Distracted

I lost a friend this week, a strong woman who once jumped out of airplanes to fight forest fires, and lost her fight with some vagrant cells after a long, long battle.

None of us are permanent, of course, a flippant statement when one is healthy.

She's dead, I'm still here.

That won't always be true for me. Nor you. Nor our students.

***

I took a walk today and saw gannets crashing headfirst into the bay. Their wings fluoresced against the gray March sky. Some folks believe that gannets go blind from their forceful foraging. I used to believe this, too.

I am easily confused by words, and trust them far more than the trust they earn. Most literate folks do.

The edge of the sea defies words, and will continue to defy words, and so long as words are mere symbols (which is all they'll ever be), this will be true. The edge of the sea defies recorded images, recorded sounds. I walk along its edge several times a week, and every time it surprises me.

Our problem is not so much our inability to train our lambs to manipulate the abstract, though that is a necessary skill for anyone landless who wants to survive in our culture. Our problem is that we forget that the abstract is dependent on the world.

Global is abstract. Core standards is abstract. God is abstract. Country is abstract.

A mudflat in March, the aroma of dead critters mixed with the milt marking those who will replace them, cannot be captured by our imagination, never mind our words. What's real exceeds what we know.

The abstract matters, of course, but is utterly dependent on the real. Death does us a favor by reminding us of this. Every time I lose a friend I briefly become a better teacher.

Then I forget.

Bye, Christine

Thank you Steve Dembo and Discovery!

I had the rare and wonderful opportunity to hang with some edu-gliterati folks at Discovery Education's Beyond the Textbook last week. It was fun hanging with the circuit crowd, listening to them talk of gigs, comparing notes and frequent flyer miles. Many had an aura about them, and I chased most of them down for autographs. I felt like a kid in the candy store.

I know a few were surprised to see me there, none as surprised as me. I've never written a book, never started a WikiEduSomething or a #EduSomethingElse. I don't speak particularly well, though happy I can speak at all (I'm pretty durn deaf), and I'm not photogenic. I have no advanced education degrees, never wrote a piece for The Huffington Post, and I'd rather clam than tweet.


I was born lucky, though (ask anyone who knows me), so there I was, and I enjoyed every moment. Thank you, Steve!

Full disclosure: my expenses were paid by Discovery and I got a Kari Byron (from Mythbusters) bobblehead talking doll--which now belongs to B362.

John Spencer on data

As a result, I am known as the guy who "doesn't believe in data." And they're right. It's not a belief. It's a rejection or acceptance. I hold research at a high enough standard that I don't easily accept the counterfeits.

John T. Spencer, a mensch

A couple of hours ago, an old man new to fishing hooked a large smooth dogfish. Its emerald eyes stared at me in its last few moments as I helped him and his buddy hoist the yard-long fish over the jetty rocks.

There is no word to describe the intensity of green of the dying critter's eyes. I suggested that they bleed the fish (which they did), and that they knock it out before they do (which they didn't). Dogfish bleed the same bright red that we do, and it struggled just a moment after the artery was cut.

I don't have data for the suffering of a fish slapping its tail on a jetty wall while it bleeds into unconsciousness, but I knock them out anyway.

***

Measuring anything that involves humans can be messy, and measuring the progress of our human larvae in public schools is particularly difficult, complicated by our lack of consensus on just what we're trying to accomplish.

There is a concerted effort to discredit public spaces in general, and public schools in particular, in this fine land of ours. Those of us in education are not helping by clinging to magical beliefs that education is immune to old-fashioned research, leaving us prone to silver-haired, silver-tongued devils.

John Spencer's simplicity gets to the heart of the matter--don't easily accept the counterfeits. We'll get fooled now and again, even the beset researcher in science do, but let's not make it easy.

The Piltdown Man fooled the science community for 40 years, but eventually his fraudulent conception unraveled, only because of a consistent application of logic. The Piltdown Man did not fit in with the rest of the story.

Who among the edu-glitterati push the Piltdown Man?

How many of us in the education community have the tools needed to recognize fraud?

Full disclosure: I love John T. Spencer's blog, and I've appeared in one of his books.

