Coffee, slide rules, and educated children

What matters?

If a child had true control over her education, and she truly understood what matters, would she sit in my class?

Ah, yes, interesting question, but it is our job as
the wise teachers to help her understand what matters....

Do we? Would you risk your livelihood by doing what's in the best interest of our children?

Of course, we're professionals, we are advocates,
can you not hear our self-righteous chest-beating?

Do you proctor state tests you noisily condemn in the faculty lounge?

Ah, well, yes, I see your point, but that's really out of our hands.

What would a well-educated, thinking young adult look like in my classroom?
Would I recognize her?

Ah, yes, the problem child, the one in black
reading Dante's Inferno, not even pretending to hide the book.

I once told a bright, fascinating student reading an interesting book that she needed to learn to be more discrete in the classroom.

Are we creating the kinds of adults we need to create?

Kids start drinking coffee in high school.
We don't use slide rules anymore, we use far more powerful tools.
What are we doing?

Hey, teach....

I went to a conference this week--the state wants to teach me how to align my curriculum to the end of course biology exam.

It's easy to get lost in what's expected by the Feds, by the state, by the local BOE. It's easy to complain. It's easy to find a chorus of toads croaking about this or that injustice, a chorus that welcomes you to join the noise.

Ribbit, ribbit, ribbit....


Sean Nash inspires me. Today he challenged his readers to remind others how to see beyond the crocodiles. (Forgive me, Sean, for butchering your metaphor.)

You know what I got to do today? I got to talk to young adults about science. I got to pick their brains, and they picked mine.

I ate basil grown in my classroom.

I dragged a human skeleton through the hallways, eliciting the usual stupid jokes.

I helped a student teacher become even better than she already is.

I found a rattlesnake bean in our classroom, cultivated by a student who grew up in an urban town. He planted it in November. It grew, using our breath to make the stuff we can now eat. Communion.

I got to sing, to teach, to dance, to play, and I got paid to do this.

Teaching is hard, I get this, but teaching can be as rewarding as saving lives.
Trust me. I'm a doctor. And now, a teacher.

If you do not like teaching, get out. The rest, the stuff that happens outside the classroom walls, well, it's just noise. Treat it as such.

John Spencer wrote a gentle (and accurate) criticism of the post,
one worth reading in the comments.

New Year's resolution

It's New Year's Eve day--we just got a shredder, so we're busy going through years and years worth of paper. Some of it has been shredded, some we'll save.

*The receipt for my sister's cremation.
*A rejection letter from the Paris Review back in 1982 with the encouragement to send more words. (It was my first and only fiction submitted anywhere--an encouraging letter from a favorite literary magazine was enough.)
*An envelope with a picture of Mother Theresa and the Pope inside, with George Carlin's home number scrawled on the outside in my mom's handwriting. All four are dead now--I think I'll hold on to this.
*My old beat up code cards I used to stuff in my pocket on the way to moonlighting in an inner-city medical center, cards I used several times. More than once I regretted that they worked--severely brain-damaged children are hardly miracles.

And on and on, funeral cards and christening announcements, of little interest beyond my clan.

I had planned to post a list today--a snazzy (or at least snarky) Roll of Hubris, topped by the madness deep below the ground, the Large Hadron Collider, which remains broken.

And plowing through the paper reminds me of my own--feigning immortality despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Our students are mortal, too. We use up a lot of their time pushing them through a system that judges them by how well they test. We use up a lot of their time preparing them for an environment that requires staying on task even when the point of the task no longer matters.

So here's my New Year's resolution: recognize my students' mortality. I am taking a piece of time in their finite lives. I'd better make good use of it.

Every task I require of my students should hold value, a value I can articulate, a value beyond "to get you ready for the next year" or "to get you ready for the High School Proficiency Assessment."

If it's something of questionable value but required by the curriculum, I will not hesitate to share my doubts, and I will work to get the curriculum changed.

