Clamming in early March

I went clamming yesterday, mostly to get clams, but the other reasons matter, too.

The breeze came in from the northwest, the temperature hovering around 35° F. Not so bad if you stay dry, but chilly on the flat if you insist on clamming with bare hands.

The moon and the breeze pushed the waters back, and the bay's edge lay unexpectedly exposed, glistening like a tendon, more surprised than embarrassed.

The back bay gives and gives, and I take and take, all unearned.

The tide rises after I leave, smoothing out the scars I left with my rake.

I gathered some kale, parsley, and rosemary from the garden, also unearned, and also taken.

The shells now lay under a tree in the backyard, the essence of the clams now part of those of us who ate them, and part of the air around us.

I teach biology, but I live life--and the chasm between the two reflects the difference between an education and a living.

We owe it to our children to make sure they know the difference.

Daylight Saving Time, again

An hour shorter makes a longer week... 

"...[T]he shift to Daylight Saving Time (DST) results in a dramatic increase in cyberloafing behavior at the national level."

DT Wagner et al, J Appl Psychol. 2012 Sep;97(5):1068-76

A quarter of the world's population will be groggy tomorrow. A few people will die traumatically. Students' test skills will deteriorate. A few more people will die of heart attacks. The stock market may crash.

And yet we still do it.

Stonehenge time

You cannot save time.

You cannot add an hour of sunshine to your day.

You can, though, manipulate human conceits. If nothing else, Daylight Saving Time is an excellent way to demonstrate to children the folly and the real consequences of humans believing they control more than they control.

Tomorrow my 1st period lambs will trudge through before dawn through blackened banks of snow to get to school. Broad Street in Bloomfield will look like the zombie apocalypse. We'll tell them to keep their heads up (or at least wipe the drool of their desks before they leave), but we are bucking millions of years of evolution.

Photo by Eugene Ter-Avakyan, cc-2.0

Humans need sleep. Adolescents (still considered by most to be a subset of humans) need more than the 97 minutes my kids average on Sunday nights.

And why not? What better way to prep for college and career readiness in the global economy than making students take life-altering assessments while comatose? Have kids knock down a few Xanax pills, and chase it with gin and Adderall cocktails to make it really authentic.

"About 1 in every 6 high school seniors in the United States has ever had some exposure to prescription stimulants, either medically or nonmedically."

Stonehenge photo by Resk, released to PD
Yep, a repeat--I ilke cycles....

Imbolc, again

An Cailleach Bhearra wandered around back in the 10th century in western Ireland,
eating "seaweed, salmon, and wild garlic" (my kind of woman), looking for firewood.

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?

Imbolc again.
The daffodils have broken through the earth. My words shrink as the sunlight grows.
Groundhog Day has always been a favorite of mine.

***

We are trapped by words.

***

A few days ago I watched a crow at the ferry jetty caw caw caw at a gull sharing a light post. The gull did not respond. The crow then swooped down, picked up a piece of paper, then returned to its perch near the gull.

The crow carefully ripped up the paper, piece by piece, dropping each piece, one by one, watching each piece until it hit the ground, looking at the gull between pieces as if to say Hey!

When done, the crow cawed once more, and this time the gull squawked back. The crow, now seemingly satisfied, nodded, then flew to a trashcan and cawed at a few humanfolk, one (not me) who cawed back.

I have no idea what that was about, nor could I justify discussing it in my classroom. So I don't.

Curriculum stops at the point where humans are besides the point.

That makes sense if you live in a world of words. It makes less sense at the water's edge.
A child can parrot the Calvin cycle without knowing a thing about a seed, about food, about the billions, trillions of other organisms teeming around him.

If we keep ignoring things where humans are besides the point, we will become just that.

***

I teach biology, the study of life, in a culture that fails to recognize death. The children spray themselves with Axe, yet shy from the pond water and the mud brought in from outside.

I can hardly grade a child on her ability to keep a plant alive in a public building . I cannot ask a child to slaughter a calf in class. I can ask her to tell me how many NADH molecules are generated from one molecule of glucose during the Krebs cycle.

With the return of the sun comes the return of my sanity, when I feel comfortable letting go of the words again, learning (again) that what I thought was besides the point is the point.

Photos by us.

Are POTUS claims fair game for CER exercises in public schools?

