September 11, again

I wrote this in 2003, and it's not something I'm comfortable sharing.

I'm sharing it anyway. Every breath we take....
It will only be up a few hours.

I was a coward.

A few bloody excuses. .. my family...I am not a trauma doc...my space is better served by this doctor, that one...it's been a decade since I put a chest tube in a child.

You have the mobile medical unit. You know how the generators work. You are good at fixing things. They need pediatricians, there was a daycare in there. At least you have some experience in trauma. 

The Executive Director, dressed in scrubs, a woman with young children of her own, a woman whose judgment I trust, asked me to go, and (even more importantly) gave me the option to say no.

I went.

***

Some day I will dredge the day back to my memory--it remains a collage of images, real images from a long day spent at Liberty State Park, chest tubes and IV bags and dressing and gauze and ET tubes and cots and cots and cots lined up in the abandoned Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal for the injured and dying who never came, waiting and waiting for a ferry of battered passengers.

Odd discussions. A nearby convention of surgeons had gathered here, prepared to surgerize, some too giddy for comfort, while the two pediatricians groused at them--when the children come, we would stabilize them and move them--do your cutting somewhere else.

But that is not what I want to share now. Maybe later. Probably never.

It was late afternoon, the city was burning. We watched from across the river. We watched billowing plumes, and the occasional immense blush of dust. The Governor came and he was hardly noticed. We got news in dribs and drabs. But you already know about this. That is not why I am writing.

The Jersey view of the sun setting on the west side of Manhattan on an early September evening wraps me with joy-- the golden hues of a promised autumn, the deep blue of the Hudson, the shimmery reflections of glass buildings. September 11, 2001, was one of those delicious days.I sat on a park bench next to the only other pediatrician at Liberty State Park that day. In the warm glow we sat, our legs stretched out on the railing overlooking the edge of the Hudson. In a surreal scene, the conversation became blessingly mundane--we gave each other implicit permission to do just that.

What do you suppose all those tiny flitting pieces at the top of the flume are? Paper?
Lovely day, no? Too bad we had to see it this way.
The view is lovely here. It truly is a lovely day.

We churned with emotion. We were both all too aware that the shared shock of the moment, as dizzying as falling in love, had little to with each other. Still, the moment was as intimate as I dare share here--we had prayed for our families, for the dying, for the day. The wounded had not yet come, and their hopes dimmed as the delay grew ominously longer. (There was no way for us to know then that the rescuers just down the river, in Jersey City, were overwhelmed with the battered.)

We had been told we might be needed for a couple of days, possibly in shifts. We had set up our triage area. Triage. A frightening word on a battlefield.

We had been fed. We had plenty of equipment, though not enough caffeine, not enough Motrin. The adrenaline waned. We were starting to become acclimated to our new condition. Humans adapt.

I remember coming here as a child.
My grandmother came though here, Ellis Island.
So did my Grandad!
Which county?
Mayo. Of all the luverly poetic counties in Eire, my folks come from an ugly-sounding one.
Well, could be Sligo, that almost sounds worse.

A pause. City burning. The smoke, thankfully, drifting southward towards the Verrazano Bridge, we thought.

A hush of guilty silence. We were alive. We had a break. It was a lovely evening. We felt very, very much alive.

This is not a love story. The irony of sharing an intimate, relaxing moment amid carnage and chaos bubbled to the surface. We laughed, more an embarrassed giggle. We were alive when, we thought, tens of thousands had died or were dying. Both of us were too old to mistake the moment for anything but what it was.

But in that moment, in the lovely glow of the setting sun, we were all that mattered.

Photo lifted from September 11--no credit listed.

My annual school prayer

please grant me

a slab of slate
a chunk of chalk

a live critter
a dead ego

a magnet
a marble

curious children
and a sundial's sense of time.

amen

Sundial at Rockefeller Center, NYC, National Archives

Goals for the start of the new school year

These were my goals in 2008.
Haven't changed much for 2015.

Teachers report tomorrow, students on Wednesday.

Tomorrow's goals:

• Find a pair of pants-> iron them
• Find a tie that does not involve alcohol or sex or Disney
• Find my shoes (I spend summer mostly barefoot--winter, too, outside of school)
• Find a pen
• 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)
• 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 70 years ago--anyone who remembers seeing this particular sunset is more likely dead than alive. But we still have the image. 

And should Homo sapiens go the way of the Neanderthals, the sun will still set on this same beach.

Insane things I hope to avoid this year: Micromanaging microscopes

In America, many high school biology students go through the ritual of memorizing the parts of a tool they will then use to analyze a newsprint letter "e" under various powers and positions, only to put the tool away for the rest of the year their lives

This ritual can go of for days, as students struggle to make sense of this new tool, of the requisite worksheet asking deep questions like "Which way does the 'e' move?" and a teacher seemingly obsessed with a particular letter of the alphabet.