The dogfish photo was from the Oregon Coast Aquarium

Action pseudo-research

 
My district's recent incursions into action research have been interesting. I have the extreme fortune of sharing my prep room with a retired bench research scientist, published in multiple peer-reviewed science journals. We are tackling a specific method of inquiry, but quickly realized getting any reasonable data will require far bigger numbers than we will likely generate in our classes.

Our administration responded reasonably, explaining that the process of looking at data generated in our classrooms will encourage teachers to look critically at specific classroom practices. No one is pretending that will will develop statistically significant findings (p <0.05).

In education, a field where Marzano's and Gardner's "research" cause real (and possibly destructive) changes in the classroom, the lack of concern for the validity of the studies used to measure effective outcomes scares the crap out of me. Charismatic personalities trample over available evidence.

On Twitter I stumbled onto a group of ed folks setting up an action research project. At least one university professor was involved, someone I've met, so I figured I'd jump in on the open invitation.

I wondered aloud about how we might generate statistical significance from our work; to be fair I wasn't clear if that was even the goal. I was told that my medical background imposed a biased logical positivistic view, one too narrow for endeavors such as this one, and that I need consider other ways of viewing the world, including "intentional observation," which is, ironically, exactly how science works.

Experiment is in fact intelligent and intentional observation.

Robert Boyle, Epoch Men, 1868

(I also happened to major in philosophy, leaving Michigan with a B.S. in philosophy back in 1982--logical positivism was declared dead back in the 1970's. *sigh*)

***

Medicine and education have scary parallels. Medicine only recently advanced beyond the snake oil stage, with doctors kicking and screaming every step of the way.

Docs like to treat things. Patients like to be treated. Docs like to get paid. Patients are not quite as happy to pay. Our motto is primum non nocere--"Above all, do no harm"--which is a whole lot different than "Make them better!"

Snake oil is (mostly) harmless for self-limited illnesses, it makes patients feel like they're getting something, and docs make money. You don't need antibiotics for the vast majority of cases of sinusitis. Most docs will prescribe it anyway.

Medicine started looking at itself back in the 1970s, around the same time logical positivism was declared dead by professional philosophers. I was in medical school when evidence-based medicine starting taking a hold, and it was both liberating and frightening--most of what we did we did because, well, that's the way it's always been done. Sound familiar?

Education also finds snake oil useful--and it is for those selling it. Lots of folks make lots of money selling snake oil.

But in education, snake oil is harmful. A child's education is not a self-limited illness.We need to pay more attention to what we know through our research than we know "in our hearts." We need to pay particular attention to the folks who hide behind pseudo-research, tossing out fluorescent graphs, cooked numbers, and charismatic smiles.

I'd be glad to participate in some research. Medicine abandoned leeches not so long ago. It's time we pushed some leeches out of education.

Yes, I know leeches are making a come back....

Photo of leeches from LiveScience

Spring!

 Yes, it's last year's, but I liked it then, and I still do. Seemed like the right day for this.

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'

'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.

Yeats' Crazy Jane makes sense mid-March. This is a hard time of year for mainstream churches. Words fall flat when the earth erupts again.

Today is the kind of day you count the old men in the neighborhood after a long winter. Still missing one, but he may be recovering from St. Patrick's Day. I will wander by his stoop again in a bit.

The cherry blossom buds are tumescent, ready to spew their sperm on our streets, our cars, our heads. Life is, again, for the living.

The big old moon reared up on its hind legs this evening. The clams are in trouble. I could feel the moon pull me along with the sea water. It seems unfair, raking clams when the moon sneaks up so close. The moonlight will dance on their siphons just past midnight tonight, and maybe a clam or two will share in the dance. They need not fear my rake tomorrow.

The crocuses have tossed off any sense of decorum, popping up pretty much anywhere they please.

The sun has returned, and with it, life. The old men left shuffle past and mutter hello, in shoes impossibly thick and black. They know, they know, what we all pretend to ignore.

Grace comes, again, unearned. None of us leave this life intact. Drink the wine, the sun, the pollen, the life.

I have spent too many of last week's hours indoors--I'm tossing this out there and taking a walk....