Part of inaugural parade route via NPR: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The Next Generation Science Standards focus on doing science--making observations, drawing inferences, making claims based on evidence and reasoning.

It's unfamiliar to students who are used to being schooled, and it's unfamiliar to teachers who are used to schooling.

As much as I have grumped about the particulars of NGSS implementation, I am a huge fan of its underlying foundation--teaching students how to discern the natural world through careful examination of evidence and the models we create to make sense of that evidence.

And here we are, with an administration blatantly disregarding obvious facts, even trivial ones, if they challenge Trump's worldview of himself.

• Trump did not draw the largest crowd ever at his coronation inauguration.
• The number of Metro riders was not greater on his day (Friday) than Obama's 2013 inauguration--it was about 27% lower if my arithmetic is right. (And my arithmetic is more right than most of Trump's cabinet picks.)
• Nowhere near a million people attended Trump's inauguration.
• It is very unlikely that "probably everyone" of the several hundred CIA employees gathered to hear his speech had voted for him.

So here's a question to my fellow teachers--will you use these blatant examples of out-and-out lies as authentic test cases for claim/evidence/reasoning exercises?

I was initially going to ignore the noise, but given the power of the source of the misinformation and the availability of public records that allow us to check the evidence, I'm now leaning towards using the administrations own words for such an exercise.

A primary function of public schools is to maintain an informed citizenry, no?

Inaugural speech and education, II

"But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists. ... An education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge."     Donald Trump

In light of our POTUS's history, this comes off a tad creepy.
How soon we forget.

"I am going to be dating her in ten years. Can you believe it?"      Donald Trump

Inaugural speech and education, I

"But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists. ... An education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge."       Donald Trump, January 20, 2017

"All knowledge" is an odd phrase, perhaps accidental, but likely not. These were prepared words spoken at an inauguration speech.

To be fair, I start off every year telling my students that they will know less by June than they think they know in September. And, mostly, they do--trying to get a handle on how the natural world works will do that to a person.

Part of me fervently wishes this was a reference to Socrates' paradox:

"I know that I know nothing."

Unlikely.

Mr. Trump has made it clear that he made a break from the natural world a long time ago. It's an illusion, of course, entropy conquers all of us eventually, but for the moment, ignorance trumps science. And many of us are going to pay for his ignorance.

I am trying to parse the sentence, but I keep getting lost.

Is "all knowledge" a reference to the tree in the Garden of Eden? Is "all knowledge" some code understood by the extreme right?

Does he believe schools act like giant brain leeches, sucking out gray matter through our children's eyeballs?

Poster lifted from The Hannibal 8

I am a racist--if you're white, chances are you are, too

If you're white and celebrating Dr. King's life today, may be a good time for a self-examination.

I come from an unusual school in an unusual school district. We are not a mostly white or a black or a Latino school. We are Muslim and Jewish and Christian and Hindu and Sikh. We hear Bengali, Spanish, Greek, English, Patois, and maybe another couple dozen languages and dialects in our hallways.

Crispus Attucks, first death in American Revolution
via Crispus Attucks Museum website

I'm not going to ruin all this by claiming a Kumbaya moment, but what makes this building work maybe better than most others is the constant infusion of immigrants into our town, an infusion of confusion, that keeps us all wondering who we are.

I've heard several times a different version of that discussion, as a small group of kids will discuss just which banner they fall under.

And that's a good place to start.

***

The other race conversation is the one acknowledging the price of color in this fine land of ours. The problem is not starting "the conversation" about race. Most kind, nice folks I know are eager, too eager, to start the conversation.

The problem is getting past the niceties, the politeness, the veneer of civility that subtly reflects our standing with each other.

The problem with the hard conversation is that most white folks I know truly believe two things:

• They're not racist.
• If they're not racist, then this does not involve them.

This skirts the whole issue of privilege, neatly tidied up in a universal statement of our humanity, and who could possibly argue with the idea that an unbiased, nice person who just wants everybody to get along had nothing to do with, well, John Crawford? 

Here's a place to start. You're not going to get off the bottle until you acknowledge you're a racist. Not a John Birch Society heavy drinking racist, just the social two-glasses-of-chardonnay kind. The kind who sits on the sidelines tsk tsking away a world that does not concern you.

But it should.
Make the declaration, then let's try having the talk. 

And if it does not, you are in deeper than you think.
This was originally posted a tear or so ago--seemed like a good day to post it again.