Solstice salad

Late autumn sunset on the Delaware Bay

I do not do well with the shorter days. Chances are, you feel the same.

Despite bathing in the glow of electric light, the sun still matters physiologically and psychologically (and that great gray area between). And it has been disappearing slowly for several months now.

Lettuce in the cold frame.

With less sun I grow more tired and less food.

I cannot control the sun, but turns out a lot of plants are tougher than I realized. With no help, the parsley, arugula, and Brussels sprouts are doing just fine through the dying sun. They're taking things a little slower, of course, but there's pretty good advice for all of us with the dying light.

I've got lettuce and baby kale tucked in the cold frames I made back when I had a bit more energy, and even a very determined bean plant that's plastered itself along the cold frame window.

So last night we ate from a mid-December garden.

"And it was very good."

Time (and time again)

We keep time in class, as we do pretty much everywhere. I've got several analog clocks and one less precise (and less useful) box of digital time.

We pretend that days are exactly 24 hours long, and that each hour is as well proscribed and linear as the next. This is not true, and will not be for millions of years.

Kids know otherwise instinctively, of course, at least until we train educate them.

An hour in December lasts exactly as long as an hour in June these days, but that was not always true. Hours were invented by a mammal that paid attention--daylight was divided into 12 portions, with noon defined as when the sun was at its highest point for the day.

Last hour of the day

We started school here in Bloomfield in September--the daylight hours shrink dramatically this time of year.  We had over 12 hours of sunlight the first day of school. Tomorrow we will have just minutes more than 10 hours.

The sunlight we do get have is more oblique and less intense, long shadows and less light. We pretend our hours are equitable throughout the year.

Science teachers will make a big deal about this, explaining the seasons using globes and lamps, but if we've taught our children that sunlight does not matter, that the clock matters more than your hypothalamus, that we eat at noon, not when you're hungry, well, then, we should stop feigning shock when children really don't pay much attention to sunlight.

None of the adults around them do, either.

A clock in front of our library, from NJ State Library Photo Collection

If college graduates do not know why seasons happen, or how trees accumulate mass, or what forces act on a basketball in flight, maybe it's not because our children refuse to learn.

Maybe it's because they internalized what we've been teaching them all along....

Yes, another cyclical post--I love the rhythms of life.

Sunrise, sunset

I watched the sun set yesterday.
I watched the sun rise again this morning.

I don't do this often enough, few of us do.

Just a few minutes after the sun broke through this morning, a twitchy squirrel sat on top of a fence post, still, facing the sun, then resumed his twitchiness.

A vulture flew within 20 feet of me, its under feathers reflecting the sunlight as it banked.

I just watched.
It would have happened anyway.
And it's happening anyway.

And it will keep on happening....

Transformations

Yesterday we fooled a few bacteria into taking in some jellyfish DNA, and now they fluoresce green. Tomorrow I will take a few colonies of these and give them what we all need--food, shelter, and a little security, and I'll get a few million more by Thursday.

This has become old hat in high school biology classes, but it still blows my mind, as it should.

We are all God  now. You may laugh, and I can temper this with some off-hand remark, but we're not the same critters we were before we started transforming lifeforms. That we do this with indifference makes it seem surreal.

(I wanted to jump up and down and scream in delight and fear--"Look what we've done!!!!" And, OK, maybe I did, just a little bit....)

***

A few planets are lining up this week, and a few folks are excited. So excited that you can go online and see them.

That planets are visible naked eye is pretty cool, and that they wander against the background of stars even neater. Indeed, that's where the word "planet" comes from--planasthai, "to wander."

To stare at one naked eye, though, is not particularly exciting. They flicker less than stars, and are quite bright, but, well, um--they look like stars.

We have made looking at planets a check list event, a commodity, an "event" simply because it's an event.

A lot of folks cannot fathom anymore why that bothers me, so I guess that puts me in the crank category. A lot of folks cannot fathom what they even want.

Maybe the point of education is to learn what you want, to figure out what's worth seeking. I'm pretty sure it's not to pass a standardized test.

***

Most of my students have never stumbled upon a flickering comb jelly, flashing electric blue as it lies dying on the beach. I have, and I wondered--who was meant to see the light?

I can change the way light is reflected off bacteria, light meant only for a few other humans to see, to reflect our glory of ourselves as we play God.

Some comb jellies flash an electric blue when disturbed, presumably to distract predators. This makes sense, a logical reason to expend energy, fit for our mechanistic view of the world.

Yet when I squat by a dying critter, the rhythm of the wash of waves running through my ears, the salty smell of the dying in my nostrils, the soft forgiving warm and wet sand caressing my feet, this single jelly flashing its last three, brief pulses of light on the edge of the bay matters to me, and I do not know why.

I only saw it because I happened to be there--and it would have mattered even if I had not seen it.

I have no opinion on the existence of God--my people said He is unknowable, and I, to their chagrin, took them at their word. I do not truck with what I cannot know.

But I do know this--we cannot know (and can never know) what we pretend to know today. Hubris does not require the existence of gods.

Tomorrow I will be the destroyer of earths as I kill the same bacterial cultures we worked hard to create. I will pretend this does not bother me.

