Partial eclipse of the heart

Education is about living, not bucket lists.

The eclipse is a wonderful event, but just as spectacular is the bay tide--it's rising over 6 feet in 6 hours, twice a day.

Wadlopen: On the flats yesterday.

Just saw a hummingbird display its ridiculous aerial abilities. Watched a praying mantis on a bean plant this morning. Dug a few clams out of the flats a couple hours ago. Eating grace from the garden every day for the last two months.

Partial eclipse in Cape May a few years ago--through a CD.

The commonness of the day to day miracles shouldn't lessen our awe, and won't if you're paying attention. Get outside and pay attention, and be the mammal you are.

Lughnasadh, again

Yep, mostly the same post seventh time around--I like the rhythm of the year.
Nearing end of my 6th decade--more a spiral than a cycle, but it's OK.

"No ideas but in things."

William Carlos Williams

The English had a sensible name for this time of year before William the Conqueror 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. Students occasionally ask religious questions, and I 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.

This week 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.
The modern myths are not enough.

Hunting tadpoles in an NGSS world

Photo by Jessica Pierce, with permission

I am going tadpole hunting with my aunt and uncle in an hour. We'll creep along the edge of a pond, muck around our ankles and nets in hand, dodging poison ivy and biting bugs, because it brings us joy.

Between the three of us we have over two centuries of living and hours to play on weekends, and this is what we chose to do, even in the 21st century. We have evolved little in the past few thousand years, despite what the futurists would have you believe.

***

Plants are aware, if not conscious. They are as much alive as you and me, and in many ways far more sophisticated. They communicate to each other, and to animals. They respond subtly, precisely to the world around them, and are more aware of what's happening than most "civilized" humans.

Without a background in natural history, without a childhood immersed in the natural world, a child in our culture has little chance of realizing the lives of the living beings around us. Without this knowledge, all the talk of "interdependent relationships in ecosystems" is like the love song of a twisted psychotic stalker--not just meaningless, but passionately dangerous.

NGSS promotes the practice of science; it does little to promote natural history. This matters. It's like learning the mechanics of sex by using a mannequin--it can be done, but really, what's the point? If a child doez nort fall in love with the natural world, with its deep nuances and rhythms, with its internal beauty, then pushing her to become a scientist becomes a cruel exercise. Benchwork is a hard, lonely business.

Take a child tadpole hunting--you'll do more good for America than anything I can do within the cinder block walls of my classroom.

Ironically, even corporattions would benefit--you want scientists?
Let children roam in the real world.

An abstract on abstraction

The abstract world will not (because it cannot) forgive you.
The natural world does with every breath you take.

Our children are timid because we pound them with the abstract day by day by day.

Somewhere in North Cape May....

If a teacher evaluation system is based on a 4 point ordinal scale, the final average should not be carried out to 3 decimal places, to the thousandths--it literally makes no sense.

Yet we do it anyway.
To our students.
To ourselves.

Take a few moments each day to share something natural with your students before succumbing (again) to the world that does not exist except in the heads of a few critters who hold themselves above the laws of the living.

A grounded education

We have a small pile of composting leaves and twigs sitting in a terrarium just below the windowsill in our classroom, home to a community of roly polies we sometimes use in AP Biology. They get get a nice warm home over the winter in exchange for occasionally running around in Petri dishes, amusing young adult humans.

One on the driveway a few minute ago....

Soon after turning on the class projector on Monday, a high-pitched chirpy whir came out of our terrarium--we had an unexpected stowaway, a lovesick cricket, who after a week still sings his plaintive song of unrequited love to a projector that spurns his advances.

All this in a tiny patch of earth less than a foot square and an inch or two deep.

That we think we can teach cartoon models of DNA for meaning in a culture that fails to recognize the thousands of hearts beating within the sound of a child's voice every time she steps outside speaks to how ungrounded we have become.

You will not find roly polies inside a board room; you'll rarely find them underneath fluorescent lights at all.They do what all animals do, without ever giving thought to the abstractions that distract humans.

We are animals, have been for as long as the pull bugs and the squirrels and the squids that are doing all the same things all animals have done for well over a half-billion years. The first commercial fluorescent lamp was sold in 1938, not so long ago--my grandfather was already middle-aged by then.

He knew how to live.

Don't let the hum of fluorescent light be the plaintive song of your child's life....

.

First Day of Biology

I chased killifish today with a woman who once had a career studying them professionally, her husband who teaches math, and their daughter. We had no net, and despite various strategies and plenty of opportunity, we caught none.

This was not an abstract exercise

The reason I wanted to catch one was because I learned today that killifish talk in frequencies that most humans can hear. They will chirp at each other when stranded in tide pools. This is the kind of thing that makes biology more interesting to me than comets. Comets are cool, but killies live in my neighborhood.