Discovery Education's "Beyond the Textbook" Forum, Part 3

OK, last one for now, folks. We'll resume our regularly scheduled programming.

Spring is breaking out all over and I'm missing it playing with abstract ideas.

And finally, my dream "textbook."

Science starts, and ends, with the natural world, the one we can consistently sense, the big mystery of whateverness, this ether, that we swim in.

Everything in a science class should get back to stuff and energy. If it's not grounded in the stuff of the world, it's not science.

The only stuff a child can truly know through her senses is the stuff she walks on, the stuff she breathes, the warm blush of sunshine on her face, the whiff of cherry blossoms blooming too early.

Textbooks can't do this.

Textbooks do what they're designed to do, provide a high density of information, 300 words per gram, millions of pixels per dram. They get sold, they get used, they get torn, they get tossed.

I have gotten some decent science out of some old textbooks--every year I drop an ancient, thick science book at the same time I drop a dime. And every time, the dime and the book pretty much hit the floor at the same time.

***

Let's forget about the physical context. Let's forget about the word "book." Let's forget about the way high schools traditionally approach science and focus on what we need.

We need a place for children to see their place in the natural world, a place where children fall in love with the critter beside them, a place that is as much theirs as it is of those imposing adult figures around them.

I am going to use North Cape May as my example--Leslie and  I spend most of our free time here, it's where we hope to live once I find a way to earn a living here, and most important, it's where our hearts sing. It's where I show children how to hold a live horseshoe crab, where I rake up quahogs that fill up my belly, where the tide rises and falls and rises again, as it has, as it will.

No book written for a national audience, or for a state audience, or perhaps even a county-wide audience can do justice to our patch of earth here perched on the Delaware Bay. Pretty much anyone who knows and loves the town they're in could say the same thing.

Every tool for science class needs to enhance a child's ability to observe and understand the patterns spinning in the figurative ether that surrounds us.

Every tool for science class needs to minimize abstraction. The abstract concepts need to build up from real interaction. A second grader can live with the Democritus view of an atom--split up something again and again until it is too small to be split again. That is a huge concept.

Make the world in the classroom synchronize with the real world of the child.

***

Teachers are flooded with tech toys tools--many are wonderful, but each is presented as a tool unto itself, each has a learning curve, and each will be replaced with something shinier, faster, slicker within a year or two.

Here in Cape May, like many towns, we are busy recording and observing the environment without much thought.

I can see what the sea level is down the road at this moment without taking a walk. I can see what it was a few days ago, and I can see where we expect it to be in a few days.
I can follow the weather.
I can follow the local groundwater levels, using USGS real-time data that goes back a decade. (I'm one of the few knuckleheads in town that thinks having a basement is a good idea. These charts matter to me)
I can peek at the harbor through webcams.
I can read the hyper-local news about people I know in town
I can see what fish were caught where in local waters.
I can walk down local streets on GoogleMaps.

I know about these things because I use them for things I like to do. I am sure hundreds of similar tools are available as well. It took me time to find them, to bookmark them, to develop my habit of scanning them.

I clam a lot. I need to know how much it rained during that last storm, I need to know the tides and the wind, I need to know what front is brewing. Had I no need, I'd never have found half of what I've found.

We already have something that does all this--it's called Facebook. Aside from privacy concerns (and they are not trifling), Mark Zuckerberg could corner the education market were he so inclined. (His early forays into Newark show his heart is in the right place, but he needs some better guidance.)
.
We don't need new sources of information--they will continue to pop up like toadstools in a spring cemetery. We need curators.

We don't to spend a whole lot of time developing the hardware--the kids already have it. They can take pics, record sounds, look up just about anything, and they have access to pretty much anything that can be reduced to binary language. We need curators.

Information is cheap. Wisdom is not.
We need curators.

***

So here's my grand idea for Discovery Education, or for Pearson, or Mark Zuckerberg, of for anyone else willing to try it.

Your sales force needs some work to do--textbook reps are going to go the way of telephone repair folks, who followed the milk deliverers' demise. Don't fire them just yet.

Good sales folk like people, tend to be a bit passionate about things, and enjoy traveling. They're well organized, and they can solve problems. I have a job (OK, a mission) for them.