Yep, I know, I know, you do this anyway. I also know that we are agents of the state, and are required to teach a specific curriculum. I am not challenging that--I am free to go work in a private venture if I want to thrust some megalomaniacal value system on my charges.

I'm talking about the day to day small stuff that rewards children's persistence but not their curiosity, that rewards performance over mastery.

What are we doing here?

The language of high school science ain't math

"I don't eat plants."
Um, you never eat cereal or salad?
"Oh, I eat those--I just don't eat plants."


The disconnect between science and language in school kills science education.

Grasping mathematics may be necessary to understand higher physics (knowing which algorithm to use on a calculator doesn't count), but the does not make math the language of science.

The language of science (in these parts) is English. If you cannot manipulate words coherently, meaning will fail.

That's a high falutin' statement. Some qualifications:

1) Words/language may be oral. Written language allows manipulation oral language does not, but I do think my non-readers can grasp some science.

Reading, though, takes them a lot farther. (Or is it further?)

2) Aha! moments often do not depend on meticulously structured language.

Still, sharing how you got to the Aha! moment does.

3) I am talking about science in a formal sense, beyond mere empiricism.

If I take a kid clamming on a falling tide, she sees (hears, smells, tastes, touches, too) more in a few hours than she will in a year of 48 minute periods in my classroom. Still, reminding children that they have senses that are spectacularly adapted for the outdoors is not science (though it is the first step).

A few days spent outside is more likely to make you a believer in spirits and magic than a "believer" of science. Reading a science textbook won't change the odds.

4) You can know English without grasping all the grammar and spelling nuances.

I'm a heretic. I insist that my students write meaningful answers, yet I do not insist on proper spelling and complete sentences if they can get the meaning across otherwise.

I am a hair-splitter when it comes to meaning--my students quickly learn this. They work hard to convey what they mean. If a child knows grammar inside out, it's one less hurdle to sharing meaning, but if they don't, hesitating over the proper structure of a pluperfect subjunctive will stop their thoughts dead.

(I am not advocating bad English. Still, if we're going to require students to read The Canterbury Tales (ful of wo and deth) in high school, I think it's OK to give them a break with spelling in science.)

***

We are talking about atoms in freshman physical science. This is not honors. This is not the step below honors. We don't have low level courses anymore, but we only have three steps. Do the math.

The textbook talks of orbitals, spends about 27 words about how the Bohr model has been superseded, then spends the next dozen or so pages using the Bohr model. The kids are, well, bohred.

I hold up a golf ball, calling it a nucleus. We talk about how far apart the electrons are, somewhere in the next town over. We talk about science fiction and force fields. We talk about trying to walk to the nucleus from the other town, hitting the energy wall of electrons. We talk about empty space. The class is amused, the teacher is a nut, it's like Philosophy 101 after drinking a a few cans of Red Bull.

Time to bring it home.

I slap my hand on a desk.
What did I hit?

"Um, the desk?"
Good! What atomic particles did I hit?
I slap the desk again.

Electrons banging against electrons.

Mathematical models get us to the big picture, and Wolfgang Pauli spun us a beautiful web.

(That's a gratuitous math equation lifted from Wikipedia to give this some oomph--in science class we call it learning. In the real world I'd call it a cheap shot.)

Takes English to translate the math back to reality, or as real as language can take us.

A slap on the desk becomes cool. A slap on the desk, done enough times, cues the students back to the space between nuclei and electrons, or the space of "stuff".

***

The best students in high school can make the analogies, can do the math, can "get" university level science.

For the rest of them, the emphasis on the math without effectively tying it to our native tongue makes science class pointless.

The students put about as much work into doing something pointless as you and I would, just enough to pass, to get the diploma.

New Jersey used to require 2 years of pointlessness, now it requires three.

I bet if you made the first year of science worthwhile, geared to the lives of children not destined for college, you wouldn't have to make the next two mandatory.

The Bohr's atom model is by Sundance Raphael at Wikimedia; the oat picture is from NASA.

