Limbaugh and technology: a cautionary tale

A cautionary tale for me....

We're about a day away from the end of the darkest three weeks of the year.
The light has been surreal--grey upon grey.
There are no shadows, there are no edges to the light.
Winter is here.

I listened to some chatter on the radio today, some guy named Rush Limbaugh. I was fascinated.

The disconnect between reality and fantasy feeds a frothing class of folks who have been removed from the land, who fuel a suspect economy based on abstraction and fear, who know something is missing, and will use hate to fill the void.

Our science is about to let us manipulate genomes with impunity.
We are not ready, and I doubt that we ever will be.

Wes Jackson said it best--"we ought to stay out of the nuclei."
We won't so long as we can. of course.

I teach science, and I'm reasonably good at it, but there are days when I'd rather not think of what actually occurs in my classroom.

• Jellyfish genes end up in bacteria, by the hands of young humans, mostly for the wow effect of seeing bacteria fluoresce.
• Frogs and fetal pigs are sliced open with too little regard for the place their hearts last beat.
• Pill bugs occasionally die through the carelessness of a young scientist.

\

The simplest, most powerful fight I have against our culture's unrestrained love of technological power may be letting students  plant basil seeds they harvested from dried flower heads using their fingers for something their fingers were meant to do.

The story of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge is a myth, of course, but it is a deep and disturbing old story that resonates today. I'm not sure the tiny black seeds of last summer's basil flowers can ever compete with the siren song of high tech, but I have seen the joy a germinating plant can bring to a child who has never sown a seed before.

So much of what we require our kids to do today has little to do with the mammalian body that blesses each of us.

We need more wildness.

We need more us.

Happy New Year, everyone. 

Wanton wilderness

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.

William Blake, from "Auguries of Innocence"

We fear wilderness, and understandably so. We prefer edged lawns to thistle, Lord Byron Tennyson to William Blake, textbooks to open and changeable sources.

A wild child fails in our culture. Thankfully, we do a pretty good job at school, curing our children of natural impulses, of wanton behavior.

***

Wanton is an old word, now infused with ill will. It comes from wan, or lack (as in "for want of"), and togen, or pull. The roots literally mean "unpulled." To be wanton means to be unbridled. The word used to mean "sportive or frolicsome, as children or young animals."

As we dive deeper and deeper into a culture of efficiency, a culture dependent on artificial standards and goals, a culture that defines joy on its terms, we have less tolerance for the wild ones.

***

The wild ones got us here:

Isaac Newton (the same man who predicted the Apocalypse may fall as early as 2060, a man obsessed with alchemy and the Bible) "seem[ed] to have shown little promise in academic work. His school reports described him as 'idle' and 'inattentive'."



Einstein, an excellent math and science student despite the myths, believed that “it is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."

The history of science is littered with bright folks sticking things into places where they don't belong, just to see what happens. At this moment, deep underground in Europe, we are trying to find the "God particle" as the Large Hadron Collider bangs together particles at ungodly speeds.

If you already know what's going to happen, what's the point? School is designed to protect the order of things, to keep us safe, to tell us what is going to happen.

Except for science class.

Sparks fly, test tubes erupt and spew off foam and flames, white flies spontaneously generate among rows of peas and carrots that look so incongruous in a government building. Occasionally our high school gets evacuated because of our lambs wandered into the occasionally unpredictable world of science lab.

Stains on the ceiling, cracks in the world, and incident reports in central administration remind us that wilderness exists, even in a building where young lives are pre-planned, curricula set, protocols enforced.

If you teach, guide your lambs to the ledge:

• If you teach language arts, push the wilderness. Read Blake with passion; you grasp that all this is miraculous, and that all this will end. Let your children see you bleed.
  
• If you teach history, let the smells and sounds of battle waft into your room, let fear and hope swirl in your room as it swirls around us in the world. Let your children taste the blood that has spilled.
  
• If you teach physical education, push a child to feel what reckless abandon feels like, when the body is allowed to break from the human forms of chairs and desks and burst into motion. Let the children fall and bleed.

We do not shed enough blood in the classroom, and there are good reasons for that. We fear lawsuits, we fear unruly classrooms, we fear chaos.

I think we most fear the wilderness. Order is seductive, civilization seduces us all. Schools produce the graduates we deserve.

Civilization matters, of course. I like my hot showers, my iPod, my tap water, my clothes. I like order and the daily insulation from death and entropy. I do not plan to paint anarchistic slogans on my walls.

I do hope, though, that I am a little bit more courageous sharing the wild with my students this coming year.

Yes, I know, we adore Blake now--he is safely dead, tucked in a dead and long ago age we call Romanticism. If you can read Blake without wanting to scream and run off naked into a July thunderstorm on the edge of the ocean, you're missing the point.

The Newton page predicting 2060 as our end is from, fittingly, Armageddon Online here.

William Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Beast From the Sea found here.

Thank you to Josie Holford for helping me out with the poets.

Opening day goals

Teachers report Tuesday, students on Wednesday.

Tuesday's goals:

• Find a pair of pants-> iron wash them
• Find a tie that does not involve alcohol or sex or Disney
  
• Find my shoes (I spend summer mostly barefoot)
• Find a pen
• Find a pen that works
  
• Memorize my student roster
• Say a prayer for the end of summer

Wednesday's goals:

• Remind myself the universe is beyond my grasp
• Remind myself that there is order in the universe (even if I cannot find my pants or a working pen)
• Remind myself that I am only here to remind my students of the above--anything else is arrogance, nonsense, or both

Photo is "The Sun Sets at Harris Beach, 1938" from the National Archives;
1938 was 72 years ago--anyone who remembers seeing this particular sunset is more likely dead than alive.
But we still have the image.
Even if Homo sapiens goes the way of the Neanderthals,
the sun will still set on this same beach.
Yep, a repeat--school is a cycle.

