What is the highest result of education?

With all the dashing about, pretending that we can make leaders of us all, make scientists of us all, pretending that the whole point of education is test score and "college and career readiness," well, it's no small joy to be working under a Principal who puts up in the hallway a large poster quoting Helen Keller:

"The highest result of education is tolerance."

Not bad, and most teachers would appreciate the thoughtfulness (I did) and move on (I didn't).

The word "tolerance" sticks in my craw--it's not a bad word, but just the hint that it requires the tolerant to endure people not of the same ilk bothers me. OK, I can't tolerate the word.

I mentioned this to the Principal, even suggesting that "love" might be a better fit, fully understanding that even the most tolerant Principal can't have a quote like this:

"The highest result of education is love."

 That's too Kumbayesque even for me, and that's saying something.

Leslie, who keeps me sane, suggested "empathy"--which I really liked, and I mentioned it to our Principal.

And today I saw this on our school message board outside:

Amen. And thank you.

Oh, yes, that white stuff is snow. I'm not very tolerant of that, either.

Scorecard

Rajeev Bajaj runs Global Education Advisors, originally a "one person" company with grammar issues founded using Chris Cerf's home address.  Hey, Steve Jobs started in his own garage, why not? GEA has gotten (so far) almost $2 million dollars of the Facebook money.

Eli Broad, a philanthropist in its current sense (though maybe not quite so heavy on the "philo-" side), founded the Broad Foundation, a private "school" that converts business folks into education wizards, then feeds them into various urban school districts around country. Cerf is a graduate (2004), Bajaj is a current fellow.

Cory Booker is the mayor of Newark. His city got $100 million from Mark Zuckerberg--almost $2 million has gone into Bajaj's Global Education Advisors group. He also enjoys the support of Cerf. Booker, hypothetically, has little say over Newark Public Schools because the state currently runs them. I made him the figurehead for the distribution of the Facebook money--hey, he posed with Mark and Oprah when the announcement was made.

And Mark? Can't really blame him for anything here. Give a kid obscene amounts of money and he's going to make a mistake here and there.

The ACLU is making a stink about all this because, well, something stinks. Government should be transparent. 
I was going to toss in Cami Anderson, the Newark Superintendent, but I could only take so much MS Paint.
You can fill her in yourself, then draw arrows from Cerf and Booker (she was a paid consultant for him before this super gig) to her.

Zuckerberg Friends Cerf

Mark Zuckerberg donated a huge chunk of money, $100 million,  to Newark, to help education. A few other people kicked in $48 million more.

According to the Star-Ledger,  ~$11,700,000 has been spent so far. Less than 65% of that money has gone to "school-based programs." Over 15% has gone to Global Education Advisors, "a company started by Christopher Cerf before he became the state's acting education commissioner," a company that used Cerf's home address as its own, an "entirely ministerial" relationship according to Cerf.

Yep, almost 1 in every 6 dollars spent so far has gone to a company intimately associated with our current Acting Commissioner of Education.

Sources:
Star-Ledger, February 24, 2011
Star-Ledger, October 28, 201

As Leslie pointed out, I had a shot at a chunk of that money.
At least I sleep well....

May well just be a misunderstanding, maybe nothing nefarious--just keep the money visible... 

Cerf photo is official one from NJ

Doritos and daphnia

In the middle of the snowstorm yesterday, I scrambled out to my tiny pond, a mud puddle, really, to fetch as much elodea as I could for school. Elodea is a lovely water plant that plays well with microscopes. I also scooped up about 5 gallons of pond water full of critters about as ill-prepared for the storm as I was.

Two buckets of pond water now sit in the kitchen--some will overwinter in the basement under fluorescent lights, some in the windowsill of our classroom. (One year I had mayflies in January.)

The classroom pond water has been there for years now. I should really start it over--as the years go by, the evaporating water leaves behind traces of salts, and eventually it will be too salty for pond life. For now, though, the water fleas still dance among a few translucent snails and the knolls of blue-green algae covering the bottom. All sorts of microscopic critters flit through the duckweed.

I could start over, dumping my windowsill pond down into the drain, starting fresh. Starting over without consequences, though, is a tricky thing, possibly impossible, in life, human or otherwise. Everything we do has consequences.

So I work with what I have, and what I have includes the great-great-great-great offspring of daphnia from my backyard summers ago.

***

The metaphysical (or at least the anti-reality folks, or ARFs as I shall call them) crowd has me worried. The Daily Show ran a piece with an ARF, Noelle Nikpour, yipping away against science:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Weathering Fights - Science: What's It Up To?
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

I have several children who know more about the Mayan calendar than they do about evolution. I have more than several children who do not know their connection to the earth. We tell children that our planet is round, and that Doritos are junk food, without offering a shred of evidence for either.

I'll concede that the Earth is round. Took me awhile to believe it, but after years of looking at boats disappear over the edge of the sea, shadows change over the seasons, and photos from satellites, it's easier believing it's round than flat.

Doritos, however, are miracles, a sophisticated blend of complex organic molecules fused together by plants using the energy emanating from the sun, itself a miracle, fusing hydrogen into helium. They're food, and pretty good food at that--and all food is biology at its gory best.