***

As for the planets, if you think it's worth staring at them online, I have a few other parlor tricks that may interest you.

Cristoforo Colombo used a similar parlor trick to fool the locals of what is now known as Jamaica. The locals had supported Colombo and his crew, but were (understandably) a little annoyed at the murderous actions of some of his crew. Colombo knew of an impending lunar eclipse predicted by Regiomontanus many years before. He attributed the eclipse to the Christian God, the same God Europe used to justify slaughtering those who knew my bay before me.

Stories matter.

Still, a lunar eclipse is about as exciting as the planets lined up in late winter--a parlor show. That they exist (and that we figured out what those points of light mean) are the stories worth knowing.

So tomorrow, an hour or so after my bacteria break down their last molecules of sugar, I will wander outside Bloomfield High, take a look west, and see the string of planetary pearls that got so much attention this week.

Then I'll walk home, knowing I am among the luckiest men alive, feeling the earth below with every step that takes me home.

Hokey smokes! Fluorescent bacteria!!!!

Imbolc

An Cailleach Bhearra wandered around back in the 10th century in western Ireland,
eating "seaweed, salmon, and wild garlic" (my kind of woman), looking for firewood.

If the day was bright and sunny, beware--she had gathered plenty of wood and was set for many cold days ahead.
If the day was gray, she didn't bother, and she will make the days warm up again. Sound familiar?

Imbolc again.
The daffodils have broken through the earth. My words shrink as the sunlight grows.
Groundhog Day has always been a favorite of mine.

***

We are trapped by words.

This week my lambs are being tested. They sit silently as they analyze stylized marks on paper, then fill in 90 bubbles on a piece of paper holding 500.

This is serious business, this thing we do with words. Outside a gull glided by lifted by the unusually warm mid-winter breeze. No one else in class saw it.

What's the use of knowing the word gull if you have no use for the animal?

We pretend our words make us safe. We pretend our words give us control. We pretend that words make us special, and that these words separate us from the bacteria, the fungi, the jellies, and the gull.

***

A few days ago I watched a crow at the ferry jetty caw caw caw at a gull sharing a light post. The gull did not respond. The crow then swooped down, picked up a piece of paper, then returned to its perch near the gull.

The crow carefully ripped up the paper, piece by piece, dropping each piece, one by one, watching each piece until it hit the ground, looking at the gull between pieces as if to say Hey!

When done, the crow cawed once more, and this time the gull squawked back. The crow, now seemingly satisfied, nodded, then flew to a trashcan and cawed at a few humanfolk, one (not me) who cawed back.

I have no idea what that was about, nor could I justify discussing it in my classroom. So I don't.

Curriculum stops at the point where humans are besides the point.

That makes sense if you live in a world of words. It makes less sense at the water's edge.
A child can parrot the Calvin cycle without knowing a thing about a seed, about food, about the billions, trillions of other organisms teeming around him.

If we keep ignoring things where humans are besides the point, we will become just that.

***

I teach biology, the study of life, in a culture that fails to recognize death. The children spray themselves with Axe, yet shy from the pond water and the mud brought in from outside.

I can hardly grade a child on her ability to keep a plant alive in a public building . I cannot ask a child to slaughter a calf in class. I can ask her to tell me how many NADH molecules are generated from one molecule of glucose during the Krebs cycle.

With the return of the sun comes the return of my sanity, when I feel comfortable letting go of the words again, learning (again) that what I thought was besides the point is the point.

Photos by us.

Food is not energy

A response to a response to my last post--NASA, food is not energy.

Language matters, especially to young children trying to make sense of the world. I remember being utterly confused as a child thinking that Karl and Groucho were the same guy--how dangerous could the Russians be if they were led by a man with a fake mustache who made silly movies?

As adults, with reasonable frames of reference, we laugh at obvious holes in our schema. The best comedians make a living at pointing out the oblivious obvious.

Children, however, will try to weave the inconsistencies into their worldview that already exists. They don't get jokes because they're so busy trying to make sense out of everything.

And they do, internally if not correctly.

As we get older, we learn that people will laugh at us if we do not share a common schema, so we learn to laugh at jokes we do not get, then wrestle quietly with the punchline, stuck in our brain like a piece of corn caught between molars.

***

We live in a Newtonian universe. Einstein was a smart guy, and his work led the way to all kinds of remarkable things, but we'll not be transforming matter into energy in our classroom, nor energy into matter.

 Matter is matter, and energy is energy.

But what about food? And plants? And sunlight?
I'll get to those in a moment.

Matter
is usually defined in public schools as something that has mass and occupies space, and we toss this at kids as though they have some special understanding of mass. 

I certainly don't, so I use a different definition my students can grasp--matter is "stuff." I can tell them it has inertia, or I can tell them that if I throw it at them fast enough they will feel it. (Yes, I know, some particles fly through us since we're mostly empty space...another story for another day.)

Energy
is usually defined in public schools as the ability to do work, and we toss this at kids as though they have some special understanding of a physicist's concept of work.

I certainly don't, so I use a different definition. Energy is some quality that can cause a change in stuff. That is, of course, a lousy definition, hardly covers all its various forms. I might say that if stuff has changed, then energy was involved, also a limited definition. 