On cycles

Last night we heard a whistle, then a bang; our neighbor saw a flash. I figured someone had launched a bottle rocket, and today Leslie found the evidence near the compost bin, a bright yellow cardboard tube attached to a pink stick

As I was walking by the Brussels sprouts, a pair of cabbage moths flitted by--while I've no particular opinion what two adult cabbage moths do with each other, I do care about the damage done by their voracious babies.

I swatted clumsily at the moths, using the spent bottle rocket. A wing floated softly to the ground. I found the other wing still attached one of the critters, now flailing on the grass.

I do not like to kill, but if I need to kill, I prefer to do it consciously. I crushed the writhing animal quickly.

A moment later, a monarch butterfly fluttered around me, nearly landing on the same spent firework, maybe mistaking it for a flower.

The story has little point for most readers. I write it so Leslie and I will remember it next year. We do not remember things as well as we used to.

***

Tonight we sat down to pesto and tomato salad, both gifts from the garden. We paddled on tidal waters a good chunk of the afternoon. I watched hundreds fiddler crabs pick at the mud with their smaller claws, then bringing food to their mouths. I watched sea urchins just under the wateras I drifted along the edge of a bridge. I saw a tern crash into the water, emerging with a minnow writhing as the moth had.

The beans have gone nuts--we picked almost 4 pounds yesterday, and plenty remain on the vine. The leaves are no longer bright green as the summer light fades. The vine's faith rests in the bean pods.

When I look at last year's posts in late August, I see I talked about similar things. If we live long enough, we will do so again next year, next decade.

From the last Saturday in August 2009:

August is a silly month--we gorge on the harvest while the sun swings wildly to the south in its death dance. Few of us notice.

Tonight Leslie and I feasted on eggplants from the garden, cooked over charcoals coaxed to flames by olive oil from Italy, a country I pretend to know something about, though I've only been in its airport in Rome. The flames were fueled by sunlight almost half a world away

Leslie and I spend half our lives near the Delaware Bay, Jersey side. We can watch the sun set on the water on the beach a few blocks away. In June we look to our right--now we look slightly to our left.

Same story, a slightly different role for us as we age.

And that is the point.

I sought permission from Ms. Kelly to use her father's cartoon.
She granted it. This may be the highlight of my blogging efforts.
I still need to write a post worthy of the post--when I do, I'll let Ms. Kelly know.

Teach truth, joy follows

So what do you do?

What do you do when major sources of information provided to children come from corrupt human sources?

What do you do when the adults around them believe whatever lights up their amygdalas the most?

What do you say when the actions of those in power, those with money, those that command the messages, no longer work in the best interests of our children, all of our children?

I work for the government. I get that.
I also work for your children, and others get that.
The two interests are becoming less and less compatible.

***

I overstated that.

I work for the people of Bloomfield--they pay most of my salary, and if I could remove the yoke of Arne and the Governor by rejecting the small percent of my salary covered by New Jersey and D.C., I would.

I would be a better teacher for it, I would have more class hours dedicated to sharing science with my charges, and my students would be better prepared to care for their children when the time comes.

Maybe my lambs won't act like the sheep who are training them, and will act in the best interests of their children when tough decisions are made.

Maybe they will refuse to proctor exams that ultimately harm their charges instead of just grumbling in the teacher's lounge or on Twitter.

***

What am I going to do?

I am going to teach science.

I trust the natural world, I trust my senses, I trust logic, and I trust the intelligence of my lambs. I let them know these things.

I do not hope (nor would want) to influence their "beliefs," whatever they may be. I do not proselytize, which would be near impossible anyway, since I know nothing. I do not take sides in many of the silly "science" either/or debates raging in the media, because there are no sides to take.

I want my children to think. I want my children to see. I want my children to trust themselves when they know "two and two is four," even when others scream it's "FIVE!"

The ones I reach, and I reach a few, will see the world differently when they leave in June. I leave them with power, they leave me with hope.

***

The natural world exceeds our imaginations, but our imagination exceeds its limits. Our cultural inability to grasp this leads to hubris, to dreams of infinite growth, ultimately to annihilation.

I am not going to tell children an economy dependent on ever-increasing consumption cannot be sustained for more than a few generations. I will talk about primary productivity and limits imposed by the finite sunlight that bathes the Earth.

I am not going to tell them that a lot of what they believe to be true is bunk. I will drop a huge textbook and a paper clip from the ceiling and let them see which one hits the floor first. It surprises me every time I do it.

I am not going to tell them that school is important because they're competing with the Chinese or Indians or Icelanders for the same jobs and America needs an educated work force to keep our economy strong. I will share my love of life, of the local, of the edges of knowledge we can never truly grasp. We'll study bugs and daphnia and radishes.

We occasionally have moments of joy, even in a classroom.

***

Here's the secret--once a child trusts her senses, trusts the joy she feels when exploring a world that is as much hers as Bill Gates' or Rupert Murdoch's or any of tens of thousands of strangers who want to shape her life, she becomes her own master.

She becomes autonomous in a world of automation.

She might even dance to her own tune in a culture of technique, a culture that worships men like those pictured above. See their smiles? Trust them?

I don't either.

The Bill Gates photo is from the UK Telegraph here;
the Rupert Murdoch photo is from What's Nextt: Innovations in Newspapers website.

This life more 'tweet....

