier bits, ultimately reduced to the carbon dioxide you breathe out, and to the protons and electrons that will join the oxygen you just took in.

Reason enough to say grace to the stuff, to the light, to us, to everything we call "stuff."

Photos by Leslie (sludge pile, sunset) and me (hops, shell)

On Transubstantiation in the classroom

From years past. the real Christmas miracle....

"Flowers, leaves, fruit, are the 

air-woven children of light."

Jacob Moleschott, 19th c. physiologist

The sun stands still for an instant just a few days from now, and will start its trip back north. We are all children of the light.

I ate a basil leaf in class today, grown from a flower fertilized by bee that stole a sip of nectar back in August. A child in class separated the seed from the dried flower head in October, and planted it.

The past two months the basil germinated, grew a pair of leaves, then another, then yet another, weaving together the carbon dioxide molecules floating around the room, pieces of this child's breakfast or that child's heart.

Transubstantiation, the miraculous changing of the Host into the flesh of God, has all the fancy accouterments one would expect for these kinds of things, but after all the noise, the Host still tastes like, well, a wafer.

Through several Sundays of Masses, the tiny basil seed grew, taking in the carbon dioxide of the breath of my lambs in class, an odorless gas, and weaved it with broken water molecules, creating the stuff of life, a basil plant, and today we took Communion.

No one believes this, of course, because it is simply too much to believe--but it's true and requires not a lick of faith.

The plants in our room are, literally, from the breath of those who live here--and at least a few of the carbon dioxide molecules captured were released when someone's brain in class tried to grasp the concept of photosynthesis.

And it was good.

And you're allowed to gnaw on basil....

A pill bug prayer

Less than a mile away, in the gray shadows of a closed classroom, a pill bug wanders around some compost, feeling relief as it moistens it gills. It stumbles onto a fellow pill bug, exchanges greetings with a brief twitching of touching antennae, then ambles over to a piece of potato.

Wild pill bug, loitering on a North Cape May driveway.

It sees light we know exists, but no human will see today.
It knows sound we know exists, as an old analog clock ticks a few feet away.
It knows of existence, and the existence of others like it.

Christmas means nothing, of course, to a critter no bigger than a wheat berry.
But living does.

The light is returning.
Amen.

There is joy and wisdom in silence and darkness.

August light

This one's from two Augusts ago.

A

The days fade quickly now--in three weeks we'll have an hour less sunlight gracing us than today.

We will assault children with a sterile view of science, reduced to a method and streams of vocabulary, "ideas" we can test.

The sun slides south without notice as we huddle under the subtle, damning hum of fluorescent lights, each one filled with vaporized mercury, coated with phosphor, a steam punk amalgamation of  early 20th century technology and vision.

We talk little of either, the sun or the hum, the light of our lives.

***

Here's the heart of biology: We're matter put together in an orderly fashion by light. When light fades, we fall apart.

Follow the energy--the breath you take brings in oxygen that allows you to convert the toast you ate this morning back into carbon dioxide and water. You literally breathe out a few bites of your breakfast  by noon.

Wheat grown in our classroom

The toast, of course, is mostly wheat--these days we take out the best part of the grain and feed it to animals (flour keeps better on the shelves this way), but what's left over , is still wheat, a plant, like most plants, that combines carbon dioxide and water into marvelous strands of carbon compounds, weavers that rival Rumpelstiltskin--the miracle is in the flax, not the gold.

And yet when we talk of "photosynthesis" the kids groan under the weight of the terms: photolysis, ATP synthase, electron chain transport, chemiosmosis....sighing vast quantities of carbon dioxide molecules, drooling on the desks.

Yes!...there's your breakfast, in the sighs, in the drool!

***

The fading light is not metaphorical--it is real. Outside the classroom windows the living world is dying, as it does every fall. The hunger season is coming.

We start the school year in late summer, as we do, as our bodies, still untamed, feel the dying light. We pretend otherwise, talk of the "new year" and of "objectives" and "benchmarks"--as the sun slides slowly south, the shadows lengthen ominously, and the ice returns.

We teach children to stop paying attention to what matters, to focus on the trivial. That is how you survive in a world of concrete and glass, in a world where many of our children would not recognize their breakfast in its raw form.

Biology is the study of life--let's shine our light on what matters.

Back to school is a bittersweet time...

Food for thought

Wheat from our winter classroom windowsill.

Some abstract intangibles:

Light
 Electrons
Inertia

If you think you know light, but see the world as solid, you do not know electrons.
If you think you know electrons, but imagine them as circling protons like planets, you don't know inertia.
And if you don't know inertia, you cannot know mass.