I'd rather use crippled definitions with their defects discussed than the "real" definitions in textbooks that tell us nothing new. (Starting science units with "vocabulary" just adds to the fun.)


My students are told, upfront, that I have problems grasping the concepts of matter and energy. These are hugely difficult concepts. If you truly grasp them, you own the universe, and no one owns the universe. No one.

Stuff is stuff, and energy is energy, and in Newton's world, "never the twain shall meet."

***

NASA tells teachers that "food is energy," and it's simply not so.


I put a pie in a slingshot and fire it your way, you will feel it. It's stuff. It moved, made a sound, broke into several pieces, warmed up my face, all evidence of "energy," but the stuff is still the same stuff.

If I burn propane by mixing it with oxygen, I mix the stuff around a bit, but I will end up with exactly the same amount of stuff (defined as the measurement of force exerted by that stuff on a scale placed between it and the Earth) in the form of water and carbon dioxide. Exactly the same. For all the light and heat and noise released, the amount of stuff remains exactly the same.

(You can easily demonstrate that water comes out of this reaction--grab a propane torch and flash the flame over cool metal--use a desk leg or a faucet.)


This is a big deal. 


If kids get through their first 8 years of public school knowing nothing else besides the conservation of mass and energy, we'll take it from there.

***

So where is this thing called energy? Bad question--it is no "thing."

How is energy stored in food? Better question, but still almost impossible to answer if you do not have a reasonable grasp of chemistry, so let's leave food for a minute and go to a 5 pound rock. 

If I drop a 5 pound rock on your head, how much damage does it cause? Well, that depends on how high the rock was (relative to your head) before it was dropped. The higher the drop, the more damage done, the more energy released. We call this potential energy, a deceptively difficult concept.

If I pick up a rock, it is the exact same rock it was when it as still on the floor. It is now in a less stable position by virtue of having been lifted from the floor, but it's still the exact same rock. It can make more change now when I drop it--louder sound, more damage--but it's still the same rock before and after I drop it.

The potential energy is not "in" the rock, it's in the rock's relative position to the floor. The less stable the rock's position, the more energy it "has."

The rock got less stable because I invested kinetic energy using my muscles. My kinetic energy came from, the potential energy created by the unstable complex organic molecules we call "food"--when I exercise, I convert unstable food molecules into more stable water and carbon dioxide molecules. I need oxygen to help strip the electrons off the food molecules.

The mass of a molecule of glucose and the oxygen molecules needed to break it down need to break them down is exactly the same as the mass of the carbon dioxide and water molecules left when the energy has been released..

The potential energy "in" food came from a plant's ability to combine carbon dioxide and pieces of water together into a larger, less stable compound, using the energy of sunlight.

You cannot weigh sunlight because it's not stuff, it's energy.

Plants do not "eat" sunlight. Stuff is stuff, energy is energy. Food is not energy. It is stuff.

Plants recycle the stuff, but they cannot recycle energy. Energy goes from useful to less useful to even less useful.

And where does sunlight come from? Here's where Einstein joins the party--hydrogen atoms are fused into helium, a tiny bit of mass converted to tremendous amounts of energy.

That's fascinating and deserves study but not until later, when a child knows what food is.

Newton and the Marxes lifted from PD sources.

Potential energy diagram from McGraw-Hill here.

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.

Ditching digital time

We're in the last few weeks of the dying sun, our days defined by our shadows. I know the sun will return, but I don't believe it.

The digital clock on my classroom wall leaves no shadows.  It defines little. It just assigns a number to now. 9:27, 9:27, 9:27, stuck in a moment. Suddenly the clock announces 9:28.

The sun barely moves, but it moves perceptibly, a fluid sliver of time  marking an infinite number of instants, and the long shadows move with it.

My analog clock moves with the sun, its second hand kissing the minute hand every 61 seconds, the minute hand kissing the hour hand every 65 minutes, the three hands uniting every 12 hours, then resuming the dance.

***

We spent a lot of money for fancy electronic whiteboards to replace the melamine boards that replaced the blackboards that replaced the slate. As fancy as the new board is, it has not fundamentally changed anything.

The images are fancier, they move, they tweet, they change colors, they can be saved to amuse another classroom full of children, but they do not alter the way children look at the world in any meaningful way. (They do, however, allow us to continue to cultivate the magical thinking that pervades our culture--another topic for another day.)

A digital clock alters obliterates our sense of time. It tells us of now only, a discrete now at that. An exact now. 9:29.

***

"I'm not late, it's still 9:30."
The bell rang a half minute ago.

I used to think the kids were just playing with me, confounding the instant after 9:30 started with the instant before 9:30 ends. But it really is all the same to many of my students. And to much of our staff.

***

My analog clock moves inexorably. It divvies up time into visible chunks of pie--this is where you are, this is how long you've been there, this is how long you will be there. The hands sweep over marked swaths of clock face.

The large hourglass that marked Dorothy's  inevitable destruction in Oz terrified me--the tangible flow of sand ebbing through its glass womb made even young viewers feel mortal.

