Clam up, Arne

 Tomorrow I am going on an adventure!

Despite predictions of a 30 knot breeze with rain tossed in, I plan to grab my rake and wander out to a mudflat to grab a handful of clams for tomorrow's dinner, and when I'm done, I'll be glad I did.

I have yet to regret a single moment outdoors. I have yet to regret an adventure.

***

I won't be adding much to the nation's economy. The license only cost $10, which averages to less than a nickel a day. The money for the rake exchanged hands two generations ago, though I did spend about a buck on hardware to sturdy up the tines. My pail was headed for recycling anyway before I drilled a few holes in the bottom and called it a clam bucket.

Unless I manage to impale myself, have a heart attack, or drown, the only thing I'm contributing to the GDP tomorrow will be the 80 cents worth of gas I'll need to get there and back.

I dream of teaching my students how to clam. It's a local activity that will never be part of the national standards because it's a local activity. That may sound innocuous enough, but it gets to the heart of the sickness in education today, our love of the abstract.

We teach to what few love, the few with the money, the few with the power to dictate what matters.

***

McNuggets are abstractions, fresh-killed pheasant are not.
A dressed whole chicken falls in-between.
Our source of food has become abstract.
 
Electronic calculators are abstract, abacuses are not.
Slide rules fall in-between.
Our sense of quantities has become abstract.

Digital clocks are abstractions, sun dials are not.
Analog clocks fall in-between.
Our notion of time has become abstract.

There is no in-between on a late December mudflat.
There is no in-between watching a honeybee work her way among dandelions in your neighborhood.
There is no in-between when an elementary teacher takes her students to a local nursing home, to hear the particular and peculiar stories of their aged neighbors, stories that may have a universal theme, true, but stories that matter because of the particulars.

I want my children to grow up in a world they believe matters to them, the one in their neighborhood.I want my students to know the world, the one outside the door. I want my students to be happy, and to contribute to the American experiment, an experiment that starts at Town Hall.

 ***

Arne Duncan wants to use my children to better the economy, to improve our international economic competitiveness--he says so over and over again. He awards hundreds of millions of dollars to states who share his views.

Arne and I have a fundamental difference of opinion in what matters, why children matter, and what it means to live a good life.

Mr. Duncan's vision of the world is fundamentally flawed, as are his attempts to manipulate education away from serving the public good. I suppose he'd think the same about me if he had any idea I exist. Individual lives are an inconvenience to abstract views, and Arne Duncan does not tolerate inconveniences.

Still, if Arne happens to be in North Cape May tomorrow, he's welcome to stop by for the freshest batch of clams he'll ever taste, local ones scratched up and eaten before the next high tide rises. Nothing abstract, just good food and decent home brew.

I promise I won't talk shop, Arne--I'll let the clams do all the talking. Then you can go back to your more important business telling children what matters more than the grace of God right here under our noses. And I'll go back to teaching children about quahogs, democracy, and yes, the real American way.

Yep, I played the America and the God card--the America of local neighborhoods and the God of grace.

Last photo is of Dave Keeney's boots, a slide guitarist extraordinaire--but I have no idea who took the photo.

Dagnabit! Looking like an inch of rain in the newest forecast--which means runoff, which means closed beds. I use 1/2" as my guideline. *sigh*

Local matters

The cherry blossom petals are gently falling now, as the faint fragrance and pink light give way to the green leaves. After the burst of sex, the trees get down to the business of living.

As old as I am compared to my students, I've only lived two extra years for each one of theirs, plenty of time to collect scars and wrinkles and gray hair, but not nearly enough time to pretend I've learned anything they do not already know, except that they, too, will be surprised at the older face staring back at them in the morning mirror.

One of my students was surprised to learn today that I had dissected a cadaver, that I had seen many people die, that all this is expected for anyone in medicine. Death still surprises them.

Death still surprises me, truth be told, but it's no longer novel.

The cherry blossoms, too, surprise me. They are exuberant beyond imagination. I cling to my incomplete memory of them every February, My catechism: Does spring exist? Yes, it does, and it will return to reign the Earth. Amen.

And each spring, we are blessed, again.

When I was a child, two things mattered--the weather report, and the tide table. I got real busy raising a couple of kids, and the weather reports and the tide tables no longer mattered. They matter again.

I suspect they always mattered.

***

New Jersey just signed up for  the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test. You won't find tide tables on a standardized test. Too parochial, too provincial. PARCC is part of Achieve, an organization supporting corporate interests "to make college and career readiness a national priority."

They don't pay our bills here--my salary is paid by my neighbors. They don't know about the cherry trees on Liberty, the turkeys that showed up on the Green a couple of years ago, the lichen on the ledge of our century old high school building.  They don't know about our children, nor, quite frankly, care about them, either.

I'd daresay most members of Achieve couldn't pass their own algebra test.

This is bull crap.

Local matters matter. We know this even if suits who gladly pull stakes and move from state to state dragging their itinerant clans about for the sake of "national priority" do not.

The Victory statue is ours, the photo borrowed from the NY Times--click on photo for link.
The cherry blossoms are from BranchBrook Park last spring, via NJ.com.

Schools are for our children, for our towns.