Which is OK--few people do, and I am not one of them, but we all pretend we do in high school science, and we test kids like they do, and we reduce science to something mystical and powerful, creating a nation that believes in ghosts and astrology.

Gardens remind us--from seeds in February to fruit in July

Some concrete tangibles:

Water
Air
Bread

Bread is made of air and water, and little else.

Oh, we can delve into the specifics of photosynthesis and CO₂ and fermentation and all that good stuff we love to test, but in the end, the miracle is the stuff around us comes together, the stuff around us falls apart.

Doesn't take a high school diploma to see this, but plenty with advanced degrees do not.

From the bay, from the backyard.

And we're all paying for their ignorance.

When was the last time Gregory R. Page, the CEO of Cargill, had a loaf of bread from freshly ground wheat?

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.

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.

12:30 A.M

Yep, the annual winter solstice news--the tinge of sadness I felt late June now reflects back as a tige of joy.
The sun is dead. Long live the sun.

12:30 A.M. tonight the sun will stand still for an instant, shift its mass^*, and head 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 just beginning, 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--12:30 A.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.

Teaching photosynthesis

I work hard to make my classroom "unscientifical." I discovered not so long ago that some students learn just enough scientifical vocabulary to throw me off their scent.

We are raising a generation of liturgists. I ask specific questions no one truly understands, I get back scientifical nonsense no one understands, and everyone pretends something was learned.

Teacher Priest: What is ATP?
Student Congregation: ATP is the main energy currency of cells.

I bet I can teach a parrot the Krebs cycle.

 ***

Light is light, and stuff is stuff, and never shall the twain meet. (Well, not in the Newtonian universe, anyway.)

Photosynthesis does not turn light into food. Yet almost all my lambs believe this. I suspect they believe this because that's what they've been told. It explains, logically, how trees can get so big without creating a crater around them.

Photosynthesis, of course, bangs together the atoms of CO₂ and H₂O to form a bigger, far less stable organic molecule. (We pretend that it's glucose, but it's really not... we simply cannot tell even simple truths to children.)

I am an educational professional--I can train most children to "know" the photosynthesis equation:

CO₂ + H₂O → C₆H₁₂O₆ + O₂

I can train the same students the respiration equation:
 

C₆H₁₂O₆ + O₂  → CO₂ + H₂O

And yet when I combust an organic compound, they are dumbstruck that water--the kind that comes out of faucets--"comes out" of the reaction, not internalizing that H₂O is indeed the same thing as, well, water.

I don't want to be an educational professional. I want to be a teacher.

So tomorrow I light up the propane torch once again, and show them water from "fire." We'll discuss fire and energy and stuff.

I'll shine a bright light through my homemade chloroplast solution--just let some spinach leaves sit in alcohol for an hour or two--and let the children see the transparent green solution fluoresce an opaque deep red, as though transformed into blood, and we'll talk about excited electrons bouncing up, then back down. What is light? What is energy?

And they'll leave the class confused, because they'll think what they saw is magic.

It's not magic; I will not allow magic in my classroom. Magical thinking destroys our connections to the earth. We owe it to children to tell the truth.

I don't want to be an educational professional. I just want to teach.

The skeleton photo was right before my first back to school night ever!

Seasonal affective disorder is not

Yep, this one again--I trot it out pretty much every year now for those who wonder why I'm such a crab in the winter....

Every year the Earth orbits around the sun, and every year, the shadows lengthen as the days shorten. While this may be news to those living in a linear world, a few of us still revel in the cycles of life.

Several orbits ago, while folks at the more extreme latitudes again fell into their annual funk, a few shrinks noted a pattern. Enough people became distressed by the coming winter that they bought an entry into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fourth Edition, and now had a diagnosis--seasonal affective disorder--justifying the use of expensive psychotropic agents to make them "happy."

Winter time blues is now a psychiatric disorder.

As more and more of us become naturalized citizens of Prozac nation, a few cranky souls remain prescription-drug¹ free, titrating the available OTC medicines with caffeine, alcohol, and herbs, surviving yet another winter.

What symptoms make the diagnosis of SAD?

(1) increased rather than decreased sleep;
(2) increased rather than decreased appetite and food intake with carbohydrate craving;
(3) marked increase in weight;
(4) irritability;
(5) interpersonal difficulties (especially rejection sensitivity), and
(6) leaden paralysis (a heavy, leaden feeling in the arms or legs).