Time flows both ways from the ever-present moment. The digital clock hides this from us, and we're glad not to know.

***

A bored child stares at the clock, eyelids hovering just over the pupils. When will this class ever ennnddddd...? 9:34...9:34...9:34....

Our class clock is covered with a large file card with the words "Tempus fugit" scribbled over it. (Sophomores love to say fuggit.) Time flees.

In front o the class I have a large analog clock, rescued from among the Great Clock Massacre of 2004, when we opened a new science wing at our high school.

Yes, children still get bored. Yes, eyelids still droop, But the droopy-eyed now stare at an analog clock, watching the seconds drip by, and, eventually, they see the barely perceptible movement of the minute hand as well. They learn the exact moment the bell will ring as the second hand sweeps past the 43rd tick on the clock's face. They see that 9:45 is a quarter of an hour from 10 (not 10:00), and three quarters away from 9.

***

I am not aware of any studies that looked at this, but I'd be willing to bet a carboy's worth of home-brewed mead that children learn more about time from an analog clock than from a block of blinking digital numerals masquerading as a time piece.

I pretend to teach high school biology, but what I focus on is teaching children how to see patterns, how to recognize the patterns as patterns, then how to describe the patterns in order to predict future patterns. Some folks call that science.

Everything that I can control in my classroom should be working toward those goals.

The digital clock does not, so it's covered up. If you want to know what time it is in Room B362, you're going to have to know how to read an analog clock.

Yes, we have a sundial, too--but it's only good for a few hours in the afternoon.
We have west windows.
The hourglass is obviously from The Wizard of Oz--
I got it from Julie Hedlund's website Write Up My Life

What hour?

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

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

What possible hour do we think we wrought last night?

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

Spring silliness

As I type this, a tiny gnat is trying to break through my monitor.

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

Theodosius Dobzhansky

I should be crafting a descent with modification (misnamed "evolution") exam.

Descent with modification is the heart of biology. Without it, a world with red-lipped batfish, roly-polies, and humans makes no sense, no matter how clever God pretends to be.

Without it, nothing in biology makes sense. Nothing.

Seems sacrilegious to test it using vocabulary and a few standard examples any student paying attention can just fly through half aware of our universe.

 ***

 
I walked tonight, crushing thousands of insects and worms, breathing in microbes, watching squirrels and starlings and dogs and robins and humans go about their business.

A cherry tree late for the party dropped a few last petals on my head.

Mosquitoes paraded around my tiny pond, blissfully unaware that soon it will be filled with young fish born in a tank in Room B362, trapped by glass they learned to avoid, soon to be munching on the young wrigglers laid today.

Sunlight bathes us now, and everything that buzzes or tweeps or flaps or gurgles has forgotten that darkness was ever possible. At least I have.

And if I can forget, despite centuries of words telling me of death and of destruction and of entropy, well, what hope does the fledgling robin I saw bouncing around the Green yesterday have of grasping how serious this all must be.

Seriousness is a human conceit.

It's May. I going to listen to the fledglings for now, as long as now lasts, as long as the sun continues to bathe us with grace.

Red-lipped batfish--really, how serious can we be if red-lipped batfish exist?

The red-lipped batfish photo from PBS here.

"Radiation is Actually Good For You"

Ann Coulter never actually said this*, but if she had, I'd be nodding my head vigorously alongside her.

Radiation is good for you!

Without radiation, there'd be no flowers, no food, no fun. Inside chloroplasts, electrons get tossed about like rag dolls in a pool of pit bulls, energized by electromagnetic radiation emitted from a nuclear furnace about 8 light-minutes away. Chloroplasts transfer the energy to chemical bonds, making our food.

Each breath we take, every thought we think, flows from the sun's radiation.

The stuff we happen to see, visible light, is just a small slice of the spectrum. Infrared rays, ultraviolet, radio waves, gamma rays, all the same phenomena, just different frequencies (a bit disingenuous, since those differences reflect huge differences in energy, but still....)

We think of small doses of light as harmless, because for most of us, it is. Our bodies continually repair damage to our DNA caused by UV light. Not all of us can do this.

Some of us are condemned to the dark because of a rare genetic disease that prevents them from repairing damage done to them, to all of us, by light.

And some others, like Ann Coulter, choose to live in the dark anyway.




 

*What she said was "the only good news is that anyone exposed to excess radiation from the nuclear power plants is now probably much less likely to get cancer." But then, she gets paid well to look blond and spew horse-hockey.

The UV protection suit photo is from the HED Foundation here.

The end of winter

Our crocuses bloomed today. A tiny horseshoe crab, smaller than my thumbnail, crawled out of the Delaware Bay. The day lilies are rising again, like Phoenixes from the snow's ashes.

All of this is more real than the nonsense that passes for discourse in the education world. I can still close my classroom door (though I rarely do) and tackle whatever problems we care to tackle that day.

Why is my plant wilting? Hey, sow bug babies! I think my slug drowned.
How come the starfish hasn't moved in three days? Are those mosquitoes?
Look! Peas!