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp?....
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Duke Senior, As You Like It
Shakespeare, natch

***

Tweet:

I'm diddling away my mortal coil here instead of staring at stars. Which reminds me--I need to go stare at some stars....

And then I hung around for another 15 minutes before I got out.

I'm glad I got out--a golden meteor streaked across the sky as though painted with glitter, sparks flying off the tail, a tail that extended more than half the sky. It shook me up.

I have never regretted a single moment spent outside. I've regretted plenty inside. If I believed in signs, I'd toss this machine off the kayak....

***

In the past couple of days I've heard two croakers complain as I wrestled hooks out of their jaws, squinched a few dozen cabbage worms, burned my feet on a hot jetty, cooled those same feet in the bay, picked tomatoes and beans, sliced open my finger, dared a harlequin stink bug to stink, stared at Vega and Venus, sank ankle deep into sand at the sea's edge, and watched tiny fish break the surface in an explosion of red light reflected from the setting sun.

***

My fledgling story:

I went into the garage just after supper yesterday to fetch the paddles. Some critter was flapping around noisily, but I was too busy running away to see it. (Yes, I'm a coward....)

A few minutes later, Leslie (much braver than me) found it--a fledgling robin, now exhausted, its beak gaping open, its chest billowing. The fledgling found a window--it could see the outside world, and it kept beating against the glass, its wings sprawled open against the pane.

Just a few feet away, the open garage door beckoned, but the bird was too frightened to see anything but its view from the window. It would die waiting for the pane to dissolve.


With the help of a crab net, I managed to get the bird out onto a juniper bush by the garage. I feared it would collapse from exhaustion. I cooed (ridiculous, I know) and slowly brought a hose to its mouth.

The robin drank. Then it drank some more.

In a few minutes it was gone.

***

As one who has trouble believing anything, not sure now's a good time to start putting trust in "signs"--but I do know this much. This computer screen is my garage window. I keep staring into it, looking at a world through glass, glass that cannot be broken, glass that will not magically dissolve.

No matter how much I tweet like the desperate fledgling.

Photos are ours, and we gave ourselves permission to use them.

Death and the web

Promissory Note

If I die before you
which is all but certain
then in the moment
before you will see mebecome someone dead
in a transformation
as quick as a shooting star’s
I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too until you
too lie down and erase usboth together into oblivion.

Galway Kinnell
Strong Is Your Hold

***

Cross-striped cabbageworms have devoured my Brussels sprouts, leaving shredded green skeletons in my garden. (Sister Barbara Mary awakes in the deep recesses of my memory--the stripped plants look like a mad painter's vision of Calvary Hill.)

We all kill unconsciously...all of us. I do not like to kill consciously, but I will when necessary. I pick off the worms and squish them, one by one. I squish the head first--I've no reason to prolong their pain. If the Brussels sprouts get to the point where's there's no longer any point, I will stop killing the worms.

I almost slaughtered a croaker yesterday, a frumpy but delicious fish found off our jetties here. Croakers "croak"--think Lauren Bacall at two octaves lower. (Well, OK, they sound nothing like Lauren Bacall, but no harm thinking about her anyway....)

My frumpy delicious fish kept croaking while I as unhooking it. The soft side of my brain tossed the chatty fish back in the drink.

Throwing away food is not a good survival strategy for any mammal. Throwing it away because a critter "chattered" at me is plain stupid. Still, it speaks to the power of language in humans. Our view of the universe can get trapped in words.

***

Our online lives, for most of us, are words and a few photos we slap up there. We share references and whittle away time, giggling at absurdities while blind to the obvious one:

We do not exist on the web.

It is not a public "space." It is not a town hall or a mall or a park. It is a linked network of users and databases.

In life, people screw up. Big time. And if Carl happened to barf at a neighborhood block party because maybe he drank too much because his dog just died two days ago, well, it's messy and embarrassing, but it's not permanent. We know Carl. We know his history. It won't be mentioned again.

We forgive Carl's transgressions.

I made up Carl, of course, because once I mention Carl's behavior here, it becomes a permanent stain. There is no forgiving silence on the internet. Forgiveness is impossible because forgiveness is a human trait, part of the same soft-sided brain that released a croaker yesterday, or that pinches worms head-first.

In life, people die. Their daily words die with them. Their misdeeds are forgotten at the wake (unless they were truly dirty rotten scoundrels, and very few of us are).

You cannot be forgiven on the web because:

We do not exist on the web.

Databases cannot forgive. Networks cannot forgive. We are neither.

***

Each of us is mortal.
Each of us will die within a lifetime.
Each of us needs forgiveness.
Each of us exists on grace.

To survive death, to become part of the great life-sustaining detritus I walk on each day, that supports the Brussels sprouts and tomatoes and kale and beans thriving in my garden, I need impermanence.

Only through impermanence can I return to what I was, and am.

Poem by Galway Kinnell used without permission, though I will seek it.

The cartoon is by @tremendousnews on Twitter, no idea who s/he is--found here....
via a tweet by @Larryferlazzo, who also pointed out Herbert's column this morning: "Tweet Less, Kiss More".

Know your place

I once knew an educated lady, banded by Phi Beta Kappa, who told me that she had never heard or seen the geese that twice a year proclaim the revolving seasons to her well-insulated roof. Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?

Aldo Leopold, 1949
Sand County Almanac

I caught a few fluke today. I picked a few beans. I saw jellyfish under my paddle, black-backed gulls over it.






The yellowlegs are already heading south for the winter--the sun blazed today, but not quite as long as yesterday. The days are shortening.