Surveys estimate that 4 to 6 percent of the general population experience winter depression, and another 10 to 20 percent have subsyndromal features.²

To summarize, about a quarter of otherwise normal human beings sleep more, eat more, gain weight, and get irritable in the winter, just like any other self-respecting mammal that wandered too far from the Equator since the last Ice Age.

Let me review the annual cataclysmic events that should shake anybody's sense of complacency in this wonderful and truly terrifying world of ours:

1) Every winter, most plants either die or go into suspended animation. The vast majority of our crops die here. In my garden, half ripe eggplants hang like bruised egos in the dying light of December. My tomato vines are black, gnarled skeletons. The basil plants are but a memory.

If the crops fail in the spring, we could starve. Instead of worrying all winter, a few of us choose to stuff our bellies as full as we can with last year's surplus, then sleep.

2) The air becomes so dry that mild patches of eczema and psoriasis turn into vast swaths of reptilian skin, repulsing friends and family, who are all just as irritable as you.

Now I'm flaky, fat, and fearful, living under forced solitude--feeling happy just upsets the natural order of things.

3) In New Jersey, the sun rose at 5:26 AM on June 21, 2008, and set at 8:32 PM., over 15 hours of sweet, summer rays. On December 21, the sun will rise at 7:18 AM, barely peek over the horizon, then plunge back down at 4:32 PM--just over 9 hours of dull winter light. That depresses me. If you are paying any attention, it will depress you, too.

4) Look at those bills! Paying for the juice of long dead ferns to keep my home heated condemns me to long hours at work. I know air-conditioning is expensive, too, but AC is a luxury. Heat keeps you alive. You have no choice.

Sleeping late under a cozy comforter lets me keep the heat turned down longer, and saves money.

5) The local roads freeze, and the December demolition derby begins; debt-ridden SUV owners try to justify their monstrous credit-eating over-sized sedans by driving like crazed maniacs in icy conditions.

I can hardly blame them--if I plunked 35 grand after watching commercials in which the SUV climbed perpendicularly up a snow-covered mountain, I'd expect my car to handle a level road. They do go nicely perpendicular into ditches, though.

What is a rational person to do? Seems like crawling into the bed under a comforter with a huge bag of Doritos while others careen to work on icy highways makes perfect sense.

Feeling down? Little wonder. I just don't think that it is a disorder. Nor do I think my annual spring fever is a problem. Watching the Earth spring back to life deserves some manic dancing. Come April, I'll look at this post and wonder how I could ever have been so grumpy. Until then, I am going to bed.

¹This is not a diatribe against drugs, just a cranky diatribe in general. Proper use of the appropriate drugs can be quite beneficial.
²S. Atezaz Saeed, M.D., and Timothy J. Bruce, Ph.D., American Family Physician, March 15, 1998.

December shadows

It's dark again, a reminder of what we mostly ignore.

Life depends on light, depends on combining simpler particles into larger, less stable ones. We juggle these unstable particles in every one of our cells every day, and every day they fall apart.

We eat to get those particles inside, we breathe in order to break them down back to their more stable pieces, so that we can do the things we need to do.

We lose ourselves as carbon dioxide in the breath we exhale.

Every year the CO₂ levels rise in these parts, as the plants pause over the winter. We could learn something from the plants.

***

I do not know many people well, and the number diminishes as my December comes. I saw a honeybee land on a dandelion today. I saw a grasshopper sitting in the sun. The days are short for both of them.

The days are short for us, too.

***

Our guidance department has a flyer that asks "If you knew you could not fail, what would you do?"

In December, it's the wrong question. We all eventually fail. I'd rather ask a child this: "If you truly understood that you were mortal, what would you do?"

Would that wise child take an AP course just to improve her transcript? Would that wise child sit in my class?

We cannot expect a child to have that kind of wisdom, and even if she had it, we have all kinds of social tools to get her to do our bidding anyway. We should, however, expect it from the adults.

If you truly believed you were mortal, that your students were mortal, that this H. sapiens species experiment will likely flame out just as every other species eventually has, what would you teach?

I'm a science teacher. I share what we know about the universe to children who did not exist less than two decades ago. This is all still new to them.

And it's still all new to me.

As the sun fades away to the south, the question becomes urgent. What matters?

Pics taken today.

How many teachers does it take to say "screw the lightbulb"?

NJ World Class Standard:
8.2 Technology Education, Engineering, and Design
All students will develop an understanding of the nature and impact of technology, engineering, technological design, and the designed world, as they relate to the individual, global society, and the environment.

