On green beans and models

The world, the one outside anyway, is incomprehensible. We nibble on models as we nibble on green beans, mindlessly consuming them as useful without grasping the wholeness they represent. In school we reward students for "mastering" the abstract without a thought to whether they grasp the real.

The students who cling to the earth learn their roles quickly. There is little place for dirt and dreams in the school to college to career pipeline. Middle school launders the few who still stare at puddles.

The same green beans we nibble on for dinner leave us like ghosts as we sleep, zing their way through our veins, our lungs, escaping as tiny particles, breath by breath, as we dream our limited human dreams. That's not a model. That's the reality.

The essence of animal life requires breaking things down back to the ghost of carbon dioxide, releasing tiny particles back outside where dandelions and such knit stuff back together, using the energy of sunlight to push particles together that would otherwise stay as they are.

I watched a spider on its web this morning, as she wrapped up her prey in a fresh silken shroud, then dragged it back into the corner of the eave. She will eat most of it, and she will breathe much of it out, tiny particles that mingle with the tiny particles I breathed as I watch her, some of which will end up in the beans, again.

You can get a degree in biology without ever having slaughtered an animal, without ever having grown a flower, without ever even caring to ponder your place in this living world.

You don't need to ponder any of that to be useful in most fields that require a biology degree--degrees today are used as certificates of successful completion of the abstract, so that more abstract can be done, usually in the service of abstracting money.

I teach biology in high school. I also helped start our school garden, which has fed me a couple of times already this summer. In a couple of weeks, I'll munch on a green bean or two as our students tour our garden, and get, once again, "you can eat something that comes from the ground?"

And I'll smile and say of course not, I eat things that mostly come out of thin air....

長崎

On August 9, 1945, just over 2 1/2 pounds of plutonium was converted to energy 1650 feet over Nagasaki.

Two and a half pounds--about the weight of a 28 week premature newborn baby.

長崎

Yosuke Yamahata, A Japanese army photographer, took this picture the day after the Fat Man fell over Nagasaki.

More of Mr. Yamahata's photography can be seen here.

The photo and the quote are from © The Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu

Yes, this is a repeat, and will be repeated every year that I maintain the blog.
We must never forget what we are capable of doing. Never.

Hiroshima, again

Hiroshima was destroyed on August 5th, 7:16 PM, our time--just under an hour before our sunset.

 

広島

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. ... It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. . . . What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.

Harry S. Truman

It happened on this date, this "greatest achievement."




New technology used to "solve" an old problem. We cannot help ourselves.

Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, suggested "we ought to stay out of the nuclei." Until we have a clue what we want, sounds like good advice.

You cannot separate tools from the critters who use them. Teaching science as some compartmentalized thought process without cultural context is a dangerous game.

What is our responsibility as teachers of science?
As citizens of the United States?
As human beings?

***

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

And now I teach science to (very) young adults. I have a responsibility to them, to the state, to myself.

Harry S. Truman called the bombing of Hiroshima "the greatest achievement of organized science." If that does not give you pause, you should not be teaching science.

You should not be teaching anything at all.

This is posted every year, as a reminder to me.

Lammas, again

Yep, mostly the same post fifth time around--I like the rhythm of the year.

"No ideas but in things."
William Carlos Williams

The English had a sensible name for this time of year before William the Conqueror blew through--weed month (weodmonað). We teeter towards the dark months. Things fall apart.

The sunlight diminishes perceptibly now. The plants know.

The past week we've eaten deep purple eggplants and bright pink brandywine tomatoes, yellow summer squash and green-and-red striped beans. Today we will pick basil for pesto, some for tonight, some for February. A bowl full of ripe blueberries waits for us, sunlight incarnate.

But the sunlight is dying, and the plants know.

We do not speak of religion in class, at least not formally. Students occasionally ask religious questions, and I deflect them. I explain that some things cannot be known through science, and that what I believe beyond the limits of science falls outside the province of class.

In class we talk of light and hormones, photoperiods and abscisic acids, to explain how plants know. We talk under the hum of fluorescent lights, time marked by defined blocks of time. In class, September light is exactly the same as February light, and class is always 48 minutes long, no matter where the sun sits.

Today marks the start of Lammas, or Loaf Mass Day--joy for the harvests that are coming and regret for waning sunlight. Lammas used to be celebrated--the first wheat berries of the year were ground into flour and baked into bread offered in thanks, some used for Communion, some for the feast that followed.

We thank God (or Tailtiu or Lugh or some other forgotten gods)--harvest time reflects death and grace, whatever the culture. Death and grace feel foreign in the classroom, indeed foreign in our culture. We pretend, at our peril, that life is linear.

Lammas falls halfway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. The days are shortening, winter is coming. Until you feel the seasons in your bones, until you follow a grain of wheat from the ground to plant to bread to you then back to the ground again, the modern myths may be enough.

Science can explain why plants produce fruit when they do, and I can teach the steps. We can test whether a student learns what I present, and the students that do this best have access to all our culture offers.