And in September I'll have over a hundred kids who know nothing, who have been trained to know nothing, and most will know nothing when they leave.

They take biology because the state says they must, if they plan to graduate.
They take biology because that's what follows physical science.
They take biology because it's what sophomores are expected to do.

I teach biology because I, even (or especially) as I age, marveling more each moment I breathe. I am drunk in July with sunshine and sea water, staggering around the garden in the late hot sun, trying to see every creature I can see.

I have never regretted a minute under the open sky. (Oh, I've regretted stepping on bees, getting caught in storms, swimming through jellyfish, but never being outside.) You cannot teach biology under fluorescent lights.

What am I doing? What are any of us doing?

That's Leslie a couple of evenings ago--we play a lot on the bay.
We all need to play. even high school sophomores.
Especially high school sophomores.

Tæcan

In June, the point of being a mammal (or a crustacean or even a bryophyte) is to be (happy). The happy is almost superfluous under the early summer sky.

Let others define the point (and they will) you will toil for what you know not. If spinning under the blue sky makes you happy, then spin, spin, spin!

This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used. The order of things should be somewhat reversed; the seventh should be man's day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow; and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul, -- in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature.

Henry David Thoreau Harvard commencement speech 1837

I watched an ostracod under a microscope as it went about its business. Its movements were purposeful, and its pace picked up a bit after finding a morsel of food. Not sure it would grasp Thoreau's point, but not sure it wouldn't, either.




I said goodbye to two of my classes today. They know a little bit more about the vocabulary of biology, but even more important, they know they know less than they thought they knew back in September.

Most of my kids will be used by strangers in the next few years. Many of my lambs will pursue paths that can only lead to unhappiness (even if they make fabulous money).

None of that is any of my business, of course, but this much is--if I have given them even a glimpse of the teeming lives around, on, and in them, their worldview will be forever changed.

The Bloomfield Green holds more mystery than anything penned by humans. The universe is as much theirs as anyone's, more if they can see beyond the artificial constructs.

The word "teach" comes from the Old English tæcan, "to show, point out."

Anything beyond that is indoctrination.

The photo was cribbed from here, but it's all over the place.

Unsustainable

Paddling directly into into a 20 mph breeze for 40 minutes burns a lot of calories--figure about 500, give or take 150.We gathered two dozen clams, from little necks to chowders, and probably burned another couple hundred calories.

Our clams provided us with maybe 350 calories.

Oh, we got all kinds of goodness from them, fresh clams scream with deliciousness. We got sunshine, we got salt spray, we got the good kind of sore muscles.

But we also got negative calories. This is unsustainable.

***

What does this have to do with biology?

Food is biology. It provides the stuff and energy that allow us to build a few trillion cells to become who we are. It ultimately comes from sugars built by green plants, carbon dioxide and water joined together, fueled by the fusion of our sun.

If it costs more energy to get food than the food provides, we starve to death.

OK, we get it. Besides, we got plenty of food, we don't have to rake for no clams, the supermarket got everything we need, sheesh, teach, you're weird...

The foods we get from our grocery stores require more calories to produce than the calories they store. This is easy to ignore in a culture that spends billions of dollars a year to shed calories.

We use more energy than we get back using today's industrial farming methods. Petroleum comes from ancient organisms, once food, and the energy released from it was captured from sunlight hundreds of millions of years ago.

Industrial farming feeds a lot of people, but we're living on our savings, calories stored over millennia. Artificial fertilizer takes a lot of fuel to make. Manure works, too, but it is heavy, hard to spread, and the animals are raised far away from the corn these days. The only farms my students "know" no longer exist.

***

We could fix this, of course. A good public school education could teach children where things come from, where wastes go.

We could focus our values on creation instead of consumption. We could teach a child how to grow basil, how to raise and slaughter chickens, how to make compost, all in the name of biology and good citizenship.

I know it's impossible to start a farm in a studio apartment, but it's not impossible to grow a sprig of basil in the window. Education is about possibilities.

We lie to the children and tell them they can grow up to be the President of the United States, that they can be whatever they want to be if they try hard enough, yet rob them of life's experiences as they sit under the hum of fluorescence, learning how to manipulate quadratic equations without once ever shelling a pea pod.

***

I think an hour or two of hanging around outside every day, mucking in clam beds or gardens or just plain mud, would wreck the grade point average (GPA) of some of our finest students. (I also think it would do them a ton of good.)

I think an hour or two of teaching self-sufficiency each week might also wreck the GPA of some of our students--not because of "lost" instructional time, but because a few might start questioning what they are doing in school.

Some of my brightest students never graduate because they started asking what the function of school is before they are mature enough to wrestle with the inconsistencies and paradoxes thinking adults face daily in our culture.

A major goal in my class is getting children to realize that we all know a whole lot less than we think we do, another to help them learn how to make connections, a third simply to teach them how to observe.
I live in the same town as the children I teach. I like to be around happy, autonomous people. If they want to learn how to be sensible, however, they best avoid a teacher foolish enough to kayak in a 17 knot breeze scratching for clams and buy the canned chowder instead.

On oil spills, disconnected Presidents, and Bloomfield

This is a longish rant meant mostly for me--
it will be as effective as screaming into a pillow,
and, I hope, just as comforting.




Last night I sat in on our Senior Awards Night, a lovely affair commemorating the deeds of our senior class. Over 90 awards were given, many of them specific to our town and our history.

The Ralph C. Diller Outstanding Choir Award, The Eric Segal Memorial Scholarship , The Raymond W. Hartman Outstanding Band Member Award...

Bloomfield has been around a long time--it's a proud working class town that still values effort over just about anything.