High school and "real life"

Our school just had a development day for teachers. We were exposed to some good stuff by a nationally renowned speaker. We were provided with notes. We had Smart boards and videos and Powerpoint slides and all the trappings of a snazzy modern lesson.

We could even wander to the loo without a pass.

The biggest things I (re)learned?:

How uncomfortable it is to be sitting for more than 5 or 10 minutes in the same seat viewing "required" material.

How few professionals could resist quietly talking to their neighbors about what they were learning as they learned it.

How teachers' faces glow like spectres as their thumbs worked their cell phones pretty much the same way our students' faces do. (No one told them to "put it away NOW!")

***

At one of the workshops given after the keynote address (by Mr. Wiggins himself), a teacher pontificated:

Every one in this room, if called to the Board of Ed, could immediately explain how everything they teach can be related to the students' life in a useful way.

A science teacher, paraphrased

Um, not everyone. Not me, anyway.

I'm a science teacher. I think our kids take away valuable tools from seeing how humans develop ways to make sense of the world. I think done right I can make the world larger for my students. High falutin' goals, true, but hey, why do we teach?

Still, to "know that an atom's electron arrangement, particularly the outermost electrons, determines how the atom can interact with other atoms" as required by our state standards does not relate to their lives, unless you mean they have to learn it to pass the state test, in which case I'll concede it does.

(The concept of "outermost electrons" gets silly anyway once we slide past the Bohr model into atomic orbitals--we can visualize a region where an electron is most likely to be found given its energy level, but even then, we cannot be 100% sure the electron will be in that particular region. It could be anywhere. Literally anywhere, so long as you define "anywhere" to mean somewhere in our known universe.

Once you start playing with molecules, the orbitals now take on all kinds of bizarre shapes--what was play for Linus Pauling may be beyond the grasp of most of us.)

***

I think we can trim a lot of our content--not much controversy there.

In science class, though, I think it really does not matter what content we trim. The value is in process, not content. And that's where people get a little buzzy.

Well, we can't drop this because....

We can't drop that because....

By the way, the state just mandated we add this...

Give me a marking period to explain the history, the observations, the controversies, the development of a particular idea, and I can change a child's view of the world. If I didn't believe this, I should stop teaching science.

***

What else did I learn?

If we expect a child to learn specific concepts for the mere sake of satisfying the goals of the presenter (be it a teacher, the Board of Ed, or even Grant Wiggins himself) we are going to have to provide external incentives. Off with his head! He's a heretic!

I got paid to sit through a workshop. I bet not more than 5 or 6 teachers out of the hundreds who saw Mr. Wiggins speak would give up a summer afternoon to do the same. Draw and quarter him!

Not because Mr. Wiggins does not present a valuable program. He does.
Without any immediate obvious gain, though, many teachers shut down before the first hour was done.

And we expect kids to be motivated by some strained tenuous strand with "real life."

Think about that the next time union negotiations come up--we need to take away your health benefits, but we'll give you an "A+" on your next observation if you do your job well.

***

If nothing else, I relearned how hard it is to be a student of the mandatory instead of a student of the universe.

I teach ancient Greek philosophers

It finally hit me--high school freshmen think like ancient Greek philosophers.

In Period 1 history class, the students are told that ancient Greece is the birthplace of western civilization; by Period 4 science, they're being told that their Aristotelian views of the universe are silly.

No wonder the kids resist science.

A few nuggets of ancient Greek wisdom:

We can see in absolute dark.

Objects emit particles that are detected even in the dark. Democritus believed objects emitted eidola, replicas of the object an atom thick, that hit the eye.

I suggested to one class that they spend some time in a totally dark closet. One student said he didn't need to, he knew he could see in total darkness. Reason over observation--if Aristotle could reject experimentation over pure thought, well, can hardly blame a child for thinking the same thing.

When was the last time you put yourself in absolute darkness. Are you sure you cannot see in the dark?

The sun is a big, hot rock.

If it's good enough for Anaxagoras, it's good enough for my students. The stars are also rocks, but are so far away you cannot feel their warmth.