We got kids from Somalia, from Sierra Leone, from Poland, from China, from Ghana. Not third generation, not second. We're talking off the airplane (Newark Liberty International Airport) and into the brink. I taught a child who spoke only Bengali.

And we thrive.

We thrive despite the mandates, the tests, the current climate that forgets the roots of the word public, "pertaining to the people." Our town supported the last budget, despite the struggles of family after family after family.


Families that come from desperate situations know education matters. Families that come from desperate situations value teachers who care about their children. They put their trust in our hands, in our classrooms.

So while the elite press on about this magnet school, that philosophy, the myriad ways to use (and abuse) technology, scouring the US News and World Report for college rankings (and the NJ Monthly for state rankings), most of the rest of us go about our business, getting children ready for loving, happy, and (yes) productive lives.

But never just productive.

I work for Bloomfield, and its families, and for its children. I do not work for Arne Duncan, I do not work for Governor Christie. I give my all every day, because I want my lambs to be happy, in the Jeffersonian sense, and I want them prepared to pursue whatever dreams they hope to pursue.

I wiled away a good chunk of the afternoon on a jetty poking into the bay. I stared at barnacles for a bit, mourned all the oysters scraped off the rocks by this year's ice. The water was exceptionally clear, revealing thousands of comb jellies, floating in with the tides, then floating out again.

My happiest moments are spent on the edges of the sea. 

I stumbled upon the horseshoe crab, not much different than its ancestors that wandered these same shores when dinosaurs still roared. It may be still alive, it may be in the belly of a gull now. Tomorrow I will share its story with my students, because for them, these stories still matter.

And then I will test them on meiosis and synapses and centromeres and chromatids, to get them ready for the state exam in May. Those who finish early will be allowed to study their terrariums, their aquariums, to see how their critters did over the weekend.

 And the day will not be completely wasted, the last Sunday of February, as the light returns, and all things, all things, again become possible.

All photos taken today.

 First one crocuses, then the tiny (and live) horseshoe crab, then the points of a dead horseshoe crab, 

then barnacles hanging out waiting for the next tide, 

and finally, light as seen through the compound eyes of a horseshoe crab.

February horseshoe crab

Leslie and I found the tiny shell of a young horseshoe crab this afternoon while walking on the edge of the Delaware Bay.

The shell is backlit by our sun, the source of just about all our energy, whatever "energy" means.

I can construct all kinds of things on computers, create all kinds of worlds, live all kinds of lives, and none of it, none, can compare to the miracles we find with each step we take on the beach outside.

A loon surface no more than 10 feet away from us today. The water was clear. The sanderlings are gone.

Late harvest

As I was poking around the classroom garden yesterday, getting the plants ready for the weekend, I found a pea pod dangling from a tiny pea vine.

The child who nurtured it will get "extra credit"--I used promises of points to get the some of my lambs 'interested' in putting dried peas into icky peat moss. She won't remember the points. She will remember the pod.

I hope she remembers the countless times she breathed on her hand--carbon dioxide and water released deep in her cells. Our plants are built on the carbon backbone of our exhaled breaths.

I do not pretend to know anything of God or gods. I enjoy reading the words of cultures past, to see what they saw when words were still so young that they were used carefully.

I can recognize grace, though--a pea pod given to us for the cost of our breath and a little bit of water.

***

I just came in from picking a few scrawny Brussels sprouts from very chilly plants--two of them now gracefully bend towards the ground, forming archways, seemingly honoring the earth that bore them, the last harvest of last spring's garden.

The sun is returning, slowly, so that our exhaled carbon dioxide can be used again, with grace.

 I can show the kids the graph above--the annual wobble in CO₂ levels reflects the dance between the light of life and the ensuing darkness each winter.

Chloroplasts and mitochondria, ancient critters in cells that keep much of the living alive, work in tandem. Chloroplasts capture the energy of the sun in sugar, and mitochondria release the energy as the sugars tumble back to water and CO₂.

A child feeds on the lies of our culture. Magic erupts from screens, voices erupt from wire. We are consumers on the infinite, and we tell the children lies because we believe them ourselves.

She memorizes the photosythesis equation without understanding,  because we tell her she must, in order to graduate, in order to get to college, in order to earn money, in order to eat.

A tiny pod just might put a tiny seed of doubt in her. It came from nothing, or so it seems.
It's tangible in a way photons can never be, no matter how thin the computer, how bright the screen.

***

So I will keep teaching about electron transport chains and ATP and things that can be tested with no more than a scantron and a pencil. I get paid to do this, and I enjoy it.

Our classroom garden provides the real lessons. Heads of wheat are erupting from plastic bottles, impossibly yellow squash flowers lean over plastic trays, and the peas keep wrapping themselves around everything in their path.

Not everything thrives--some of the children get quiet when their seedling wilts, a few get angry. There are always more peat pots and seeds in the back, and eventually another seed gets planted, converting our breath again to the living.

Biology.

Do not confuse grace with religion, nor technology with science. I know nothing. None of us do.

The veggies came from the back yard, the graph originally from NOAA

The Bambification of Dr. King

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice....Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

Martin Luther King, Jr., from "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

***

Death's shadow stretches long on a mid-day January beach.


