Mr. Obama goes to school

You’re excellent listeners. And the reason we came to visit, A, we wanted to get out of the White House; B, we wanted to see you guys; but C, the other thing we wanted to tell everybody is that this kind of innovative school, the outstanding work that’s being done here by the entire staff, and the parents who are so active and involved, is an example of how all our schools should be.

POTUS, on a visit to a "public" school yesterday in D.C.

The President read to 2nd graders yesterday. Last time our President read to second-graders, I spent a very long day on Liberty Island waiting for the injured children that never came, so excuse me for being a little touchy here.

The school that Mr. Obama uses as "an example of how all our schools should be" is the Capital City Public Charter School (CCPCS) in D.C.

Ahem.

Political folks will point out that public charter schools are open to everyone, with students picked by lottery independent of ability. And that's true.

Parents of children at the CCPCS must volunteer 20 hours per year at the school. That takes care of a few single parent families.

Political folks will point out that the CCPCS has demonstrated that children can succeed in their environment. And that's true.

There are only 25 sixth graders, 25 seventh graders, and 25 eighth graders. The student-teacher ratio is 12: 1, which is wonderful. It is also very expensive.

How do they do it?

Gates Foundation.

Walton Foundation.

Bruhn-Morris Family Foundation.

Capital One

Cartier

City First Bank

Comcast Cable

Donatelli & Klein

Graham Fund

Hattie M. Strong Foundation

Marpat Foundation

National Geographic

National Home Library Foundation

Payless ShoeSource Foundation

Radio One

The Sallie Mae Fund

Susan W. Agger Family Fund of The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region

Target Stores

The Washington Post Educational Foundation

To be fair, my high school gets money from the local Bloomfield Educational Foundation, and I think we got some bucks from Adidas. At least I hope so, since we have an Adidas banner hanging in the foyer.

We turned down Channel One a few years ago because we valued our children enough not to force them to watch commercials on school time. Go us.

Political folks will assure you the lottery system for charter school admission is random--and it is. It randomly selects from a large pool of applicants. The pool of applicants, however, is not random.

Over 60% of the District of Columbia Public Schools students qualified for free or reduced lunch in 2002-2002. (I'll update it if I ever find time to ply the quantitative waters of that district.) 43% qualify for the same at CCPCS.

Mr. President, it's apples and oranges. Bancroft Elementary School is a skip and a throw from the CCPCS. Over 80% of Bancroft's students qualify for reduced lunch prices. They're working hard there to provide a decent education for an impoverished group of kids who mostly speak Spanish.

I want to know how Bancroft does it.
I want to know if anyone at the national level has a clue about teaching kids.
I want to know how Mr. Obama is going to get my class sizes down to 12 students.
Mostly I want powerful people at high levels of government to stop playing us in the trenches.

The CCPCS sounds like a wonderful place to send your children. Money can buy a decent education. Involved parents have a tremendous influence over their children's success.

Mr. President, we already know that. What about the rest of us? Why not pay a visit to a truly public school in your neighborhood. Then we can talk.



(Fair disclosure: I am still steaming over the games Mr. Arne Duncan played with his test result numbers last summer when he came to Washington for a chat. He is either aware of his gamesmanship and plays us for fools, or he believes his own nonsense, which scares me even more.)

Grinding grain

Ye Maids who toiled so faithfully at the Mill
Now cease your work and from these toils be still;
Sleep now till dawn, and let the birds with glee
Sing to the ruddy morn from bush and tree;
For what your hands performed so long and true,
Ceres has charged the Water Nymphs to do.

Antipator of Thessalonica, 85 B.C. ¹

Grinding grain is hard work, still done by hand by much of the world, and still done here at home. Hard kernels of wheat berries, barley, maize, or rice are ground into flour, the foundation for life in an agricultural society. Bread, booze, Fritos, Lucky Charms--all from ground grains.

On Sabbath, I grind wheat, a direct violation of the melachot. It is hard work. Muscles strain, but they know what to do. My mind is idle, and in the steady whir of burr on burr, my thoughts wander.

I use a Country Mills grain mill--a solid tool. It will last longer than me. The burrs need replacing every decade or so, but the rest of the machine will be fit for my grandchildren, should they choose to grind.

A small depression is growing deeper in the cement basement floor--my left foot rocks back and forth as I crank, and over time, the sole of my foot has made its own cradle. My son's bicycle rusts in the backyard--he has long outgrown it. When I get the time, I will figure out a way to rig his bicycle to my mill. I am not getting any younger, and my legs are stronger than my arms.