So now instead of debating what I once considered a foolish point with Sergio or Briana or Louis as they fumble with their iPods and phones, I pretend I am talking to Anaxagoras.

Try explaining plasma and nuclear fusion to an ancient Greek philosopher, a very bright one at that.

Imagine inviting Anaxagoras to dinner. Most of us would use the finest china, serve filet of mignon and the best wine, and only after some initial small talk even consider questioning his position. We'd give him lots of latitude (for how can we expect him to grasp modern physics) and give him room to stumble. He announces at dinner that the sun is, indeed,"a red, hot stone."

Now imagine a 14 year old child who says the same thing in class--there'd be laughter by students, an eye-roll from the teacher.

Until someone offers evidence otherwise, I think a 14-year-old who thinks the sun is a hot rock has good reasons for believing it. It's not our job to convince him otherwise; it's our job to show him how we came to our current understanding through the available evidence. (This translates into getting the right answer on a multiple choice question, true, but I can dream.)

Reading it in a textbook is not a good reason to believe something.

Heavy objects fall faster than light objects

Imagine Aristotle in your class--he's getting to be a real thorn in your side. He says heavy objects fall faster than lighter objects.

Heavy objects are made of "earth" (one of the 4 basic elements), and the object's natural place is back in the earth. Take a big chunk of earth away from its proper place--it needs to return. Do you have a better idea, Mr. Teacher?

How many of us would retort with "Did you read your assignment last night, Ari?" You have a 24 children in class, you have standardized tests breathing down your neck, why won't Aristotle comply?

Oh, well, that's different--he's from ancient Greece, we're more sophisticated now, everybody knows that gravity is this force that no one understands that causes every object in the universe to be attracted to every other object in the universe.

Imagine a thinking 14-year-old student weighing between a simple Aristotelian version of gravity that says heavy things fall faster because they want to return to their proper place against the teacher version that's telling you that a star millions of light years away exerts a slight pull on you.

The same teacher, by the way, who just told you astrology is nonsense. Even though you had good luck last Friday, just as your horoscope predicted you would.

So I drop my keys and paper clips and lab stools and heavy science books in class--and we all marvel that they hit the ground at the same time. It amazes me every time. I've been dropping things for almost 50 years, and after a few decades I finally accept that at low velocity many objects do in fact drop at the same rate.

I expect my kids to unlearn ancient Greek physics in less than a class period. Took western science about 2000 years to unlearn the same concept (thank you, Galileo).

***

Teaching my lambs does not get any easier realizing that their reasoning rivals that of historic geniuses. Does make me a little more patient, though.

The drawing is of Anaxagoras--the writing is loosely translated as "A classroom full of Anaxagorases"

The Butler Device

I had a child in class this past year who was obviously misplaced--he belonged at least in College Prep, maybe even Honors, but here he was, in the PCP class.

It takes more than a mite of courage to say anything original in a freshman class. Oh, it does take a bit of chutzpah to tell the teacher to "fuck off," and the dramatic "this class sucks and why do we have to take science" blow-ups require Dale Carnegie tactics (who suggested speakers pick a topic that make them angry, but adolescents already know how to draw from their amygdala). Still, toying with an idea, especially an original idea, in front of one's peers, peers who have already been labeled stupid and worse, requires brass gonads.

And Andy had brass gonads.

So here's the device. And if you credit it, credit Andy's uncle from Cal State, a fictitious character whose existence protects Andy's cool factor. (If you want Andy's real name, write me, and I'll ask him if it's OK to credit him.)

Take a plastic bottle, and drill a small hole in the bottom. Blow up a balloon within the bottle (the hole allows you to do this--if you don't believe me, try blowing up the balloon without the hole), then tie off the balloon. Drill another hole into the bottle cap, large enough to fit a tire valve snugly into it.

Now you can play--using a bicycle pump, and covering up the tiny hole in the bottom with a finger, you can make the balloon shrink. Open the tiny hole, the balloon inflates.

Great stuff!