...The Edith M. Albinson Choral Award, The Margaret Sherlock Memorial Chemistry Scholarship, The Mary E. Boylan Egan Scholarship...

One award goes to a student with a "grade average of B-C, well rounded person in school, civic and youth activities." Another to a "student who has through perseverance and effort has maximized his potential."

...Suzan Hertzberg-Bohrer--Jason Pelusio Scholarship, Hilda R. Taffet Scho
larship,
Michael Castles Memorial Scholarship...

In 1849, Bloomfield joined the Free School Act, taxing its citizens to provide public education to its children. The Bloomfield Oakes Woolen Mill provided uniforms in the Civil War. A brownfield marks the early development of the atomic bomb in our neighborhood. Street signs carry the names of so many from town who died in wars past.

We've paid our dues.

...The Gay Gerber Memorial Scholarship, The George Daudelin Memorial Scholarship,
The Michael Cozzolongo Memorial Scholarship,
The Joseph A. Bongiorno Career Education Senior Awards...

For all the shouting coming from the Scarecrow in D.C., the folks in Bloomfield are still footing the bill for educating the children in their town. Anyone who has spent any real time in town knows someone who knows someone who knows someone--all of us are connected.

And so sometimes when I hear folks down in Louisiana expressing frustrations, I may not always think that they're comments are fair; on the other hand, I probably think to myself, these are folks who grew up fishing in these wetlands and seeing this as an integral part of who they are - and to see that messed up in this fashion would be infuriating.

A man who moved yanked his children from Illinois

No, Mr. President, folks who know the land under their feet, the water under their boats, do not see "this" as an integral part of who they are. It is, indeed, part of who they are.

Churlish parochialism gets lots of press. Farmers are hicks, clammers are slow, and commercial fisherman piss away all their money within hours of coming into port.

A real education, one worthy of producing citizens who the land enough to defend it to their deaths, must be parochial. If you do not love the earth beneath your feet, you cannot love this huge abstract thing called country.

I cannot know America any more than I can know the moon. I do know, however, the patch of land I tend in New Jersey. I know my clam bed as well as maybe a few dozen other people on this planet.

I will not fight for abstract, nonsensical causes. I will, however, defend a patch of Grassy Sound should someone try to take it.

The same week Mr. Obama made his inane statement, one that resists partisan classification, the Common Core State Standards Initiative released the final version of their standards, designed to make American children fit for the global workforce.

These standards provide appropriate benchmarks for all students, regardless of where they live, and allow states to more effectively help all students to succeed.

Steve Paine, West Virginia State Superintendent of Schools

I looked for the part about clamming--I think they missed it.

A kid growing up in Jersey needs to know about eel grass and horseshoe crabs; a kid growing up in Wyoming may need to learn a thing (or two) about grizzlies and elk. No child needs to learn how to be a private corporate clown. Public schools should be for the public good.If you want to raise a child who preys on others, there are plenty of private schools that will be glad to take your money.

That so few folks see the disconnect we are cultivating is infuriating.

I have no problem with some children "know[ing] and apply[ing] the Binomial Theorem for the expansion of (x + y)ⁿ in powers of x and y for a positive integer n, where x and y are any numbers, with coefficients determined for example by Pascal’s Triangle"--but I have a HUGE problem making that part of a core curriculum in any population where half the students are below average intelligence.

We have a decent town, with a lot of decent folks working hard to raise families, pay taxes, and, dare I say it, pursue happiness. You can live comfortably in Bloomfield even if (or maybe especially) you're not terribly ambitious.

If you cannot see the Bloomfield in me, or in my children, you have no business telling me how to raise them, no matter how much Bill Gates or Vartan Gregorian may need them. for their businesses.

Clamming is an honest business that requires a local education. Too bad we've gone done killed all the clams.

June

I want to crawl face down in the fields

and graze on the wild strawberries, my clothes

stained pink, even for seven years

if I must, if they exist. I want to lie out

on my back under the thousand stars and think

my way up among them, through them,

and a little distance past them, and attain

a moment of absolute ignorance,

if I can, if human mentality lets us.

Galway Kinnell, from The Seekonk Woods

I have never regretted any moment outside. As in under the sky.
Not one single moment.

I've been cozy, chilled, hot, wet, dry, stung, caressed by the breeze, and almost drowned in the sea. I've feasted on wild berries, feared wild beasts. I've watched ants for hours, and the moon forever.

I've seen life take life, and I've taken lives. I've heard the last yelps. I've eaten critters that squirmed in my hands. I watched a lightning bug flicker in desperation as a spider wrapped her silk around and around and around.

Tonight the honeysuckle blossoms steal words from my cortex, and I welcome the thieves.

June lasts forever when it comes, and is impossible to remember when it's gone. No words are needed in June. None. Life is as abundant as the light. I cannot help myself--I worship the sun now, so tangible on my skin, so obviously the giver, as it settles in the north for a spell.

Tonight somewhere in my town a child is doing homework on an early June dusk. Probably safer that way. Can't have children shirk responsibilities. Keep them indoors. They must stay focused!

Say you're a biology teacher, and, say, you know a lot more biology lies outside the textbook than in it. You're older now, with many more Junes past than any yet to be (graciously) received. What does a 15 year old child need to know? What do any of us need to know?

Ambition is well-rewarded in our culture. Delayed gratification is a virtue. If you want to be rich or powerful, chances are pretty good you won't die in the same town that welcomed your birth.

There's also a good chance you won't know where the local wild mulberries lie ripe for the picking, or where clams can be raked.