On this day not so long ago, Edison switched on a reasonably bright incandescent bulb using a carbon filament, and it lasted long enough to read the next evening's newspaper. (It was also the first time in history Samuel Ogden Edison, his Dad, shouted those immortal words "Shut off the damn light, Tommy, you think money grows on trees?!")

I mentioned this to class yesterday, then added that I thought Edison had done more to cause human misery than just about any other human ever born, largely because of this invention.

I said this on a dark Friday morning, with 22 pupating humans in front of me, sitting under the buzz and barely perceptible flicker of fluorescent lights, which, to be fair, were not Edison's thing (though he dabbled with them before an ex-employee  made a commercially viable version.).

A couple students giggled, but I was serious, and finally one asked why. I turned the question back on them. How would life be different without articial light?

I won't betray their words here, but I will say this--if you give young'uns a tiny bit of space to call their own, they can think. Deeply.

***

We lost any real connection with what happens outside our windows generations ago, and lose any semblance of connection when we abandon our religious rituals, the last vestiges of our pastoral (OK, pagan) past. For many of us, our biggest connection to seasons is shopping and sports, both poor substitutes for living.

I can use prepackaged glossy corporate curriculum "aids" designed to mislead, I can use textbooks tamed by fear of market loss, I can use all sorts of "educational" websites sponsored by folks with a vested interest in a particular way of thinking.

Or I can tell them what I think is true.

And no, I do not claim to have any special relationship with "truth"--I do have, however, a healthy respect for it, which means looking at what we do and teach with a critical eye, using logic and love, to explore the world around us. It means being wrong a lot, too.

In science, we're used to being wrong--our goal is to be more right today than we were yesterday, but if we ever figure everything out, science would no longer exist.

When we continue to ignore truth, though, we not only lose science, we lose ourselves.

Saying Thomas Edison invented the light bulb is like saying Christopher Columbus discovered that the world is round.
They both did really cool things, and both caused a lot of damage to a lot of people.

The Edison lamp drawing is from the National Archives; the jelly taken last week at Cape May.

And we wonder why 11% of American adults are on anti-depressants....

Weodmonað

Yep, mostly the same post third time around--I like the rhythm of the year.

We call it August now, for Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, a short guy with bad teeth, but this was less of an issue before television--the name was dragged over to England by William the Conqueror, who enslaved both the Anglo-Saxon people and their language with the support of the Pope.

The English had a sensible name for this time of year before William blew through--weed month (weodmonað). We teeter towards the dark months. Things fall apart.

The sunlight diminishes perceptibly now. The plants know.

The past week we've eaten deep purple eggplants and bright pink brandywine tomatoes, yellow summer squash and green-and-red striped beans. Today we will pick basil for pesto, some for tonight, some for February. A bowl full of ripe blueberries waits for us, sunlight incarnate.

But the sunlight is dying, and the plants know.

We do not speak of religion in class, at least not formally, though students will occasionally ask religious questions, and I will deflect them. I explain that some things cannot be known through science, and that what I believe beyond the limits of science falls outside the province of class.

In class we talk of light and hormones, photoperiods and abscisic acids, to explain how plants know. We talk under the hum of fluorescent lights, time marked by defined blocks of time. In class, September light is exactly the same as February light, and class is always 48 minutes long, no matter where the sun sits.

Sunset today marks the start of Lammas, or Loaf Mass Day--joy for the harvests that are coming and regret for waning sunlight. Lammas used to be celebrated--the first wheat berries of the year were ground into flour and baked into bread offered in thanks, some used for Communion, some for the feast that followed.

We thank God (or Tailtiu or Lugh or some other forgotten gods)--harvest time reflects death and grace, whatever the culture. Death and grace feel foreign in the classroom, indeed foreign in our culture. We pretend, at our peril, that life is linear.

Lammas falls halfway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. The days are shortening, winter is coming. Until you feel the seasons in your bones, until you follow a grain of wheat from the ground to plant to bread to you then back to the ground again, the modern myths may be enough.

Science can explain why plants produce fruit when they do, and I can teach the steps. We can test whether a student learns what I present, and the students that do this best have access to all our culture offers.

You can become very powerful, very rich, without knowing grace. You can go far in life if blessed with intelligence and beauty, degrees and citations, without ever knowing what a wheat berry looks like, without ever kneading a lump of flour and water and yeast into glistening dough.

In the end, we don't know much, and may never know much. We can, however, recognize grace. We might not grasp it rationally, but we we can grasp it--a good reason to celebrate Lammas.

