National Canine Latin Barking assessments

While immersed in the Krebs cycle in mid-January, pushing biochemical pathways on sophomores who have yet to learn chemistry, I marvel at their persistence, trying to grasp what I know they cannot, but I ask them to do it anyway. (There is something unethical about this....)

Should I ever train a dog to bark in Latin, I will be praised for my remarkable puppy and my methods of puppy training. I could write books about my methods, and others could train their pooches to recite Virgil as well.

I could develop a whole system of tests, the National Canine Latin Barking assessment system, and make those with less educated mutts feel shame. 

I would be rich, my puppies would gain universal acclaim, but truth be told (and truth has become a rare commodity), my trained terriers would no more about Latin than I know about the mind of a frisky horseshoe crab clasped onto its partner under a June moon.

My dogs would know nothing more than they did when they only barked, no matter what the NCLB assessment measures.

***

Come May, I will take a few busloads of young humans to watch horseshoe crabs mate at the edge of the bay, to remind them (and me) that there's a whole lot more going on than we can ever grasp in a lifetime, much of it as beautiful as it is incomprehensible.


And we will return to Bloomfield, our Bloomfield, different critters than the ones we were that morning, in ways no standardized test can measure.

Mid-January is as good a time as any to be cranky.

Photo by me using Leslie's point-n-shoot.

Oh, dear, New Hampshire, too?

"I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It's a worldview and it's godless....Columbine, remember that? They were believers in evolution. That's evidence right there."

 Rep. Jerry Bergevin, New Hampshire

For all the excitement over whether evolution can explain H. sapiens without appealing to the dominant version of God in these parts, I'm working on the small battles.

Leaves come mostly from air, a lit propane torch emits water, a dime falls as fast as the 7th edition of Campbell's Biology, a charged glass rod can bend a stream of water, a tiny pinhole can flip an image upside down, you can light a lamp by spinning a magnet in a coil of wire, and you can balance a gyroscope on a finger.

Sunlight makes a radiometer spin, gingko fruit smells like vomit, red cabbage juice changes color when you add acid, a garbage bag with the air vacuumed out can immobilize a JV high school football player, and you can crush an empty Pepsi can instantly simply by cooling it quickly.

You can launch a rocket a couple of hundred feet up using just a little water and a lot of air, you can float a paper clip on water, you can make that floating paper clip act like a compass by magnetizing it first, you can make green chlorophyll fluoresce red.

You can catch (and listen to) a radio signal with a long wire and the right crystal, you can make a coat hanger sound like bells, you can see Jupiter with your bare eyes, and you can grow a bean in the back of a science classroom.

I got a whole lot of things every bit as interesting and seemingly miraculous as evolution, and none of it is magic.

Maybe we should just ban the teaching of science period--God only knows how much damage thinking might cause to this fine democracy.

You cannot make this stuff up....

Clamming: a 21st century skill

19th century version:

Yesterday I headed for one of my favorite places with one of my favorite people to do one of my favorite things--clamming. The moon is waxing and near full, so I knew low tide would fall in the early afternoon.

COST: months of intermittent observing, which I enjoy.

21st century version:
Yesterday I checked the computer for the tides, clicked through a few buttons, and saw that low tide would fall precisely at 1:29 PM. and that the moon was 93% full.

COSTS: computer, internet connection, electricity. 

Jersey fresh quahogs, a couple of hours out of the mud.

Which gives me more information? 
Probably the latter. It's clearly more precise, and it's also more efficient than watching the moon and tides in a particular area for a few seasons.

Which gives me more knowledge?
Depends on what you mean by knowledge, but becoming part of the local natural rhythms requires a deeper understanding than needed to read a computerized tide chart, and maybe even something called wisdom.

Which gives me more pleasure?
Following the rhythms of the moon, of the bay. We do not talk much of pleasure in education, and I'd bet most "educators" would would put pleasure far down on the list of reasons for schools to exist.

Of all the reasons to push for high technology in the classroom, arguing that it prepares students for the 21st workplace, that students need to be trained on computers, is, well, hogwash.

Our students do not lack for information--many carry phones more powerful than the computers that got astronauts to the moon back in 1969, and can easily look up today's tide should the need arise.

We've come to see schools as little institutes for job preparation. We used to call that vocational school.

Given the economy, kids around here might be better off learning how to read the moon the 19th century way.

A wise child might wonder why it's warm enough to clam comfortably  in January.

It's called biology for a reason

I'm a pretty good teacher--I can train a young H. sapiens to recite the Calvin cycle in such a way that everyone, including the young H. sapiens, believes that she actually knows something.

That same young H. sapiens can graduate high school without having a clue that her food comes from the ground, that the water from her tap was once a raindrop, and that her waste flushed down the toilet goes somewhere.

I ostensibly teach biology, the study of life, but there are days when I think I am merely teaching acronymology, the study of Holy symbols--ATP, NADPH, DNA--worshiped for their ability to confer riches on the true believers.

You want biology? Hatch chickens in a classroom, raise them for a generation or two, spend a few hours each week to get to know them a bit, then slaughter their descendants as a final exam. Feed them seeds from plants grown on the windowsills. While feasting on the birds, discuss why we eat the meat but not the intestines, why chicken fat tastes so good but the feathers not so much.

If a child leaves my class knowing nothing about food, then that child has learned nothing about biology, no matter how well she does on the AP Biology exam.