In June, my motives are clear--teach the children to see the world under their noses. The world offers riches beyond a wealthy family's dreams, but you need to go outside.

Kids know this until we teach them to forget. Most classes fit well in a classroom--a good biology class tends to ooze outwards.

National Lab Rat Day

We all have a vested interest in advancing our country’s proficiency in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math as a means to driving innovation and jobs — which are key to fueling our economic growth and global competitiveness.

Steve Ballmer
CEO, Microsoft

Yesterday was National Lab Day--major corporations, foundations, politicians, and business folks got together to fuel a national PR project to push technology under the guise of science. Again.

Technology serves the self, science is another beast altogether.

We teach mostly technology in high school--it's what the corporations want, it's what the Feds want, it's what parents want. Get edumacated, get a degree, get a career, get fed, get laid, maybe have kids, and eventually get dead. I'm not saying that's a bad plan, at least not publicly, but it does require limited vision. Thankfully, we live in a culture that's designed to provide the blinders.

Science, unlike technology, serves no one. It is selfless. Peek beyond the hoopla of equations and models and jargon and the floor falls out of the universe.

Or rather, the universe, it seems, has no floor.

If I could teach this to 15 year old brains, bad things would happen. Fortunately, their brains are not mature enough to grasp this, and I'm not half the teacher needed to teach this. Even with tenure, I'm not sure my career could survive a class of children grasping how tenuous reality is.

***

Pick up an object you know, one that gives you comfort, maybe an old shell. It feels solid, has some heft, it's real.

Yet it's mostly empty space.
Yet is is tugged by every other object that exists in the universe.
Yet its elements were fused in the vast gravitational depths of some unknown star.
And maybe most stunning, the oyster was once alive, a sentient creature, and no longer is.

I do not teach religion in class, I teach science. You get to the edges of it, though, and words fall apart. When words fall apart, walls, which are mostly space anyway, fall apart as well.

If a child is locked in a human universe, culturally bound to the myths that will help her become the successful careerist she's been taught to want, grasping even basic physics may ruin her as surely as mainlining heroin.

Thankfully, a child can fly through school "knowing" all kinds of equations without truly understanding their implications. We keep science safe.

Steve Ballmer wants your kid's brain wrapped in gauze. I want your kid's brain so open to possibilities that it oozes all over the universe. I admit his version is more likely to lead to financial success.

But I bet my version is happier.

Photo via ayacop on wikipedia, CC

Androcles and the green crab

My son and I went to Sandy Hook today to scout for our multi-class horseshoe crab trip scheduled later this month. We solved the more pressing issues (a Park Ranger will open the latrines, we'll bring the toilet paper), then meandered around the park.

Today a congregation's worth of fiddler crabs appeared to synchronously wave their claws at my son as he stared at them from a small wooden bridge, an osprey eyed us from her nest, and I felt a hermit crab tickle my hand as it made its escape. I have gone to the shore's edge thousands of times, and every time I see something unexpected.

Today's story, though, is not mine--it belongs to a U.S. Park Ranger, and he trusted me enough to share it with me.

The Sandy Hook Park Rangers regularly schedule walks along the beach. At this particular walk, only one person showed up, a woman in heels carrying a large black purse. One person is enough for a tour, so the two made their way to the shore's edge.

While the blue claw crab gets all the glory around here, the green crab occasionally shows its snippy smaller self around here. The few times I have found one, it was quick to scurry away, though one did nip me pretty good when I tried to grab it.

As the Ranger and his tourist stood by the water's edge, a green crab crept out of the bay, unusual enough. Even more remarkable, though, was what followed--the crab walked right up to the Ranger and the woman.

The Ranger stopped down to pick it up, well aware of the green crab's penchant for pinching. This one did not even try. While showing the crab to the woman, the ranger noticed that a tiny mussel was nestled in the apron (underside) of the crab. To the ranger, it appeared that the crab was in pain.

(No, I do not know how a ranger knows this--but if anyone would, a U.S. Park Ranger would.)

Using the woman's purse as the operating table and his knife as a scalpel, the ranger gently scraped at the byssal threads holding the mussel to the crab, finally freeing the crab from its tormentor.

The crab returned to the water.

We really know nothing about what other critters know. Nothing.

No, I did not make this up--and I doubt the Ranger did either.
The photo is indirectly via wikimedia,

Yes, I know, the Androcles analogy does not work well. I just like the title.

Let it bee....

If you have never stuck your nose completely into a cherry blossom, a blossom that burst open only a few hours ago, you cannot know the intensity of joy possible by bees, by us.

We cannot know what bees know, but we close our minds, our universe, when we presume mechanistic explanations for all animals not human. If I had to choose between words and the inexplicable joy felt when I buried my face in a fresh patch of cherry blossoms, well, I'm throwing away my keyboard and running away with the bees.

***

After giving myself to the first tree, I imagined blending honey and cherries and yeast to make this year's melomel. I saw a young child, no more than 8, pick up her even younger sister, about 2--she was carrying her to the cherry tree, to sniff the flowers. I suspect she saw me doing the same a moment earlier.

The father, smoking a cigarette, barked at her: "There may be bees in those flowers--get away!"

She slinked away, now fearful of bees, and cherry blossoms. Just as well, I suppose--a child in love with flowers and bugs does not work well in cubicles.

Not all things are possible, but these things are:

You can eat bread, real bread, made from flour you ground with your own hands.

You can drink honey wine, made by the yeast you put in a carboy mixed with fruit and honey.

You can watch the tide fall, then rise again.

You can see Orion tonight if the sky is clear.

You can eat pesto made from basil grown in a classroom, fed by light from the sun and the breath of you and your students.