Energy's no longer cheap. Last year's abundance has become scarce, and  the sun is too oblique to fulfill last summer's promises.

Purple sandpipers picked at the remnants of horseshoe crabs that failed to return with the last tide; several vultures hunkered down at the edge of the bay.Glistening glass orbs marked the end of comb jellies just out of reach of the receding waters.

We stumbled upon a hole dug by a gull, its presence betrayed by its footprints. Next to the whole lay a small, live clam. I tossed it back into the bay, figuring the gull had given up.

A few steps later, I found another displaced clam, again sitting next to a hole dug out by a gull, and again I tossed the critter back in the sea.

Then a third.

Winter beaches kill the ignorant. I looked around. Several similar holes, each with a clam next to it.

Gulls know how to open clams--I've watched them do it. They pick them up, hover over the jetty, then drop them, following them as they fall, ready to eat the freshly exposed flesh as the shell shatters on the rocks.

I suspect the clams had been left to die--their gaping shells would have saved a gull a few trips over the jetty.

I left the remaining clams on the beach.

One creature's death is another creature's grace. Powerful stories emerge daily from the beach--stories of grace and power and even love. None of them, however, are "nice."

Bambi never lived in the real world.

***

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was loving, and kind, and powerful. His words still resonate, should you choose to hear them.

Do not confuse non-violence with passivity.
Do not confuse kindness with niceness.

During school announcements yesterday, our students were told that Dr. King pushed "cooperation." Rania Jones, a 3rd grade winner of the Milwaukee Public Schools' "People Must Work Together" King contest wrote "That's what we must do today - demonstrate cooperation." This is the Dr. King lite version of a complex story. This is the version that gives so many of us the day off on Monday.

"Love" is a complex word, and one not easily used in public settings. "Cooperation" is much safer, more sanitary.

And it's the wrong message.

***

My Dad joined  the 1963 March on Washington, dressed in full uniform, a proud US Marine officer. He flew A4 Phantom Skyhawks off carriers, in love with a country that let poor first generation children fly.

My dad was pulled to the front of the parade, or so the story goes. If you see a full-dressed USMC officer in photos from the parade, it may well be Bill Doyle. Dr. King later went on to oppose the Viet Nam War as unjust, and my father, a die-hard leatherneck, resigned his commission for the same reason.

I grew up in an Irish Catholic home, but Dr. King held as much influence as the Pope, maybe more, years before he was assassinated. My Dad loved the man, not the cartoon he has become.

Read "Letter From a Birmingham Jail."
Take a walk outside and watch the grace and agony of life around us.

Yes, it's complicated. Life is complex,

Bambi's just the celluloid illusion of a corporation that owns a good chunk of the airwaves today, including ABC. I'm betting you won't hear much about King's letter from jail Monday.

You want to learn about Dr. King? Go read his words, listen to his speeches, learn everything you can about him. But don't "cooperate" with those who would steal his image without his words, the Glenn Becks, the Arne Duncans, the innumerable talking heads that will piously bow on Monday.

Take a walk on Monday, a walk outside, away from noise. Carry a copy of King's letter and read it under the January sunlight.

Share it. Live it.
Don't let the dream die.

The photo of Dr. King (D.C., August, 1963)  is from the National Archives and is the public domain.

The crab claw was taken by Leslie.

November light

The last time these parts saw 9 1/2 hours of sunlight was the last day in November. The darkest 6 weeks of the year are over.

Amen.

Photons strike chlorophyll, electrons get pumped up, organic compounds grow. We need the sun. Not in a metaphorical sense.

Every breath you take, every thought you think, every sound you make requires energy, energy released when you break the bonds in the bread you eat.

The energy came from the sun, caught by plants, stored in bonds. The bonds get broken, our daily bread again reduced to (or, I suppose, oxidized, for you chemistry folks out there) to carbon dioxide, to water, the raw ingredients plants need for creating the stuff that ultimately creates us.

I cannot (and would not) presume to teach any religious creed in class. I do talk about this, though. Photosynthesis and respiration, molecules dancing together, joined together by the grace of sunlight, then breaking apart to release the energy within ourselves, energy needed to read these words.

The sunlight is returning. The days are lengthening.

And our lives depend on it.

Photo by Leslie.

Crocuses and clams

We're a few weeks away from the crocuses. They know the sun is coming back. I do not know how they know but they do. Soon green fingers will break through the corms.

Meanwhile, my clams have settled in for the winter. Not deep, maybe 2 or 3 inches deeper than July, but still deeper, clammed up tight, waiting for the water to warm. Deep for a clam, though.




We still have a few stalks of Brussels sprouts growing, still with a few tiny sprouts left.

At this moment, the tide is just starting to rise again on the mudflats, under a crescent moon dancing between wintry clouds low in the west. The clams are there, under the black water glistening from the sliver of moonlight, as they have been before we came, as they will be when we're gone.

In a few more hours, a few feet of water will rise over the clams, then recede again before dawn.

***

We can teach about tides and the moon, we can talk of gravity, but until a child wrestles a clam from the mud, she knows nothing about them.

Most of what we teach, or pretend to teach, means nothing to a child, but often, sadly, nothing to the teacher as well.