Killifish are not abstract.

I teach young adults as well as I can, but much of what I am required to teach (as proscribed by law) is the sentimental nonsense of the abstract. That my lambs can chirp about nucleotides and proteins well enough to pass a state-sanctioned exam does not mean they are any closer to understanding the killifish that swim just a few miles away from our classroom.

Biology is not abstract.

That my students can graduate without grasping that everything that breathes is connected to everything else alive, that food comes from the air, that everything alive will die, means I have wasted their time pretending I teach biology.

Not sure how I can fix this, but I am going to try.
Every child walking into Room B361 in two weeks is getting a seed.

I'll let you know how it goes....

All learning is local

A slug creeping outside our back stoop.

I suspect that Spinoza was not in love with his God-Nature but rather with his own system of ideas, which, whether true, false, or somewhere in between (as in all systems), seem to be the product of the mind and the library, not of living engagement with persons, places, things, events, all the infinite variety and particularity of the world we actually know.

Edward Abbey, Postcards From Ed

I'd make a lousy teacher in July, not an issue so long as we have summers off. (Yes, folks, we do!) I can fool myself into believing that kids are investing their time wisely sitting under the hum of fluorescence in mid-February, but there is too much light to fool myself now in mid-summer.

I just came in from the edge of the bay--the osprey and the tern diving into the bay even after the sun settled below the horizon reminds me the days are shortening now. (In June, the birds are full by sunset.)

A mid-winter's sunset over the bay.

All living is local.  We can talk to folks many miles away, but when we do, we are talking into a machine that is right here, now. It works because we convince ourselves that that voice, that face, are real. Most of the time, it seems to be enough.

All learning is local. We can talk of alps and oceanic trenches and kookaburras and what once was Rhodesia, but the kids figure out quickly that none of that is more real than the hum of those same fluorescent lights.

I can teach better with a horseshoe crab's tail and a patch of sand than I can with a Smart Board. While part of that reflects my obstinacy, much of it reflects a larger truth. 

A very old clam rake--it still works.

I loved Spinoza back when I studied him, and I love the trappings of systems during our cold winters when the world feels dead outside--but I no longer know what it means to be learned. If I had to give up either my esoteric knowledge of philosophical systems or my ability to rake clams on a misty mudflat, I'd give up Spinoza.

What are we asking the kids to give up?

Cutting edge? I'm on the backside of the blade....

I take a perverse delight in my Luddite Lite view, but it's really as simple this. Anything that distances me from the natural world, from my connection to the stuff that comes in (and leaves) my body, from the delicious sensuous (even sensual) symphony of particles and light dancing on and in my body, this body, the one with a beating heart, well, deserves a critical eye.

• I am materialistic--I like the stuff around me. 
• I am cheap--the air, the water, the earth I walk on, the gravity that keeps me grounded, are all free.
• I am mortal--I am made of this same stuff, and will be returned to the same stuff, and my particles will be dancing on other conscious beings within a few decades, perhaps sooner.

Our iPods separate us from our voices, our kazoos and guitars, our hands and our harmonies.

My favorite teachers out there talk about making stuff. Tom Hoffman and Shawn Cornally cure meats,  Mary Ann Reilly creates canvases, John Spencer writes music and stories, and on and on it goes.

I do not know any effective teachers who are not passionate about something they created by the fusion of their mind and their hands, about their connection to the stuff of creation.

I confess I love playing with iPods and iPads and anything else that keeps my brain buzzing with dopamine. They are a lovely distraction from our mortality.

If I am charged with teaching a child about the universe, though (and why else teach?), the natural world should be the distraction.

A good first step would be to show them that it even exists....

I'm not Amish, but I get the point--be wary of the things that would separate you from the things you believe matter.

Slaughtering science in the classroom

It's planting time--as has been for the past few weeks. I poke a small hole in the earth, drop in a seed, push dirt over the hole, then go on to the next.

It is an act of faith that each seed will erupt into a growing organism, thrusting it roots deep into the dark, its leaves arching towards the sun. It is through acts of science that we "know" how.

I can tell you the science behind germination, a complex and fascinating dance, and if I'm feeling particularly cognitive, grasping this complexity brings joy. That's not what I think about though when sowing, when I think at all.

I pick up each basil seed one by one from my palm, each seed felt as it clings to my moist finger. Live seeds, even tiny ones, have a vital heft. I know this through experience, something I have done for years because I enjoy it, and because I like to eat fresh basil.

It's a good reason to pray, so I do.

***

I do not believe in science. A lot of folks do, but a lot of folks are confused. Science is not so much about the "real" world as it is the natural world--and therein lies a world of difference.