You can bury your face in early April cherry blossoms.

You can rake clams, take their lives, and eat them, no matter what sins you have committed.

What do you tell an 8 year old child holding her very young sister whose just been told by her father that bees are to be feared?

Do you tell her of the honey bee waggle dance? That bees will find her tree, and tell other bees, and that they will all be so intoxicated with the smell of the cherry blossom that she will not be noticed?

Or do you let her Dad stand silently against the tree, puffing on his cigarette, tend to his own children, his own myths, his own ignorance?

***

My Dad is dead. He loved bees.
My Mom is dead. She loved bees.
My sister is dead. She loved bees.
I will someday be dead. I love bees.

Maybe it's the bees that are killing us. Maybe it's not. But if it is, I'd still love the bees.

Occasionally I will stumble upon an exhausted bee, dying on a flower. Too tired to move, but still alive enough to thrust her tongue into the nectar. I leave those bees well enough alone. Should I be gasping my last breaths with my nose buried in a blossom, I trust the bees will return the favor.

The last sound I heard my mother make was laughter--she died two days later, while I held her hand.
The last few hours of my Dad's life, he laughed. I heard it, and I held his hand as he died.
I did not hold my sister's hand--she was killed by an errant missionary--but I bet she laughed a few minutes before she died. I know she sang. She always sang. Always. Like a bee humming she sang, sang, sang.

***

It's spring.

The flowers are back. The bees are back. The mystery, too, is back.

We can spend our Januaries pondering the mystery of life, the misery of death, while our brethren sleep through the dark days.

But now it's spring--humans with their electric lights and propane heaters no longer dictate the terms.

Get outside. Breathe. Live.

Hubris and the LHC

Suppose that the ultimate standard of our work were to be, not professionalism and profitability, but health and the durability of human and natural communities. Suppose we learn to ask of any proposed innovation the question ...: What will this do to our community....Suppose, in short, that we should take seriously the proposition that our arts and sciences have the power to help us adapt and survive. What then?

Well we certainly would have a healthier, prettier, more diverse and interesting world, a world less toxic and explosive, than we have now.

Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle

The scientist, a woman, is sitting in a room surrounded by monitors detailing invisible events miles away. She is smiling, so I imagine she is happy. She is happy thinking thought about things that do not exist except in her mind and on her monitors.




In her hand she holds champagne. Grapes fed the rays of the sun, lashing together carbon dioxide and water, were consumed by yeast. Electrons spilled, compounds changed. The yeast grow and divide, grow and divide, until poisoned by the same ethanol they produced.

That we can smash a couple of protons together at energies beyond comprehension, spending money beyond imagination, to search for the God particle in the name of physics speaks to our conceit.

That we celebrate such deeds while holding champagne in our hands, only dimly aware of the daily miracles that make wine, that make bread, that allow us to breathe, to drink, to eat while chasing our conceits at the expense of our neighbors speaks to our ignorance.

Michio Kaku, a physicist, writes in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal that this will help us "understand...the instant of genesis." He has said that finding new particles might "affect our conception of who we are in the universe."

Dr. Kaku speaks metaphorically, I suppose, and I reckon he'd be a fine musician of Bremen, but he does not speak for me.

Yesterday, the same Dr. Kaku said:

This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1 -- what happened in the beginning. This is a Genesis machine. It’ll help to recreate the most glorious event in the history of the universe.

If you cannot find your "conception," your place, your existence in the life around you, you are not going to find it anywhere. Not in a book, not in a monitor, not in a 17 mile slinky toy buried beneath Europe.

The mindless pursuit of knowledge is a very dangerous game. If you're going to quote Genesis, Dr. Kaku, you'd do well to take a peek at Genesis 2:17. It is a fable, but a wise one.

Science allows us to see the world more clearly, to find patterns, to predict events. All science requires a filament attached to the natural, observable universe, a universe we cannot hope to ever fully understand, a universe not made in the image of man, a universe that may prove less forgiving than the gods we have created for our comfort.

Time for quahogs

The back bay's warming up--the quahogs are feeding again.

The sun's rays are no longer just glancing off the Earth around here--we're warming up. Algae grow, fusing carbon dioxide and water into sugars, bound by sunlight. A bed of clams lies just under Richardson Sound, a few of them tossed back by my hand last summer, eating the algae.

Eating is a religious act--we eat other creatures, other creatures feed on us. We pretend otherwise at our peril.

I teach biology--we use words like adenosine triphosphate synthase and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide--and none of my students know how a clam grows.

Few know why we breathe.

Should I ever become a competent teacher (as opposed to the "highly qualified," tenured educator that I am), a child will grasp why our economy cannot be sustained, why declines in phytoplankton matters, why our words and abstract reduction of an incredibly complex (and ultimately incomprehensible) universe threaten our survival.

And that child would worry.

But should I become a good teacher, better than competent, a child will feel joy knowing she is part of the mystery, and she will act in good faith and good conscience to change what she can, and dance and breathe and sing and eat and live until she dies, knowing as she lives that she will die.

***

The crocuses are blooming again. The clams are rising again. The sun is climbing the sky again. I'm in my 6th decade.

Time to get the clam rake out. Again.

Five inventions that have doomed humanity

I just read a fun post tweeted by dtitle, "Five amazing inventions that will doom us all!"

Why wait for the future, though? We already have all kinds of technological doo-dads that have doomed humanity (if not humans):

(Runners-up: Automobiles, telephones, and the incandescent lamp. And record players (recommended by John Spencer).)