I get one shot to teach children biology--for most of my kids, this is the last time they will study biology in any formal sense, ill prepared to face years of propaganda via the Noelle Nikpours, Rick Perrys, and Rick Warren (what is it with Ricks?) of the world.

Tomorrow I will haul a couple of gallons of water almost a mile, as my ancestors did (though for a different reason), to bring more "real" life to my biology classroom. In the end, I cannot hope to compete with the propaganda fed both inside and out the school by the monied interests who know more about demographics than democracy, more about profit than people.

My hope is to give children a taste of just how large this universe is, how wonderful, how deeply ingrained we are with it, and it with us.

A bucket of pond water holds more life than most of us can imagine.

It starts with a single drop.

Or I could just teach to the state test, and put the microscopes away.

Exploding trees

The trees are exploding.

We're getting a wet, heavy snowfall, and the broad leaves of our deciduous trees are catching snowflakes as well as they catch photons.

Their vessels are still swollen with sap, carrying nutrients back into the ground, stored in the massive roots of the underground world we fear.

Water starts to expand as it nears its freezing point--that's why ice floats. Still, I've never seen trees explode because of an early frost, so I'll blame the snow.

I stood out in the snow watching my daughter play football. The scene was surreal--several players had dressed up for Hallowe'en, dinosaurs chasing ninjas, Goldilocks chased by a pirate. Some players wore overcoats, a few dressed only in shorts. The snow was blowing sideways.

*CRACK*--a large limb fell from a massive tree just a few feet from me.

Had my brain caught the branch, I would have regretted not finishing a few things, but that's the way it goes. I worked for years in hospitals. Massive trauma, tempered by unconsciousness and ungodly jolts of endorphins, is about as good as it gets for one's final moments.

Now, a few hours later, my numb feet warm again, my skin dry, a few thoughts:

*My daughter turns 29 tomorrow. My son will be 26 in December. Watching her intensity playing football, hearing her laughter across the field, reminds me my biggest job is done.
*Had I been brained, the last thing anyone (I cared about) would have worried about would be an unfinished curriculum being written just to meet the demands of some acronym (QSAC) emanating from Trenton.
*We're finite, focus on what matters.

It continues to snow, I continue to breathe. But I appreciate the reminder.

Photo via Baristanet.

A jelly story

When looking at a jelly lying at the sea's edge, a critter that uses the same genetic code as pretty much anything that has suffered the indignity of DNA analysis, it's hard to get worked up over nonsense.

• A physicist says that we, like the jellyfish, are mostly empty space.
• A priest says we have dominion this dying jelly, over all that lives.
• A chemist says that the orderly appearance of this critter, and us, does not deny entropy--the sun's slow collapse into chaos feeds our lives.
• A business man says the jelly is hard to sell, and loses interest.
• A poet say the jelly has a soul, and notices the cyan halo of sky around it.
• The astronomer ponders the angle of the jelly's shadow, a telling sign of winter to come.
• A geologist studies the angle of repose of the grains of sand, failing to see the critter at all.

The jelly faded back into the sea, now dead, its story as interesting as mine, as yours, our stories share a common end.

I almost missed this jelly, anxious as I was to catch up on something for somebody due somewhere before Monday's sunset. Now it has become part of my story.

We found the jelly a week ago, and a moment later, dolphins distracted us.
I meant to put the jelly back. I did not.
I had a chance to change the story.

Mr. President, we "learn to live"

The 2nd repost today, again more for me than anything else.

"Through this plan we are setting an ambitious goal: All students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career – no matter who you are or where you come from."

President Obama, March 13, 2010

Mr. President, can we cut through the crap?

I'm a retired pediatrician. A lot of children are damaged--some by bad luck, many by bad choices made by others.

Yes, the photo is unsettling, yes, too many children have been lost because we did not acknowledge their potential, but your rhetoric is fanning a dangerous fire.

I teach healthy children, and I teach damaged children. I teach wealthy children, and I teach poor children. I teach children with fancy orthodontia, and children with rotting teeth.

I teach America, Mr. President. If you cannot see America from your perch in D.C., please spend a weekend back home in Chicago and remember the man you once were, or pretended to be.

Come to Bloomfield--our motto here is "Learn to live." Some of us have careers, some of us have jobs. Some of us went to college, some of us were apprenticed. Most of us are happy, even the good chunk of us who have neither careers nor degrees.

Focus on getting the jobs back, and towns like Bloomfield will fill them well. We send soldiers to war--our street signs carry the names of those killed and missing in action. We have young folks overseas now. We helped process uranium during World War II, and have the contaminated useless land to show for it.

Learn to live. Not learn to earn, not learn to serve Microsoft, but simply learn to live. Most of my students will leave BHS with decent academic skills and decent decency skills.

All the degrees in the world won't fix the plumbing. All the degrees in the world will not land a job that's now in Asia. All the degrees in the world will not make you a better citizen, friend, or lover.

Learn to live, Mr. President, and let us go about our business doing the same. And if you need the name of a decent carpenter, a decent bakery, a decent school, give me a call. We got them right here in Bloomfield, the America outside the Beltway.

The disturbing photo from Temple University is real, and it's human.
The classroom photo is from Bloomfield, 1914, found here, shared at the Bloomfield Historical site by David Petillo.