You can become very powerful, very rich, without knowing grace. You can go far in life if blessed with intelligence and beauty, degrees and citations, without ever knowing what a wheat berry looks like, without ever kneading a lump of flour and water and yeast into glistening dough.

In the end, we don't know much, and may never know much. We can, however, recognize grace. We might not grasp it rationally, but we we can grasp it--a good reason to celebrate Lammas.

The Skeleton of Death dances every hour in Prague--photo of the Prague Astronomical Clock by Sandy Smith found on VirtualTourist.

Teaching in June

From a June half a decade ago.

She wrote, simply, "hi mike."

I assumed I was the Michael she meant, but it does not matter, berries are for all of us, so I am using the photo. The hand belongs to Jessica Pierce, the berries to whichever mouth gets them first.

***

Along my walk to school are several cherry trees--the cherries are ripe now. I get to school with a tongue stained purple.

I found two blueberry bushes three blocks away yesterday. The mulberry trees are about to give up ripe fruit in the next week or two. It's a great time to be a mammal (or a bird).

The cherries are small and dark, full of bitter tannins countering their ridiculous cherriness.

When I eat a cherry, I believe in God. Not the wordy omega John God--I keep Him in my pocket in late autumn. I mean the atavistic, prehistoric sun god, the Ra, the one who sets off week-long dancing and unpardonable ecstasy. The mysterious one. The unknowable one. The one found in a June-warmed cherry.

Most of the year, I can talk myself into anything. In June, I simply cannot talk. No need. Life is bursting around us.

***

When I was still young, I feared dying in spring or summer, feared missing what was to come, dying in the midst of plenty.

Now I fear dying in winter. I do not wish to die, few of us do, but when I do, I want to be surrounded by possibility, by sunlight, by berries.

I want to be the bee found nestled in the flower at dusk, her last day spent exhausted and resting on clover petal, a life well spent. I do not want to die in the hive. Even a 5 star accredited hive full of well-intentioned bees trained to transition me to the next life.

I am not transitioning anywhere. In June I am here, and no other "here's" exist. In June William Blake makes sense. W.B. Yeats makes sense. Even death makes sense.

***

The school year is winding down. And what have we learned?

I live in a good town. I teach in the same town. I am paid through taxes given up by my neighbors. I work hard, and so do they.

The least I can do is teach their children the ecstasy found in June berries and honeysuckle blossoms, pursuing the happiness of sweet stained lips instead of the demands of a petulant man-child dictating education policy several hundred miles away.

The least I can do is show them our local lichen and hawks and bees, instead of just words in books written by strangers who know nothing about the pair of mallard ducks who slumber on the Bloomfield Green.

The least I can do is show children why I still get excited when the sun rises over our town, our gardens, our homes, and why so many of us choose to stay here. The sun worth knowing is not the one in the textbooks, the one of fusion and distance and solar storms.

The sun worth knowing is the one that keeps us alive, the one that we can feel on our faces, the one that pulls the bay over my clams, the one that blesses the cherries with sugar.

If you want to teach science, start with joy. If you cannot tie joy to wild berries, go play on Wall Street or Pennsylvania Avenue.

Real education starts right here in Bloomfield..

Technically we've lost our minds

These will be part of the state-mandated curriculum starting September here in New Jersey.

8.1.2.A.5	Enter information into a spreadsheet and sort the information.
8.1.2.A.6	Identify the structure and components of a database.
8.1.2.A.7	Enter information into a database or spreadsheet and filter the information.

For children in 2nd grade--children 7 to 8 years old.

Oh, it's doable, and even maybe a little cute, watching the young'uns enter data like their mommies and daddies working at their desks under the fluorescent hum of lights making enough money to pay the bills.

But it's not something anyone needs to do before sprouting axillary hair.

Technology is not going to fix the cultural injustices that haunt our hallowed halls. But we can pretend.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Amidst the chaos and the entropy, sunlight streams in and helps us put things back together.

We're pretty good at this as populations, much better than as individuals, all of whom share the same fate. Life goes on, but we do not.

The sparrows and the squirrels do their squirrel and sparrow business just as they did when I watched them so any decades ago, but they are not the same sparrows, not the same squirrels.

If I teach a child about squirrels, should she be interested in them, and I fill her up with all kinds of squirrel trivia, she knows some facts about a common rodent, but she has not learned a lick of biology.

If I tell her to go find a squirrel on the Bloomfield Green, and watch it for the duration of its life, she will learn a little bit about squirrels (in general) but know a whole lot about the business of being a mammal in the wild, during which it will grow, probably reproduce, and certainly die. She will never see squirrels the same way.

But I didn't do that.

As the year slips to its end, and another few classes of biology students wander out my classroom door for good, I realize I have failed again to teach biology.

And I become just another teacher, always there in the classroom, as interchangeable and immortal as the generic squirrels flitting in and out of a child's life.

I'm going to plant more seeds this weekend.