A wheat berry makes a fine crackle as it gets crunched between the plates of the hand mill. One stationary plate, one rotating plate. The noise sounds like the white noise background of an untuned radio. When I have drunk too much melomel, I imagine that the wheat berries make a noise beyond the crunching on the bran. There are worse things to imagine.

First my right arm, then my left. I can feel my biceps swell. My legs work, too, shifting my weight back and forth with each pass of the milling wheel. My breathing picks up.

Oxygen in, carbon dioxide out. When the wheat berries were made in Montana, the wheat plant breathed in carbon dioxide, and using the sun's energy and water, created carbohydrates and oxygen. The sun's heat is now released again in the warmth of my breath, my churning muscles, and the steel plates grinding the wheat.


Before the last few wheat berries pass through the millstone, I pick 2 or 3 to go into the garden. They are, after all, alive, until ground into flour. Conscious? No, but that's not the point.

That's not the point at all.

¹ from Mill Folklore: "History or Hearsay," http://www.angelfire.com/folk/molinologist/folklore1.html

The Country Mills grain mill photo is from the Everything Kitchen--I have no monetary interests in the product, but I do have an unnatural love for this inanimate object. If you buy one, get the "power bar"--grinding is hard work. Those prairie women were tough!

Happy anniversary!

Two weeks after Mr. Carter was sworn in as President of the United States, in the midst of the Great Winter of '77, I finally stole my first kiss from Leslie.

And I'm still stealing them!

Happy 32nd anniversary!

(And I didn't mention that Rumours was released by Fleetwood Mac on the very same day because you would have hated that!)

Actinomycetes

Good smells exude from crumpled earth.
The rough bark of humus erupts
knots of potatoes (a clean birth)
whose solid feel, whose wet inside
promises taste of ground and root.

Seamus Heaney, from "At a Potato Digging", Death of a Naturalist

Mid-winter thaw. The earth softens a bit under a soft rain. You wander outside, trying to shake off the heaviness of winter, to smell the awakening earth.

The mud disappoints your nose. Inert. Lifeless.

You wander back inside, dreaming of May.



Actinomycetes is a class of bacteria essential to making good dirt. They are what give compost the sweet, earthy smell that makes gardeners wild with desire.

Actinomycetes give us the smell of rain in the summer. Storms draw life from the mud. Poets and lovers already know this. Microbiologists now know why.

Actinomycetes, which look like strands of fungus, break down rotting piles of vegetation, producing geosmin, the source of the aroma of healthy soil.

The smell, considered pleasant by (most) humans, has been added to some perfumes to give them an earthiness.

So why does mud smell lifeless in February? Actinomycetes go dormant in colder climes. While it is possible to grow actinomycetes in a petri dish (and yes, it will smell like the rich, sweet soil that makes gardeners swoon), waiting for the Earth to awaken reminds me of the cycle of life.

I think I can wait.

Besides adding romance to summer showers, actinomycetes has antibacterial properties. Streptomycin and related antibiotics come directly from actinomycetes; Biaxin and Zithromax are semi-synthetic antibiotics made from this same class of bacteria.


Image from UK-JAPAN 2008 website,

Crocus

I mark the seasons by plants. Some connections are obvious, strawberries and honeysuckle in June, apples and pumpkins in October. After the hard freeze in November, time seems to stop. By January, even the kale has given up the ghost.

In deep winter, rhythms cease. Some of us lose our way. Age teaches me little but patience. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes.

Now in February the ground remains frozen, and will be for another month or two. In a couple of weeks or so, however, impossibly green slivers of grass-like leaves will break through the ice, silver stripes down their middle. A couple of weeks after that, egg-shaped cups of purple and yellow and white will flare open with the sun, exposing bright yellow stamens, the first smell of sex since the world died.

The earliest flowers defy logic, brilliant bursts of color calling bees still slumbering in their hives.

This time of year, I have just about given up on prayer.

The first bright drops of color remind me just how little I know.

This is old--I plagiarized myself from E2.

An Cailleach Bhearra wanders again

Ebb-tide has come to me as to the sea;
old age makes me yellow;
though I may grieve thereat,
it approaches its food joyfully.

Beginning of "The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare"

We're halfway through winter. American children will hear tales of Punxsutawney Phil today, wrapped in cozy classrooms, bellies full of lunch made by strangers.

An Cailleach Bhearra wandered around back in the 10th century in western Ireland, looking for firewood yesterday.

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

The next three months will see the days grow longer faster than they do at any other time of year. We gain over two more minutes a day of sun now at our latitude. We'll gain a quarter hour of sunlight a week, over an hour's worth in a month.