 (You can even buy a letter e slide, preserved using
"state-of-the-art preservation techniques."  

This is often followed up by having students look at preserved (and very dead) specimens of critters they never knew, except for that kid in the corner who chewed on his chapped lips enough to surreptitiously look at his own blood.

Mark my words--a student struggling with focusing a scope will get excited by an air bubble, then get his own bubble deflated as he hears "that's just a bubble," followed by criticism for improperly mounting his specimen. (Talking about "mounting specimens" with sophomores has its own entertainment value, right up there with talking about the blue nitrogen atoms in your 3D molecule model set.)

Live slug from my backyard more interesting than letter "e"

Heck, if a child gets excited by the beauty of a bubble in his microscope, share the excitement! It's a step in the right direction. Then let your students play. Get some pond water, a dead ant, a piece of hair, floor dust, anything but some assigned slide a child has little interest in, and let them play.

Give your students permission to use the scopes whenever they have a reason to use one, which, in biology class, can be pretty much every day! Encourage your students to look at everyday objects they choose to look at.

They will very quickly learn the limits of the tool.

Otherwise you're wasting everybody's time--no need to know how to use a hammer if you live in a world that has no nails.

If your microscope lamps are not burning out now and again, you're not using them enough.

My best new trick last year: Errorometer

While sharing pints with a few teachers upstairs at McGinty's, Chris Harbeck took a sip of Guinness, then tossed out a few words that changed my teaching--

"I give out points for anything, a thousand here, a thousand there. They don't mean anything."

Simple. Cheap. Effective.
Print out your errorometer, laminate it, hang an Expo marker next to it--done.

Every time a student gives me a reasonably well thought "wrong" (or even an unusual but "right") response to anything going on in class, even if only tangentially related to the natural world, a student can put a point up on the Errorometer. For every 10 points, everybody in class gets 10 out of 10 points in the Test/Quiz category.

Yep, everybody.
Yep, it diminishes the "value" of points individuals receive on tests.
Yep, everybody's grade gets a boost.

But, as a wise Canadian math teacher told me over a pint (or two) of Guinness, if points mean nothing (and we agreed that was true), then giving them out freely and frequently means nothing as well.

Image PD, quote added by Golda Poretsky.

No points are given for thoughtless answers--and it doesn't take long for the kids to catch on. Doesn't take long before the kids are debating among themselves whether a wrong answer deserves credit. (The fancier pedagogues among us might even call this metacognition.)

(Yes, points are just about meaningless....even the perpetual A students get to like this after a few weeks....)

Chasing dopamine, amygdalin, and death

My brother and I have well over a hundred birthdays between us, but both of us still love to dig holes and find things--living, dead, ancient, new, doesn't really matter--it's the moment just before discovery that matters, Dopamine is dopamine, no matter how you get it.

We needed to clear a small patch of ground for a patio that we'll get done sometime between this lifetime and the next, and while scurrying around like woodchucks, I ripped out a black cherry seedling, and, for whatever reason, sniffed the roots.

I do not know what I expected, but I did not expect the round, deep cherry-almond aroma overwhelming the earthy soil smell.

We both took turns sniffing the roots, like two children in the garden that once was. Under the hypnotic cherry-almond roundness was a hint of something uncertain, unnerving, yet still compelling.

Amygdalin, again.
Sugar and cyanide linked together in a compound with a bitter, incomprehensible allure

I am pulled to amygdalin, always have been--I chew on apple seeds with abandon, will gnaw on a peach pit for literally hours, have since childhood.

I plan to take some black cherry roots back to school. Maybe I'll draw the symbol for amygdalin on the board, maybe I'll bore the class with a minute or two on the life history of a tree native to Bloomfield, and then I'll pass around the root shavings.

For the younger among us, what do you think you would remember 5 decades from now?

White on white

Part of the reason for my recent silence....

I am working on "White on White," a blog that will explore white privilege, geared towards white folk (like me).

I thought it would launch weeks ago, but the deeper I go into the rabbit hole, the muddier it gets, not the least because of the layers of subtle (and not so subtle) racism I need to dig through beneath my own epidermis.

At a minimum, a blog purporting to witness what appears to be obvious to some, oblivious to others, should do no harm. (Not no anger, not no outrage, not no hurt, but no harm.)

Starting a blog mostly for whites by whites certainly is nothing new--Trump is no accident--but asking whites to think about their own humanity enough to pose to other whites awkward questions they usually reserve for people of color could short-circuit faster than the clamming of pale lips when one of "those people" walks into a room unexpectedly.

Feel free to email me thoughts. I do not need ideas for material, Lord knows every hour of paying attention provides enough fodder for years. Just wondering if the pale folks among us think that a public forum by whites for whites to enlighten whites could work?

I welcome words, both here and (for now) privately.