I really would like to do this in class. 

The picture is of Gail, my sis-in-law. She looks happier than the chickens....

Watch the wheels....

I've ridden motorcycles on and off (always better on than off) for over thirty years. While a few things are annoying--bugs in the teeth, bits of rotting roadkill kicked up by a car, the unexpected downpour--the joys far outweigh the negatives.


The one thing that threatens to tilt joy to despair are the folks in the 4-wheeled cages who simply do not see bikes. Live cars sitting at intersections make me wary.

When I see one, only one thing matters--its front wheels. Are they moving?

Only that, nothing else matters, nothing.  Riding gets down to the bare physics of things.

If it creeps forward, react. Do not waste time looking amazed, or yelling, or flipping the bird.  All are useless
The motive of the driver does not matter. At all. It cannot be changed even if you knew it.

You'll hear a lot about how Arne cares for kids, how Gates humanitarianism saves thousands of children, how the new nationalized standards and multimillion-dollar tests are good for our children, and a few misguided souls may even believe it.

When the front wheels are moving, it doesn't matter what the driver thinks. We need to react.

The front wheels of the edu-plutocrats are spinnning so hard they're leaving patches of rubber. React

Arne photo from Colorlimes.com; motorcycle photo (no one hurt) from lowellsun.com.

Card carrying member of The Anti-Anthropomorphizing League of Rational Thinkers

A repost. Hey, it's my blog...

In Galway Bay, nestled on the west coast of Ireland, lives Fungi, a lone male dolphin who seeks the company of humans, as he has for over a quarter century now. He's a tourist attraction, and an enigma. No one knows why he sticks around—perhaps he was abandoned by his pod for some nefarious dolphin behavior during his wild youth, maybe he happens to like humans and their noise.

I once watched spearing, tiny fish with aluminum foil strips pasted on their sides, jumping over a piece of straw floating near the surf. One or two would jump over it, then circle back around, then jump over it again. The science teacher in me tries to equate this jumping over a piece of phragmites with evolutionary fitness. For all my training, though, I can't help myself—I see joy.

Our reference is human—it's all we have, really. We see trees as humans see them, smell the early morning mud flats as only humans, fear the humming of a bee as only humans can. (If you prefer a lonely nihilistic view, as only humans can, then imagine that you alone can know what you sense.)

There are certainly problems with anthropomorphizing, impugning motives on critters going about their business. I should not presume joy on the part of the silver-sided fish—no way to know—but we make a bigger mistake presuming the absence of shared motives. (Obviously the tiny fish had some motive.)

Science rests on models. A water molecule consists of 2 hydrogen atoms, 1 oxygen atom, fused together by covalent bonds, which is to say they share electrons. The electrons spend a little bit more time on the oxygen side of the molecule than the hydrogen atoms, creating a slightly more negative charge there.

If I were to draw an electron in class, it would look like this:

I might even add a charge sign to it, like this:



The children will dutifully write it down, and the symbol becomes the electron. I suspect that's the act that makes us most human, the symbol. It is also, ironically, the one that separates us from the universe.

Obviously the “dot” is not an electron—it reflects a tiny part on the board where less light reflects back to the children's eyes that the rest of the board. The “dash,” a dose of negativity (which only makes sense when contrasted with a dose of positive), reflects another slash of less reflected light.

We teach this and children memorize it, and we pretend we know what charge means, a relative term that measures, um, attractiveness, much like the confusion we have when we are attracted to others, but not in that sort of way....

We are ascribing motive or behavior to the non-sentient, or rather to models of the non-sentient, since electrons are unknowable beyond the models we create, and in my very stern voice I will chastise the children for ascribing motive to the very same things. (These are the problems with trying to keep the universe in some neat mechanistic package.)

This becomes a sticking point for a lot of us teaching science—we carefully present models using words like “attract” and “repel” and then get our knickers in a twist when a student confuses attraction with desire.

And with that, we extinguish the tiny spark.

I was once a card carrying member of the AALRT (the Anti-Anthropomorphizing League of Rational Thinkers). There are plenty of reasons to join—baby robins don't smile and crickets don't sing.

I am still a member, though I may let my dues lapse this year. If adding emotion to a cute drawing of a couple of hydrogen atoms sharing their electrons with an oxygen atom starved for electron love holds my lambs' interest long enough to get them to glance at the concept of bonding (another loaded word), maybe I'll try it.

And who knows, maybe an incomplete orbital shell is more than just a metaphor for unrequited love.

The photos are ours, which I will gratuitously place in my posts, because I like them, and because they remind me that as much as the classroom matters, a few things matter more.

A science teacher's resolutions

Say a prayer every morning honoring a mystery. A prayer for light, for life, for gravity, for cosmic rays, for the source of water. I pretend I know nothing. I want to know what knowing nothing really means.

Remind myself every morning, when I wake up, should I wake up, that I am mortal. Not as in some shimmery philosophical sense, but in the full entropic mess of death that marks the end of any life. Keeps one focused on what matters.

Continue to get outside. Every day. Hubris melts under the sunlight, dissolves in the rain.

Teach children science, as science. Every day. Not technology. Not trivia. Not as a means to better the economy. Teach children to know the world more today than they knew yesterday, to understand their place in the natural world. Why else teach?

Every minute spent on this machine is a minute in Dante's Bolgia 4.