I know of tides, but not the taiga or the tiger.

I know of quahogs, and reasonably well, but my words and pictures cannot replace an afternoon on the mudflats, the pungent sweet smell of life mingling with death, jolting young noses more familiar with Amber Romance and Axe.

A single afternoon on the flats can be ruined if I emphasize the abstract, especially to a generation that knows only the abstract. So I will pretend to care about mantles and siphons and the economic importance of hard shell clams while I hope that a few of the children get curious about this unknowable universe we've kept hidden from them.

And for the next few weeks, I am trapped in their world, until the crocuses come back.

Thanks to PSE&G, about 150 young adults will get to spend a day on a tidal flat in May.

Dying light

I tossed some metal into the Atlantic surf for about an hour today. The sun has settled low in the south. Gashes of December light broke through the wintry gray clouds. Even the midday shadows are long now.

The chilly brine bathed my feet as I cast. It may be time for boots.



The sun sets at 4:29 PM today, as early as it will for the year. The shortest day arrives in a couple of weeks.

I pulled the last tomato off the vine today, tinged pink on dull green. It froze last night, and had the consistency of pumpkin pulp. I spit most of it out, and tossed the rest back in the garden.

We're down to kale and Brussels sprouts now, then we are done.

***

I pray the sun comes back.

But just in case it doesn't, the prayer is one of thanks, for what was.
I am seeing Galway Kinnell again in just a few days.

Last time I saw him, he was the age I am now. He wrote of love, and loss, and timelessness.
Now he is three decades older, as I am, and he still writes of love, and loss, and timelessness.

He reminds those of us getting through life that there is no "through." Talking to his young daughter Maud, he talks to all of us:

learn,
as you stand
at this end of the bridge which arcs,
from love, you think, into enduring love,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come – to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
which tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

If I keep thinking of cycles and orbits and tides and the spin of electrons in invisible particles, if I keep chanting about redox equations and hydrolysis and the Gibbs free energy in the classroom, I miss what is herenow.

I tried to capture a December rose in the fading light with a camera, to share. But I can no more share this than share time itself.

Galway reminds me of this every time I read or hear his words.

He knows, he knows, and yet he writes of what we cannot believe.

We all make the same mistake, we all "commit...the error of thinking, one day all this will only be a memory."

***

Leslie worries that I might someday wander around barefoot too long on the beach, in the snow. She's right to worry, of course. I can get distracted outdoors long enough for incipient ice crystals to tear open my cells with their intricate patterns.

I don't need to worry yet. The water temperature is still in the high 40's--my feet feel warm when washed by the sea when the air is as chilly as it is today.

Back inside, I worry about what might have been. When I am outside, there is no "what might have been." Just sound and light and smell and touch.

I'm not sure ""Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair In The Moonlight" would have made much sense to me the last time I saw Galway Kinnell read, decades ago, shortly before I held my own child in my arms, before the filament of life passed from me and Leslie to two lovely people who, should our prayers be answered, breathe long after we're dead.

It makes sense now.

The lines by Galway Kinnell come from "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair In The Moonlight," from The Book of Nightmares.

On balance

Theology alert--feel free to jump in....
This was inspired by Father Sean and Brother John and Reverend Scott.

Balance.

We need balance in our lives. Overwhelmed? Seek balance.

An innocuous philosophy--who could possibly be against balance?

A madman in the back wildy waves hand--and (again) I get sent out of the classroom.

***

The light is failing. Local carbon dioxide levels will rise until late May now, when resurrected plants start reconstructing the molecules back into something we can use again next winter. CO₂ and H₂O, carefully bonded back together into strawberries in June, peaches in July, corn in August, wheat in the September...little left now but the kale and the Brussels sprouts.



Breathe on your hand--you can feel the moisture, the breeze of molecules brushing your hand.

If God can be found, She will be found in the chloroplast, Her heart made of rubisco, the enzyme that puts us together, the most common protein in our known universe. She carefully holds a tiny molecule of carbon dioxide, three atoms of nothing, and glues them to life.

Heart of God?

She takes her life, her energy from the sun. Three times a second, another molecule of CO2 pressed together to a molecule of life, over and over and over again.



Rubisco is everywhere, in every green leaf, and as the leaves of summer fade into fall's glory, She leaves us. We start to drown in our own CO2, waiting for Her return, as She has, as She will. (That's called faith.)

***

You cannot balance a lifetime. You can dance, jump for joy, cringe in fear, curl up, scream, love or hate. There is no balance for love, for fear.

A well lived life is not one where you've balanced your fears with your joys, your love with your hate.

A "well lived" life makes no sense. You cannot "lived"--you can only live, now, this moment. Either the amygdala or the cortex rules a moment. We pretend we can string together moments, we hold on to memories, to words, to pictures, to myths of eternity, and we miss the obvious.

The here and now.

And we wonder why it's hard to teach children in a classroom....

***

A couple of soldier flies erupted from our class terrarium last week. Unexpected. Large critters crawled out of the thin litter layering the glass bottom. The yellow bar splashed on their legs with their waspish wings and fluttering antennae screamed danger. My cortex knows they're harmless, my amygdala makes my fingers stutter when I pick one up.