Science is not a belief system, it is a process, a particular process of  story-telling to help us understand the events we're capable of perceiving in the natural world. Science is not based on faith of any sort except that there is some kind of underlying universal order, without which science would not work.

And science works.

***

No one has seen an atom's nucleus, though we all know the story. No one has measured the gravity imposed on us by a random star 12 billion light years away, but we trust that the mathematical expression of gravity applies. We cannot visualize chemical bonds, yet our students draw stick figures of molecules using a line to represent what they call a "bond."

We test these things regularly--and most of our kids mindlessly pass those tests.

We fetishize science, finding huge meaning in facts when what really matters is how we write the stories, how we enhance our senses to see what is part of the natural world, and what is simply part of us. (The two are similar, but not identical.)

Praying for a basil seed's being makes at least as much sense as drawing stick figures of molecules. The stories of science are meant, simply, to understand what we can perceive. My prayers acknowledge that I cannot perceive everything that matters through senses alone.

When we fail to make these distinctions, when science defines reality and everything else dissolves into mere fictions, we not only demean the arts--we kill science.

The basil is from our classroom.

The stick formula drawing from Joachim Schummer, "The Chemical Core of Chemistry I: A Conceptual Approach"

 HYLE--International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol. 4 (1998), No.2, pp. 129-162

Bats!

Last night was Perseids night--we had our lawn chairs out, the full moon's light blocked by the garage at our backs. The mosquitoes, our state bird, were scarce enough that we had not slathered on whatever state-of-the-art organic compounds we use to ward off 6-legged critters these days.

Joe Westerberg, Joshua Tree National Park, California, Aug. 11, 2007

We saw a bat, a welcome sight. Then two. Now a third.

We held still, lying on our chairs, watching the bats chase bugs and each other, a spectacular aerial show against the deep gray-violet of the late dusk sky. And we realized that, really, the mosquitoes were remarkably scant.

A bat swooped up from the ground by our feet, no doubt, munching away. We watched the acrobats flip from their invisible trapezes a few more moments, then one swooped inches from our heads.

Now we know that bats tangling in your hair is an old wives' tale, but the few mosquitoes buzzing about our heads was tempting enough to the bats to show off their aerial skill a tad too close, and as much as we appreciated their predation, we scurried back inside.

Though we missed the main event, the Perseids changed our world in subtle ways:

• We spent the whole afternoon outside, as well as a good chunk of dusk. The dust of Perseid micro-meteorites fell on our hair. (Heck, you can catch micro-meteorites at home--really!)

• A few of my red blood cells gulped by a mosquito (or two) ended up in the belly of a bat, now broken down into tiny pieces. Some of it will become part of that bat, some released as carbon dioxide in the bat's breath, possibly captured by the Brussels sprouts nearby, which I will eat after November's first frost.

Communion.

The meteor photo was taken by Joe Westerberg, lifted from Spaceweather.com, used with permission.

Natural world

If you know a bit
About the universe

It's because you've taken it in
Like that,

Looked as hard
As you look into yourself,

Into the rat hole,
Through the vetch and dock
That mantled it.

Because you've laid your cheek
Against the rush clump

And known soft stone to break
On the quarry floor.

Seamus Heaney, from "A Herbal," Human Chain

***

I got whomped pretty good by a virus last week, you may have, too--it's wandering around.

Viral illness fascinates me for a variety of reasons. Pieces of viral nucleic acids take over your cells for no particular reason except to make more copies of the same nucleic acids. We respond by using eons of evolutionary memory built into our own DNA, waking up specific antibodies to tackle a problem seen before by our long gone ancestors.

This particular bout with a virus had the added bonus of hallucinations--not the feathery, febrile kind, where various blobs of color bounce through your field of vision as your teeth chatter. No, these were different--they were real.

Solid, opaque objects meticulously placed in a couple of spots around the room grabbed my attention as I lay in bed. I woke up Leslie to confirm that they were not, in fact, real, though they were as real as the cup of coffee sitting next to me now. Rock solid real. (We've been together a long time--she answered directly, then went back to sleep, just as directly.)

The only reason I even questioned their reality was because there was no particular reason why a couple of large cubes would be stacked on the corner of the bed.

In the morning,I asked Leslie if I had, indeed,asked her about the boxes sitting in the room. I had.

Most sensible people would have seen a doctor, but since we conveniently have one under our roof, and since I was otherwise OK except for the usual virally fever, sore throat, and muscle aches, I opted for watchful waiting, and except for a diminishing malaise, I have, as expected, recovered.

***

Most high school science classes start out the same way--before plunging into a specific -ology, we toy with the concept of science. We speak of learning more about the natural world.

It occurs to me, a few years late, that few people (besides scientists) know what "natural world" means, and the scientists know that what we know is tenuous, at best.