So when children gather around the internet this morning to see Phil's forecast, brush up on your astronomy and spend a moment or two asking the students to watch what happens to daylight in the next few weeks.

I'm going to look for crocuses today.

Corn dolly from Miskinfolk website here

Punxsutawney Phil's cartoon from his official site here


And no, I am not a pagan or wiccan --but if you're going to celebrate humans dragging rodents out of their burrows, doesn't hurt to know the science behind the American myth, based on stories of early Christian myths (Candlemas), themselves founded on earlier pagan myths developed back when paying attention to the natural world might keep you alive one more winter.

Living trees and dead ideas

We can learn a lot about, and from, a tree.
We can learn a lot about, and from, our children's understanding of a tree.

Many high school sophomores think fire is alive, and that trees are not. I can spend a week letting them explore fire (staring at a candle, perhaps), and if I get permission slips, spend a day or two outside on the town green, studying a tree.

I do not have that kind of time, of course, not if I hope to cover the curriculum before the state test May 18 (and a stand-alone field test May 19, the product of the NJPAA, more on that in a moment).

The assumption is that children already know that a tree is alive, and that fire is not. I have no doubt they have been asked questions about that before in earlier grades:

Which of the following is NOT alive?

A. A rabbit
B. A tree
C. A horse
D. A rock

Figure well over 80% of 7th graders can get that question right--no, I don't have the numbers, but maybe some middle school teacher would be kind enough to test the question. (The answer is, of course, D.)

Here's the crux: "knowing" that answer does not mean the child truly knows what "alive" means.

Here's another question I'd like seen on exam:

Which of the following is more alive than the others?

A. A tree
B. A slug
C. a dog
D. None of the above

It's a "bad" question--it involves a "none of the above" and a little bit of trickery, but it works for Sunday morning before coffee.

The answer, less obvious now, is D. Which would most 7th graders pick (without the usual week or two of prompting preceding the standardized (cough, cough) test?

Here's a better question:

The adults around you want you to "prove" you know what the word "alive" means in its scientific sense. Compare and contrast a rock, a slug, a tree and a dog in terms of whether each is living or not. Be sure to include at least 6 characteristics of life in your answer.

Now some of my sophomores have a tiny shot at getting that right the week we cover the definition of life. I'm betting that most members of Congress would turn it over to their aides, and that even their Ivy League young ambitious aides would have problems answering the question without running to Google.

Still, it's a better question than the previous one if you want to test whether a child grasps the word "alive."

Even if I prettied up the question, ran it through a couple of trial sessions, validated it, and stamped it with the official approval of the American Board of All Things Testable, the state would be hard pressed to use it.

Why?

Someone needs to grade it. Grading costs money. People have a lot more fun sitting in lucrative sessions designing tests than in the far less lucrative business of sitting in a cubicle grading essays based on a rubric.*

So how does this happen? How do we end up testing children about life when we design a curriculum that does not allow them to grasp a tree?

Last April, the state came out with a report headed by the governor, the CEO of Prudential, and the President of Montclair State University. No need to drag their names into the foray, it's their positions that matter.

In a fancy brochure with lots of colors (it hogs over 3 MB of my hard drive), our education leaders speak:

Extensive research conducted by Achieve, Inc. and others has revealed that students need the same knowledge and skills—no matter what their plans are after graduation. Students, whether they choose to pursue an apprenticeship, two-year college, four-year college, or entry-level employment will need to be prepared to the same standard.

NJ STEPS RE-DESIGNING EDUCATION IN NEW JERSEY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
A Policy Report of the New Jersey High School Redesign Steering Committee
April 25, 2008

You'd think that with that triumvirate of brainpower, someone would have balked at that sentence. (You'd think maybe they'd balk at the indefinite article before "Policy Report", too, but maybe it endears them with a false sense of modesty.)

So I believe they mean it. And that scares me.

If the goals are defined by the tests, and if the former CEO of Prudential doesn't require his charges to know a tree from "the Rock," well, time for me to take my John Dewey and Thomas Jefferson portraits off the wall.

Anyone have a poster of Rex Tillerson I could have cheap?


*Last year New Jersey biology teachers got messages from the New Jersey Performance Assessment Alliance looking for scorers--the money went up and the prerequisite qualifications went down as it became clear that teachers were less than thrilled with the process. Someday the test prompt “Tweaking the Genes” will be available for all to view--give me a heads up if it's available now--and the reasons for our reluctance will be obvious.