The last few days a half dozen more came from the same dirt.

When I opened the top to feed my sowbugs yesterday, two flew out and headed for the window. They only live a day or two as adults, and they had been trapped for hours in the terrarium. They flew fiercely, full of desire, and crashed right into the glass.

Instinct, true. Fixed action patterns with proximate and ultimate causes. Memorize this, children, pay $87, and earn your AP Biology credit.

We never speak of desire in other creatures. Of wants. Of needs.

The soldier fly carcasses will sit on the sill until my students return on Monday. I will ask them how they got there. Then I will ask why.

We all need what rubisco gets us--we all feel desire. It's why we burn our energy even though we know December's coming.

***

וייצר יהוה אלהים את האדם עפר מן האדמה ויפח באפיו נשמת חיים ויהי האדם לנפש חיה׃

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and man became a living soul.

We think we're sophisticated and learned and (the worst conceit of the three) immortal. We gorge on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and forget that we are closer to the soldier flies than we are to rubisco.

I do not know who wrote the Hebrew Bible, and I do not know which of the 47 men chosen by King James translated Genesis 2:7, but there's been a huge misinterpretation of "soul" in the last few hundred years.


The soul, at least according to the Words allegedly governing the actions of the dangerously powerful here in the States, is not separate from the dirt. Our "stuff," the polymers of proteins, our layers of lipids, our DNA, our essence, is our soul.

We are mortal and finite. We are living souls, dependent on rubisco, dependent on unimaginable events in the heart of the sun, hydrogen to fusion, mass to light.

You want your children ready for the world of humans, raise them under artificial light. Keep them planted in front of monitors. Feed them impossibly perfect fruit. Keep them shod. Pump them full of music made by machines. Surround them with images of the "perfect" human, and demand they become one.

Don't talk to me about balance.

We are training our children to avoid the window pane, to stay safe, to gaze at the world outside, to create stronger panes. We don't want to see them hurt. We cannot imagine their last agonal breaths.

Me? I want my children to crash into the glass, and if they're bloodied lying on the sill, to get up and crash into it again. Again and again and again.

3 billion years of desire got us to here; a few hundred years of playing God has reduced us chasing photons on screens, practicing religion disconnected from the wiser elders who wrote texts we refuse to read, to believing we are in control.

I may be unhinged, but I am not as unbalanced as anyone who believes in balance.

The sun that sustains me has been dropping lower into the sky day by day, the plants that feed me have lost their leaves, the bees I adore have gone. I am a man of science, I have a good idea why this is so.

I am also a man of faith--faith that the sunlight will return, and that rubisco will return with it come spring.

Photos are mine and Leslie's.
The rubisco model is from Wikipedia, and is in the public domain.

Infinite jest

I am very careful not to tip my hand in class. While I am responsible for teaching my puppies how to think, I am loathe to tell them what to think.

I trust that most humans with open minds and reasonable tools for observation are kind, rational, and loving, and I have yet to see anything that demolishes my hypothesis.

My job? Keep their minds open and teach them how to observe.

It doesn't make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is - if it disagrees with real-life results, it is wrong. That's all there is to it.

Richard Feynman

Why does this come up now?
I'm teaching our interdependence unit, ecology.

Not the hippy-dippy squirrel-kissing tree-hugging VW lovebug version (as much fun as that might be) but the real thing--interdependence.

***

It's a hard unit to teach, not the least of which is the creeping hubris that wanders into any discussion about "solutions."

Life changes the planet. It makes messes, it continuously molds the environment, often making it unliveable for myriad species. Heck, we polluted the atmosphere with a strong oxidizing molecules over two billion years ago when our ancestors were single-celled cyanobacteria.

Humans appear to be particularly good at changing things--we're in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction, but life will muddle its way through, even if humans choose to step out of the party.

Still, it's not something I want to throw at sophomores before their 4th decade on Earth, and most of them will have graduated from high school by then.

***

We are consuming more calories than our green cousins can capture from the sun, literally living on borrowed time, energy stored over the millenia by organisms now reduced (that's a bio pun, son) to petroleum.

Should I share this?

Our current industrial agricultural practices are unsustainable for more than a few generations.

Should I share this?

Economic "growth," a cornerstone of our Federal policy, ultimately depends on what the Earth can give, not on what we can extract, no matter how much we posture. (We've just about made "capitalism" and "democracy" synonymous, no?)

Should I share this?

***

I do share this much.

Life requires an influx of useful energy, just about all of it coming from the sun. The amount of sunlight hitting the Earth daily is finite.

Ultimately we are, too.

None of us will live forever, shocking news to a sophomore, and no doubt I'll be a bit surprised, too, when my cells give up the ghost.



If by the end of the year my puppies realize that limits exist, unforgiving limits at that, yet still see the joy in the flutter of a swimming scallop, well, I've done my job.

The crab took us on just a couple of days ago.
He was, apparently, the self-appointed guardian of the Delaware Bay.
After I took its picture, we wandered away, but he continued his steadfast defense.
I think it's an Asian shore crab--any thoughts?

The scallop video was uploaded by Cas1920.