That's not how my lambs hear it--the "natural world" is as obvious as the noses planted on their faces. Really, just how daft is this teacher?

What makes something real in the natural world? What is the essence of stuff?

***

Biology is the study of how stuff puts itself together over and over again, and how energy is glommed to make this possible. A century ago, biology mostly taxonomy, a great way to teach children how to look for nuances as they classified and dissected hundreds of organisms into various categories.

This year I will spend exactly one day on taxonomy--which is one day too many the way we approach it now.

My students have not yet had chemistry, or physics, or geology--yet we expect them to learn molecular biology. This is, of course, silly, so I spend most of the year exposing children to fancy-sounding biology words but sneaking in basic science epistemology every chance I get.

What do we know, and how do we know we know it?

***

Until kids grasp the circularity of our most basic assumptions about matter and energy--sophomores are not quite ready for quantum mechanics--most see science as solid as the odd solid blocks someone placed on the edge of our bed last week.

They are studying hallucinations, and see them as real, because they have been told, over and over again, that they are real.

They believe in atoms atoms (or rather what teachers present as atoms) are real, without grasping their vast emptiness.

The atoms taught in elementary school  do not exist. If a nucleus is the size of a dime, the electrons would fling as far as half a football field, and even that's just an average. What's in-between? Nothing. Nothingness is a huge part of everything.

They believe in the Big Bang, imagining an explosion in empty space, truly magical thinking and a misconception of an conceptually inconceivable model, and we feed their misconceptions.

The Big Bang, as understood by most, ranks right up there with Santa Claus. The whole point is that there was no space--all energy/mass was a point, so distance, as such, did not exist. A picture of the Big Bang as seen from the outside is not science, it's religion.

I get too strident, not because I know something students don't, but because we keep assuring them that the nonsense they know is "science."

***

Schools muddle things up pretending that a young child who parrots science vocabulary knows more than the child babbling on about the Easter bunny or a schizophrenic babbling about critters implanted in his brain.

We praise hallucinatory thought, and we suffer the consequences.

My goal is for kids to know less by June than they knew in September, a whole lot less. Good science can be as tenuous as the wisp of a shrew's breath.

Until they know this, and it's easier to grasp when entropy takes its toll over the years, as knowledge of your inevitable path creeps into cerebral shadows, I fear I am wasting their time.

Until they know this, maybe pushing them outside, a copy of Seamus Heany's Human Chain in one hand, a cheap plastic magnifying glass in the other, is enough science for a period, for a lifetime.

Between heather and marigold,
Between sphagnum and buttercup,
Between dandelion and broom,
Between forget-me-not and honeysuckle,

As between clear blue and cloud,
Between haystack and sunset sky,
Between oak tree and slated roof,

I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.

Seamus Heaney, from "A Herbal," Human Chain

Which is all we can ask for, all we can know.
The rest is hallucinatory.

The pieces of poem are from Seamus Heaney, obviously, but are meant to be read as part of a larger piece, not included here because I'm already pushing copyright law. Buy the book. Read it. Then a few weeks later, read it again. Months later, again. He gets it, this whole 'thing' thing. Eases some of the fear, no?

Letting go

I'm letting go this year. I'm going to trust the collection of young humans sitting in my class, brains honed by countless generations before them, each and every child with a lineage going back as far as the first protobionts that globbed together in the seas here billions of years ago.

I'm letting go this year. I'm going to remind myself every morning, right after the Pledge of Allegiance, that I am mortal, that my students are mortal, and that the "liberty and justice for all" means just that. Neither is cheap. Nor are our children.

I'm letting go this year. I'm singing aloud in class, because I can, and because it helps children remember, It helps them remember facts, true, but more important, singing itself helps us remember who we are. I may drop a couple on a used guitar. I don't play well, but I do play. I don't sing well, either, but I do sing. As the warm July sun sets, I hear the squeaks and squawks and chimmering and chammering of cicadas and cardinals and squirrels and bees and crickets and grackles and dogs. Even the fish around here make noise, croakers and sea robins grunting in protest when dragged out of the water.

I'm letting go this year. I'm going to overtly share my ridiculous love and awe for this marvelous universe, one that belongs to any critter with ribosomes and some nucleic acids. I'm sharing our emerging stories of the natural world along with the joy and fear these stories elicit. Squid flashing light signals to each other deep in the ocean, orgiastic balls of earthworms reveling , bacteria sensing each other before working communally to a common goal--stories about other lives that help us grasp ours.

I have no idea what worlds lie outside what we can sense and rationally infer. I do know that what exists in our natural world exceeds the imaginations of all of us.  If a child's curiosity gets dampened in science class, you cannot blame the world.

Leslie's photos.