Clamming and competency

By the time you hit your 5th or 6th decade, you're mostly competent at what you do. You've long abandoned the things you're incompetent at, and mortality precludes starting a whole lot of new things.

As a result, most older folk forget what it means to learn new things, forget what it means to be a decade or two old, when everything requires climbing a wall to gain mastery.

"Potential" becomes an albatross around the neck of the young. (Go read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner if you have not. Yes, it's Coleridge; yes, he can be onerous; yes, it's worth your time.)

***

I got a clam rake last spring. It's an old rake, and a good one.

I can only imagine how many clams ended up in a pot after being pried out of their homes before I got it. The tines are rusted brown, the handle oiled by the sweat of others before me.

Still, as good a rake as it is, it was almost useless in my hands last June.

***

Can you remember when you first drove a car? When every twitch of the wheel required thought?

Just about every 17 year old Homo sapiens on the planet has faster reflexes than me. Just about every Homo sapiens in the western hemisphere has more facility with technology than me. Still, All State Insurance charges me a bucketload less for auto insurance than any 17 year old I teach.

Teachers need to remember how hard it is to drive the first time.

Or else go clamming.

***

Back in June, the rake was a weapon--plow through the mud, rip out whatever it hit, say (yet) another prayer for the unfortunate creature impales by its tines. Horseshoe crabs, whelks, worms--but very few clams.

Now the rake is an extension of my arm, its tines tickling the mud beneath the water. I can feel shapes, I can feel density. A tine or two bump against a clam, my sympathetic system reacts. Against a stone, nothing.

The horseshoe crabs are safe again. The clams are not.

***

I like clams.
I really, really like clams.

I practiced and practiced and practiced because I like clams, and slowly my brutal assault against any critter large enough to suffer from misguided tines evolved to a gentle prodding of the mud.

My students like driving.
Really, really like driving.

They practice and practice because they like driving, and slowly their jagged starts and turns evolve to hugging the road unconsciously.

***

Here's my plea to anyone of us arrogant enough to presume we have something to offer to the young. Try something new.

Try to master something you suck at but like to do anyway.

Now imagine trying to master something you suck at and don't really care for.

Welcome to high school.

A lesson plan unlikely to be used

Course: College prep biology
Unit: Ecology
Lesson topic: Your place in the food chain

Objectives:

1. Recognize human connection to food chain
2. Equate consumption with acquisition of energy
3. Learn what meat (e.g., hamburger) comes from which animal (cow)
4. Develop appreciation for life
5. Break students out of their cultural cocoon

NJCCS/Tech. Standards: 5.1A, 5.1B. 5.1C; 5.5A; 5.7B; 9.3A

Materials/Teaching Aids/Resources:

Two live fish
Holding tank
Small billy club
Fillet knife
(Consider live chicken and chopping block if time allows)
Tissues (to dry eyes)

Do Now:

Who slaughtered the last piece of meat you ate?

Strategies:

Anticipatory set: put guppy in beaker holding a leech not fed in two months.

KWL: discuss what students know about sources of food; lead discussion beyond "the grocery store"

Visual: Show brief video on current husbandry practices

Kinesthetic/authentic learning: Slaughter fish in class. Allow interested students to hold fish prior to killing. Ask students where fish got energy to carry out life's functions. Ask students what happens to source of energy once fish is dead. Is the energy still useful to fish? To us?

Guided discussion/critical thinking: Discuss ways to humanely kill animals; ask what other methods of dispatch could have been used?

Homework:

1. Catch a fish
2. Eat it

***

I am not a vegetarian, though I do go through intermittent phases pretending I am.

Last night my son and I slaughtered 5 fish we are eating tonight. Slaughtering fish is not easy for us, nor should it be. We can try to minimize slaughter by calling fish "lesser" animals. We can pretend no pain is involved. I did not raise my son to pretend.

Before we took the fish home, we made sure we had enough for dinner. If not, we release them.

We could never deliberately slaughter a creature in science class unless it's something "less" than a fish. Apparently flatworms and protozoa are fair game. We feed crickets and fruit flies to frogs and salamanders in class, so insects don't count either.

***

Children in New Jersey cannot be required to do a dissection on a real animal. (I use "real" to counter the "virtual" animals on computers that can be whittled away.)

This is a good law. A better law would add the provision that no child may dissect an animal unless the child had a clue why she was dissecting the animal. And the "why" cannot be "cuz it's kewl."

Life is messy. We take great care in school to put things in boxes and categories, to feed into the great mythology we have created, a mythology that now precludes children from knowing where their food originates. We keep biology clean.

Life is messy. We're part of a huge morass of energetic goo that replicates and plays and consumes and replicates and plays and consumes some more. Life involves fluids and combustion and not just a little bit of mystery.

***

Thanksgiving is coming.

The industrialized turkey most of us eat on Thanksgiving Day has become so grotesquely shaped that toms can no longer mate with the hens. The Butterball turkey you're eating most likely was conceived with the help of 3 humans.

