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.
In a few moments the Earth's shadow will start to creep across the full moon. While it gives the science news folks something to squawk about, and they do, I suspect events like this turn more than a few children off to astronomy.
Oh, it makes for a nice rusty moon (blood red's a bit of hyperbole), but it takes a bit of time to develop, and shoving children out the door into the chilly December night to see a moon that still looks like a moon hardly sparks a lifelong love of the skies.
A passing meteor might, though....
***
Here's a piece of astronomical news I can chew on. The sun sets a few seconds later today than it did yesterday. We have less sunlight today than yesterday, and will until the solstice on the 22nd, but the sunsets are hanging around 4:29 P.M. in these parts, and won't get any earlier.
If you spend most of your time indoors however, and have not noticed the lengthening shadows and the sinking noon sun, then dwelling on why the sun sets earlier today than it will tomorrow becomes a mere mental gymnastic, performed to amuse oneself or others like a dog-and-pony show.
The few kids that do notice these things are often the same kids who crash and burn in high school. If a child even notices these things, what adults around her could even begin to answer them?
***
The sun is never directly overhead here in New Jersey, full moons do not cause aberrant behavior, and the Earth is not farther away from the sun during winters here (it's actually closest in January). That surprises many adults, some who are licensed to teach.
It took me several years of teaching to realize how deeply "science" myths are entrenched in the sulci of our students. What we think is true frames how we perceive the world, literally shaping our reality.
Every minute a child spends under fluorescent lights, every moment she stares at a monitor, every iTune song that threads through her auditory cortex distracts a child from the finite time she has to develop a true relationship with the natural world.
Science is based on observable phenomena of the natural world. If we want to create more scientists, we need to nourish our children's connection to the rhythms of the natural world. The spectacle of reddish moon once every couple of years makes for good copy, but cannot replace the rhythms of its phases.
Dear public school teachers,
Stop making stuff up,
kthnks
The sun burped on Monday--its breath will hit tonight.
Get outside and look up--auroras are possible in this neck of the woods, and possibly as far south as D.C. We have an even better shot tomorrow.
The moon's practically full, so even if we get the show, it may be washed out a bit. But that's OK, that same full moon is opening up tidal flats for dinner on Saturday.
Not often one gets a shot at an aurora and clams in the same week in February.
5.2.2.A.2 By the end of Grade 2: Identify common objects as solids, liquids, or gases.
Throw plasma in there, the most common state of matter known in the universe. You have common examples in the classroom, the incessant hum of fluorescent lights above. You have great examples outside, the sun and the stars. Some students may have plasma televisions at home.
How many teachers have been tripped up by this "simple" question: what is the sun made of?
If you want to keep a state of matter up your sleeve, save the Bose-Einstein condensate for high school.
5.2.4.A.3 By the end of Grade 4: Objects and substances have properties, such as weight and volume, that can be measured using appropriate tools.
I spent weeks teasing apart weight and mass in a freshman science class. Mass is, at this level anyway, the amount of matter (call it "stuff") in something.
Weight is a measure of the force of gravity on the stuff you are measuring. It depends on where all the other objects in the universe happen to be at that moment, since everything is pulling on everything else.
The closest huge ball of stuff is the Earth, so weight and mass seem synonymous.
They're not--your mass does not change on the moon, but your weight does--but you knew this already. Even 2nd graders know this. You can show them astronauts jumping around the moon and ask them why they can jump so high. They'll parrot the standard answer ("less gravity").
I suspect most of us are afraid to touch gravity because we just plain don't get it.
I would love to start the year with a class full of young adults who get that we don't get it. That's how science starts.
Really.....
The states of matter graphic comes from Chem4Kids.com. The moon clip from YouTube, uploaded by Amontai Yagala
This is about folks who miss regularly spectacular events such as the ever-changing moon phases getting excited because a "full moon" happens twice within an artificial division of time. Turns out we create even bigger, vaguer excitement if that month happens to mark the culturally designated new year.
The word "month" comes from menses, an old word from an older language. "Menses"comes from the same old word. Whether menstrual cycles were tied to the moon before artificial light changed our culture is not clear, though women may be more likely to ovulate during the full moon.
Many critters remain romantically tied to the moon: grunions, newts, and coral have kept their ancient pact with natural cycles.
Thomas Edison allowed us sever our ties to the moon; that we continue to do so is our choice.
Ultimately, what you do with the choices you have today, what you do with this moment, defines who you are. We have years, decades, centuries as constructs in our heads, but we can only act in the moment. This one.
It's all we ever had, despite our tongues that confuse what we create ("blue moons" and calendars) with what exists in the natural world, a huge chunk of matter revolving around the Earth, affecting our tides, and perhaps our bodies.
***
If you believe tonight's blue moon is news, you need to get reacquainted with our gravitational neighbor. You can pretend to do this by looking at the Farmer's Almanac, or go high tech and download a moon phase widget.
Or you can step outside and look up. Tomorrow night, do the same. A week from now, look up again. Two weeks from now, you'll need to look during the day if you hope to see the moon.
Do this for a month, for a year, for a lifetime, and you will learn, as Robert Frost knew, that time is "neither wrong nor right" for those of us "acquainted with the night."
Forget Happy New Year! Time is in our heads, and you only get a few dozen New Years in your adult life.
Start celebrating Happy New Moment!, an infinite string of "nows" celebrated by everything in the natural world.
The photo is by Tom King, taken October 2003 and lifted from the NASA website. The Robert Frost lines were taken from his "Acquainted with the Night," New Hampshire, 1923.
Very briefly a longshoreman, briefly a lab tech in a booze plant, more recently a pediatrician in the projects, now a high school teacher in my hometown.
A few children chasing butterflies, mucking in the pond mud, and otherwise doing their best to confound our educational system remind me teaching matters.
The usual disclaimer: these are my views only, and I have days even I don't agree with them.
Posts