The Skeleton of Death dances every hour in Prague--photo of the Prague Astronomical Clock by Sandy Smith found on VirtualTourist.

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.

On words

I mucked around my classroom long after my lambs had left. One tank needed cleaning, another could use a few beakers of water. A third I stared at for a bit just because, and found a few squiggly things that looked suspiciously like mosquito larvae. I think maybe the spontaneous generationalists had it right.

Civil twilight lasted until almost 5:30 tonight--the slate-blue evening wrapped itself around me as I slid home on wet ice, full moon rising.

Language cannot describe this light, at least not the language of the Europeans. Maybe no language.(I suspect that any culture that pays attention to light has a word for the mid-January evening light that cuddles the few folks who still walk around these parts.)

I could take a picture of it, but it would fail. Words fail, too, unless you're beside me, and if you were, a sigh would suffice.

We've only been writing a few thousand years, and even now, many of us do fine without it.

Words help define us, but written words impose a steep price--they separate us from the world.

Never forget that science is based on models, on words, on artificial constructs. Science works by reducing the world into manageable bits. Never forget that science can limit our focus even as it expands our knowledge.

And if a child rejects science, do not reject the child. Every child in public schools here in Jersey is required to take three (and pass) years of science to get a diploma, because those of us in power have decreed that that matters. Every child has something to teach us, often beyond words.

As I walked home tonight, wrapped in mid-winter's gloomy light, with Jupiter shining up in the southwest sky, the glistening, crunchy water at my feet, my knowledge extended past the walls of words and artifice.

You'll just have to take my word for it, if howling at the rising moon counts as words.

Photo by Leslie--sunset in January on the Delaware Bay.

Bell jar

No, nothing metaphorical. The real thing.

I cleared out some space from one of our hallway exhibits to make room for our horseshoe crab art exhibit--a wonderful art teacher is integrating art and science, and the results have been lovely.

I took out an old microscope, a shark jaw (and the log-dead critter drew blood yet one more time), and a big glass bell jar.

***

Bell jars command attention, sometimes the wrong kind ("yes, Ralph, I realize it looks like a giant condom, let's get back to the lesson...").

I wiled away a lunch period with two other science teachers, trying to see how long we could keep a candle burning inside the bell jar, using various plants and light sources, ostensibly to create a nice demo for the kids, but the three of us were, well, having fun.

We "failed," or rather, ran out of time before we got a workable demo, and I'm sure we'll play with the bell jar again.

It dawned on me that there is little science in the demo.

"Look kids, no plants, candle goes out...." Kids stare for a minute as the flame dies.
"Look kids, lots of plants, candle stays lit..." Kids stare out the windows.

I would ask the obvious questions, then, waiting for the magical words, another science class liturgy, the teacher leading a communal response, another ritual without much thought.

***

For a few students, the demo could be brain-popping amazing, I suppose. For most, it cannot compete with the electronic looking glass resting in their pocket, a dopamine injecting machine, pure jolts of pleasure that does not diminish with dose after dose after dose.

Playing with a candle, a bell jar, and a couple of plants through lunch soaked my limbic system with dopamine. I would like my students to get stoked, too, but the joy comes from the discovery, not the finished product.

Because we lack time, because we have a state end-of-course exam, I rush through science as a bad history lesson ("We know this and this and this and this...."). Teaching science this way would be like an English teacher asking children to enjoy literature through SparkNotes.

It cannot be done.
We try to do it anyway.

***

The longer I teach, the messier it becomes, again not metaphorical.



Biology is messy and wet. At the end of each day my classroom screams entropy. Yesterday I picked up a remnant of fat left from sheep's heart on a lab table, rescued a couple of red worms abandoned in a Petri dish, and wiped off the Vaseline used to seal the bell jar on my desk. I put away the microscope used to show the soldier fly's compound eyes via the class projector. I tossed two peat pots left with dead seedlings--not all children care for their plants, and they die.

While my classroom gets plenty messy, my lessons may not be messy enough. I can show the bell jar demo in 5 minutes, or I can let go and let the kids figure it out themselves at the risk of broken glass, burned fingers, and Vaseline smeared all over the room.

So far I've taken the ostensibly low-risk, high efficiency  route, cradling "science" with demos that hold science in a bell jar, a few students watching the show, many just amused by any diversion in rooms of cinder block and white boards.

It's long past time to take the bell jar off of the lessons.

The doll heads in the bell jars photo was lifted from Eliot Glazer's post on urlesque here, permission pending.