One or two humans had the task of "milking" the tom. There are directions for this:

Collecting semen from a chicken or turkey is done by stimulating the copulatory organ to protrude by massaging the abdomen and the back over the testes. This is followed quickly by pushing the tail forward with one hand and, at the same time, using the thumb and forefinger of the same hand to “milk” semen from the ducts of this organ.

The Merck Veterinary Manual

And what do you do with the semen?

I won't show the video in class, but I will mention the process.

Being part of the web of life is a mystery, a blessing.
Being part of an industrialized food web defiles the blessing.
It is our obligation to know the difference.

Teaching tides

Slate gray sky above, slate gray water to my knees. The water's still warm enough to wade in, and the tide was creeping in over the clam bed.

The few splashes of color--a jumping bluefish, a few scoters scooting by--looked pixellated against the dull light.

I scratched up enough clams for dinner,and a few more for my Auntie Beth, then paddled a longer route home.

It was a gorgeous morning.

***

Clamming lets you see things you forget you care about. Clams are in no hurry to escape; the only urgency is the rising tide.

Humans are very good at assimilating information, finding patterns, creating a more perfect vision of the world. Tide heights vary over a 19 year period, depending on where the moon and sun happen to be, and you can find nice graphs with smooth, curves that even supermodel Heidi Klum could envy.

We teach about tides in school, of course. Understanding tides requires grasping geography and gravity, winds and water, mathematics and models (of a different sort).

I confess I do not fully "get" tides, despite a decent education, but I'm going to talk about them anyway.

***

Tides around here happen about twice a day. Tides change fastest between the peak highs and lows, or mid-tide.

You can watch the tides rise and fall. Literally. And while the tidal flow does, indeed, peak around mid-tide, it does not rise as smoothly as your textbook might suggest.

I clam at the edge of water. The edge rises perceptibly as I work. The edge's personality changes over the couple of hours I rake.

It creeps up stealthily, smoothly, for a few minutes, then takes tiny staccato steps for a few more. It pauses. It retreats for an instant, then surges a bit more.

The edge does not define the tide. It's jerky journey up towards the debris left by the last high tide reminds me what we cannot know.

In school we teach the big ideas, the grand illusions, and we lose touch with the local.

Humans define the tide on a grander scale than a sandy patch of Richardson Sound lying next to an abandoned railroad. We can know averages, we can know tendencies, and we can make wonderful predictions based on our grand scheme of things. People who can make good predictions can make a lot of money.

Still, to know the tide, to understand something about it, you need to watch it push the edge of the sea, washing away the footprints of your feet.

Graph and photo lifted from NOAA; the caption for the photo reads:
"Taking boat for a walk over the mudflats. If the tide goes out and you anchor high, you might have to do this."

Proust effect

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

Marcel Proust, in Swann's Way, 1913

---

The nose detects stray molecules--if something has an aroma, it is emanating molecules.

When Leslie walks past me, tiny parts of her shimmer away, forming a molecular cloud of Leslieness. I sniff imperceptibly (to her, anyway--27 years of obvious sniffing could wear out any marriage). I collect tiny pieces of my love and gather them (her?) in my nose. There tiny hairs caress the molecules. The science gets a little fuzzy here, but one hypothesis is that the shapes of the molecules trigger different odor receptor neurons, which ultimately send the signals to the brain.

To understand smell and memory, however, you need to understand that the brain is not a single organ. It has all kinds of parts with all kinds of functions.

Ask a 9 year old child what the brain does: "It thinks." This is a cortical function--the gray matter coating the outside layer, the cortex, triggers voluntary movements, "thinks," and helps keep memory in sequence. Its the part of the brain that makes humans human.

This, however, is not the part of the brain used by your nose. The olfactory neurons reach deep into the limbic system, the ancient part of your brain shared by other warm-blooded critters, the part that deals with levels of consciousness we uncomfortably recognize as "animal." The parts sound comically ominous--the amygdala, the hippocampus, the uncus.

Here is where the heart truly lies, the center of passion, lust, fear, and pleasure. Here is where the deepest memories lie, hidden from the cortex. The limbic system transfers information into memory, and the information is colored by emotional input.

This is the brain shared with other mammals--swirling memories are tagged with emotion for survival. This is the stuff of nightmares and wet dreams, memories and surges of emotion tied timelessly together.

And my wife wonders why I like to sniff her so much....

---

Want to evoke childhood memories? Smell an old gum eraser. Memories come flooding back. The aroma of turkey on Thanksgiving, the piney smell of Christmas, the woody smell of the season's first barbecue all evoke strong memories and emotions.

Marcel Proust knew this--"the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom" resurrected a whole town from his memories of years before. Proust creates long, vivid passages of memory and emotion blended together from a smell, a taste. The ability of a certain aroma to open a floodgate of memories is now called the "Proust effect."

---

Of what use is this?

In a world of deodorants and sanitizers, what chance does the limbus have of evoking the earthy warmth of the first kiss in June three decades ago from the subtle waft of pheromones today? Turns out perhaps more than we suspected.