Number Five: Television (and other forms of e-media)

Very few folks control television, and very few appreciate how this medium has altered our minds. Democracy depends on discourse, and folks who spend hours a day "consuming" visions produced by very wealthy people with very narrow objectives effectively remove themselves as true citizens (though they can, alas, still vote).

Democracy is essentially dead in the States, and hasn't flourished in most parts of the world anyway, so as influential as televison is, I relegated it to fifth place here.




Number Four: The Haber Process

Prometheus gave us fire, Fritz Haber gave us nitrogen fixation. We were now one with the gods.

Before the Haber process, only bacteria and bolts of lightning made nitrogen available for life. Without nitrogen, we have no proteins, no nucleic acids. Haber gave humans control of the nitrogen cycle. We are gods now, able to make ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen.

We no longer had to rely on poop for fertilizer. Our huge human population depends on fertilizer made possible by the Haber process. Ammonia can also be used to make lots of explosives.

Why is this on the list (aside from my innnate hatred of golf courses)? Haber's process created industrialized agriculture. We disconnected ourselves from the mystery (or so we think), and now believe we can continue to grow food relentlessly, without thought.

Haber helped trigger the Green Revolution. In the end, it will only mean that many more carcasses to burn when our fossil fuels are depleted, and artificial fertilizers become too expensive for all but the elite.

Fritz Haber also developed chlorine gas for use in warfare, and personally oversaw its use in France.




Number Three: The written word

Yep, I use them. I read, I write, I even (*gasp*) blog. I'm a hypocrite.

Words are abstract. They freeze moments. Our collective oral memory evolves through generations, tailoring the needs of the clan with the needs of the community. The written word changes all this.

NONE of any of the rest of this list happens with oral tradition alone. The written Bible does not happen, nor the written Koran. Old conflicts dissolve with time in the oral tradition. The written word keeps grudges alive forever.

In my best moments, words disappear.

I'm OK with burning books, as long as we burn all of them.




Number Two: Computers

We can now process thought faster than we can think. Every one of you reading this post can be traced. Databases record your keystrokes. There is no longer privacy for anyone committed to living the 21st century life.

I'd like to pick my nose and maybe even savor the results without anyone knowing. (That was allegorical, folks.)

Computers allow telecommunications, allow nuclear weaponry, allow large hadron colliders, allow genomic typing, allow pretty much every foray into risky high tech hi-jinks without an iota of thought.

OK, they allow Zelda, too, so it's almost a wash.





And number one:
Nuclear weapons

We got 'em, lots of them. So does Russia, and China. The Brits. The cozy buddies India and Pakistan. Did I mention France? France!?

Well that's OK, no rogues states, eh. (Ooops...almost forgot. NORTH KOREA!)

Maybe Israel. And soon, perhaps, Iran.

But it's OK, we all love each other, and would never use them, right?







Yoshihiro, the baby died 11 days later.
Tanaka Kio, the mother, lived until December 9, 2006.

Their story, our story, is here.

Television pic from https://ishcmcwiki.wikispaces.com, via CC 3.0
Fritz is from wikipedia
The open Bible is from wikipedia, too
Univac via Georgia Gwinnett College
Yoshihiro and Tanaka's photo was taken by Yamahata Yosuke.

Am I serious about this list?
Yes.

I'd love to hear your opinions....

Ecstasy in a classrooom

I remember

coming to the farm in March

in sugaring time, as a small boy.

He carried the pails of sap, sixteen-quart

buckets, dangling from each end

of a wooden yoke

that lay across his shoulders, and emptied them

into a vat in the saphouse

where fire burned day and night

for a week.

Donald Hall, from "Maple Syrup"

I am drinking some fine mead made by my daughter and her beau--they had almost given up on it a few months ago. Honey, water, and yeast, when left alone long enough, make one feel like a part of a universe that matters. We play a part, but just a part.

This week's Perennial Project, my year long observation project, is for the kids to go stare at the tree they picked way back in September. The leaves gave up their nutrients, sugar flowed into the ground, and the trees "died."

And now the sugar returns, last summer's bounty fueling this spring's growth. We don't tap trees in this neck of the woods, but we could. Maybe next year we will.

***

Miracles continue to happen in the classroom. I ate the freshest rattlesnake bean possible in February--Dina brought it up to show me the bean, concerned that her plant was dying. And it was. Somehow her plant had gotten fertilized, and the bean sprout poured its energy into this lovely bean pod.

Without a thought, I ate it, and it was delicious. Another teacher eyed my basil patch this afternoon and offered to "thin" it out. My student teacher has already confessed to gnoshing on some others.

Dina will get extra credit for getting her bean to fruit, but long after the points dissolve to nothing, she will remember her bean, and the ridiculous look of joy on my face as I ate it, the freshest produce in Bloomfield, righ under her nose.

Mead, basil, and rattlesnake beans make the last week of February tolerable. We teach order and restraint, as we must in a public school setting, but wildness creeps through anyway. We share our room with yeast and daphnia, basil and fish. We've raised E. coli that fluoresce with jelly fish protein. We have tomato plants that are threatening to fruit.

And what will a child's heart follow a decade or two from now? Will it be influenced by a battery of tests designed to create super-citizens who will "outcompete" workers from around the world?

Maybe, just maybe, a heart or two will be influenced by the few moments of pure joy experienced by the oldest in the room, eyes rolling up as he savors the explosion of flavor available to anyone who cares to know. Life consumes the living, and all living today will be consumed by life.

That's science.
Just ask Donald Hall.





The photo is of Palestine, the great great grandfather of Willow of Willow Manor, via Creative Cmmons 3.0.
Isn't it a great photo?
It's reason enough for a post....