Travel from town to town, get to know the locals, get to know their towns, get to know what tools are available--heck, even the cameras on traffic lights could prove useful. Which towns have Weather Bug stations? Which ones have the eccentric with a DaffodilCam? Which have beer league sports teams to follow?

Put together a town-wide package, get together the permissions needed to use the tools provided by the package, and serve as the town's technology curator. For free. Gratis. CHEEP!!! What mayor or superintendent or local wackadoodle could resist a chance to be part of something like that? (Think Patch.com.)

The tools are free anyway, but few towns have the energy or the creativity or the political will to assemble everything together. Or the money. Setting this up will cost money. The traveling curator needs to be fed and watered, no?

So what's in it for Discovery Ed et al? Good will first.

Now back in Silver Springs, these traveling curators have among the best tech folks money can buy. They can put together individualized packages that sit in the cloud (or more specifically, is some warehouse of servers in Maryland). If a teacher has access to local tools that requires no new hardware nor new skills, he will use it. Even for a fee.

But even this only touches upon the possibilities.

The kids are creating their own worlds today anyway, worlds that are dangerously magical. I'm a science teacher holding out against a culture of magical thinking, teaching too many kids who took Dorothy's ruby slipper world vision to heart. 

The kids record everything anyway--have them record the natural world around them. If a child takes a photo a day of a tree along their walk to school, Discovery can make it become a living documentary, showing the tree's annual events in time-lapse photography. In ten years, Discovery has the 10 year story of a local tree.

When classes run experiments, they can record their data through Discovery Education--and their experimental data can be stored and used by future classes.

When an unusual event hits town, like Irene's unwelcome visit last August, the children can record its effects, narrate how it affects them, take charge of the story.

What makes this so compelling for science is that the heart of science relies on a matter of faith: what happens here, in this spot, at this moment, would happen anywhere else if (and it's the if that makes science science) the same conditions hold.

If  child starts paying attention to the local natural stuff--and trust me, they're paying attention to all kinds of things most adults do not see--we have a chance to get our kids fascinated by science again.

Heck, if you need any pioneer curators, consider a few science teachers.

xkcd rules!!!!

Discovery Education's "Beyond the Textbook" Forum, Part 2

While some schools have fancy Madagascar hissing cockroaches, we made do with an American cockroach, the huge one found in norther Jersey.

A child volunteered that she her dad had caught one at work, and wondered if she might bring it in. I loved the idea, most of the class groaned, and the next day she waltzed in with a margarine tub poked with holes.

(This says a lot about the child who was curious, about her father who saved a "pest" for his curious child, about our town where kids can freely talk of cockroaches without being ostracized, and about our school where kids believe that bringing in cockroaches is an option. Think what you will, I love Bloomfield!)

Once the class settled down a bit--a 1 1/2"  live cockroach in a classroom beats the Krebs cycle any day--a few kids started paying attention to this critter, one they knew they were supposed to hate.

Cockroaches like to groom themselves--and our particular cockroach, when trapped in a Petri dish groomed her antennae incessantly like a nervous tic.

This is what a scientist sees:

Antennal grooming behavior consists of the following sequence of events: 1) medial rotation of the head coincides with the raising and extending of the foreleg opposite (contralateral) the antenna to be groomed; 2) the flagellum in the region of annuli 15-20 is contacted by the fore tibia and adduction of the foreleg bends the flagellum to the mouth parts; 3) the foreleg returns to the substrate; 4) rapid lateral movement of the maxilla and labium on the flagellum as it moves through the mouth parts; and 5) the flagellum returns to the original, extended position, and the maxilla and labium continue to move for a short time. This sequence of five events comprises one episode of antennal grooming.

A child sees a creature "cleaning" herself, taking care of herself, getting nervous--a child sees herself in the movements of a creature she was taught to hate, and an odd thing happens.

The child becomes interested in a cockroach, a once reviled critter. She looks some more. She falls in love. She becomes an entomologist.

***

You cannot love (or know) the idea of things unless you love (or know) at least one thing that represents that idea. A child who loves bugs loves them because she knows something about particular bugs.