Some human pheromone-like substances do not trigger the olfactory system, yet still trigger pathways from the nose to the limbus via accessory pathways. Scientists call this "subliminal biologic odour,"¹ Mothers recognize babies and lovers recognize each other at levels beneath our consciousness. Women who live together for a bit soon find their menstrual cycles synchronized.

This may be news to us--we trust our cortical, sequential world more than the morass of memory and mood mucking about in our nether-brains.

Still, if you're feeling a bit disconnected from your limbus, a bit too corporate, you're feeling just a bit too efficient in your high-tech world, here's the recipe for a cheap thrill.

Go to the dollar store and buy school paste, the thick white stuff your teacher used to scoop out of the gallon pail with a tongue depressor. Also buy a package of manila paper. Scrape some paste onto the paper, dim the lights, and inhale.

Be careful, though. You might want a friend with you. If you light up your amygdala, there's no telling where you will go.

¹Vincenzo Rialdi, Maddalena Donetti, Stefano Dorato, "Olfactory Subliminal Perception of Human Pheromone-Like Substances," http://sssup1.sssup.it/~angeli/Symp1.html

A few amateur "How to's..." in an age of experts

Just a few things folks ought to pass on to their kids.
If they don't do it, maybe I will.
Even if it's not in the core curriculum standards.


Find a meteor:

Get a blanket.
Wait for dark.
Look up--if you see starts, lie down on blanket and continue looking up.
Wait some more.
Wow!

Catch a frog:

Get a small net (optional).
Find a pond.
Make sure pond is not frozen.
Look for jumping green objects as you approach the pond.
Crouch by the edge of the pond (or in it if you like).
Wait.
Wait some more.
When you see a pair of eyes poke out of the scum, swing net in general direction.
Feel through net now full of duckweed, algae, mud.
If no frog felt, dump net.
Watch frog you didn't feel hop away from blob of pond drek you just dumped.
Repeat.

Catch a boxer turtle:

Find a woods.
Wait for rain.
Go crawling around woods during rain and look for splotches of bright yellow.
(I know this sounds odd, but when we were kids we could sniff them out.)
Pick up your turtle.

Taste nectar:

Find a blooming honeysuckle vine.
Pull off a flower.
Carefully pinch the very bottom of the flower.
Slowly pull the bottom of the flower, pulling the stamens with it.
If you're lucky, a drop of nectar will rest at the base of the flower.
Suck on the flower like a straw.
Yum.

Find a (tiny) meteorite:

Put a bucket under a rain spout.
Collect rainwater, then let it sit somewhere dry and forget about it.
Rediscover bucket a few months later.
Put a magnet under a piece of paper, then scatter dried contents of bucket on the paper.
Shake the paper.
Look at the tiny bit left under a microscope.
Some will be pitted and look like meteorites under the microscope.
Why? Because they are!

The frog and flower are from the National Wildlife Service; the micrometeorite from NASA.

High school and "real life"

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

We could even wander to the loo without a pass.

The biggest things I (re)learned?:

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

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

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

***

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

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

A science teacher, paraphrased

Um, not everyone. Not me, anyway.

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

We can't drop that because....

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

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

***

What else did I learn?

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

The Orion Nebula

Orion emerges as the nights grow cold. Nestled in his sword lies a stellar nursery, newborn stars so brilliantly blue-white I expect to hear noise as I gaze in the eyepiece.

The Great Nebula in Orion, a fantastic cloud of glowing hydrogen, lies 1500 light years away; hydrogen atoms excited by the ultraviolet light of infant stars, spitting photons as the hydrogen molecules relax. For over a millennium the photons travel through the emptiness, finally piercing through our atmosphere, then bouncing off my mirror.

1500 years going one direction, an instant in reverse.

The fantastic greenish structure, a green spidery web, a puff of smoke, crosses the eyepiece, moving with the deliberation of an aging ocean-liner, a reminder that I am on a planet that insists on spinning. I feel dizzy, break away from the eyepiece, steadying my gaze on the warm glow of a neighbor's window, trying not to fog up my eyepiece with my breath. It is cold tonight.

You can see it naked eye--a blush in Orion's sword, a little cloud, a nebula. Orion rules the wintry skies in the Northern hemisphere. Betelgeuse, the single biggest object I will see as I breathe, lies in the same constellation, a glowing red eye, complemented by the fiery blue of Rigel.

I went to elementary school in the States; I did not know the Great Nebula existed.
I went to high school in the United States, I never looked for the Great Nebula.
In college, I never talked to anyone about the Great Nebula.

Science gets a little funny about this, but we are all made of stardust. The Earth formed from the remnants of star formation. Man is of the dust, the dust from the stars.

(Ah, the crusty words of a cranky Christian? A pagan myth? No, the creation story of modern science...the pieces fit almost too well--the ancients preceding us were wiser than we know.)

Those of you who have gazed upon the Great Nebula know how words fail its description, the haunting glow of unexpected energy, mirroring the source of our creation. For those of you, particularly the young, who have missed the eerie glow, find someone to show it to you.

For all the marvel of words and videos and music and cell phones, some things, though visible, remain beyond our comprehension.