You can go through life loving abstract ideas more than living, and many of us do. (Those who chase the abstract seem happy enough, and they're are plenty of days I do the same--Go, Giants! Our economy depends on this.)


 If you want to create children interested in science, though, the abstract must emanate from the real. You need to let them play with cockroaches and magnets and balls. You need to let them fall into puddles, to fall out of trees, to scrape knees as they master something they can truly know, not mere ideas pushed on them by a culture that honors magical thinking.

***

And what does any of this have to do with textbooks?

Any educational tool that honors the abstract above the real helps foster magical thinking. Magicians make lousy scientists, have no need for math, and design crummy bridges.

Traditional textbooks exist to be sold. The larger the market, the less attached to the real, to the local, they must become, unless "the local" means a market as large as Texas, whose laws affect the content of science textbooks.

Pearson started as a construction company, nothing wrong with that, and now aims to take control of the education business, whatever that means. It is a publicly owned company, PSO on the New York Stock Exchange, nothing wrong with that either, as long as it's understood that their primary obligation is to earn money for its stakeholders.

Pearson's latest financial data from Google

Our school bought a wonderful set of textbook's from Pearson last year--Campbell Biology, a wonderful and hefty book that I love to read. But I already love biology.

My students (in, ironically, the abstract sense) are not reading the book. They do not care how beautiful the photos are, how accurate the words, how much money their town spent on them. They do not dive into the website set up for them, they do use the CD that comes with the book.

But I bet if it had a photo of something we did in class last week they'd all take a peek at that page.

***

Discovery Communications, inc., is also publicly owned, you can follow them on NASDAQ. Discovery Education holds a huge influence in our classrooms, providing free digital and media (redundant?) through the internet. Pearson, of course, does the same, but the two are coming from different angles.

Discovery Education has bought a piece of my time--I've learned more about them in the past few days than the past decade. I'm not immune to influence, and I'm a sucker for anything that allows me to hang out with folks wiser than me.

They think I might have some ideas on how to reach kids through the next-generation tool--I'd love to drop the word textbook, it's too limiting--we'll find in our classrooms.

***

So why am I doing this?

It looks like fun.
1) We have been assured that this is not meant to be a direct promotional bid by Discovery--anyone who's been kidnapped by time-share schemes knows the dangers of committing oneself to a confined space.

It looks like fun
2) Steve Dembo wants us to spread our ideas publicly before we even meet. Not sure his bosses are keen on this, but his emphasis on sharing ideas openly makes this more than a junket. (/me waves to the Pearson folks....)

It looks like fun
3) I'm older than most folks bleating the tech story, and age has tempered my enthusiasm. A conference like this needs an old goat, a Luddite, a keeper of tradition, if nothing else than for amusement. If I had a choice, I'd take a slate board over a SmartBoard, for several valid reasons. (To be fair, though, my typewriter's collecting dust as I write this.)

It looks like fun
4) It's free and I'm cheap.

It looks like fun
5) I love train rides. Trains are older than planes, buses, cars, and rocket ships. You could look that up.

 It looks like fun
6) At the risk of being influenced, and there's no pretending that I am not, I get to have some input into an extraordinarily important process. Last time I got to do anything like this was back in 1993 when I served on a sub-subcommittee for the Clinton Task Force on National Health Care Reform chaired by his wife. Not sure I accomplished much, if anything, but I got a nice train ride and a few free meals (see 4 and 5 above).

 It looks like fun
7) I get to grovel and apologize (and apologise) to varied folks who have tried to drag me into the 21st century. (Lessee, I already apologized to Eric, there's Alex, Dean, Tom, good Lord, Jon, David--is there anyone online I haven't tangled with?)

It looks like fun
8) I have my Principal's blessing, Chris Jennings, who just won a NASSP Breakthrough School award last week in Tampa. We're good. We want to get better. Mixing with folks from around the continent can only help.

Next up?
My dream school toolkit....

Downside? I hate missing classes. We got a lot of stuff going on in Room B362, and never enough time.

Cockroach photo from Virginia Cooperative Extension, Virginia Tech, and Virginia State University, used with implicit permission.