Guest post by Albert Einstein: What are you doing to the children?

  

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

Albert Einstein

Ah, a treat today! While London security focused on the Olympics, I snuck into the British Museum and grabbed a slice or two of Albert Einstein's brain tissues--while I couldn't get the whole thing, even half a brain rivals what a whole committee collaborating together produced for New Jersey's science standards..

Alas, Dr. Einstein's eyeballs remain locked up in a bank in NYC (you can't make this stuff up)--any typos and misquotations that follow are on me.

And my justification? Einstein once said a person “experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness." Well, I figured he'd not object to my li'l brain in a vat experiment if I raised him up for something he cared about dearly--teaching science.

Earlier experiment with a more intact brain

I asked Dr. Einstein to peruse Jersey's standards for the preschool crowd, children no more than a few dozen moons removed from the womb, practically pollywogs--if you look closely, some still have tails.

Excuse my imperfect use of language--your host may have been a physician, but his grasp of brain anatomy needs some work. It's as though he just shuffled my brain slices together like a deck of cards. [EDITOR'S NOTE: confession--I barely passed neurology. I'm colorblind, and all the brain tissue looked the same....]

I have been asked to examine the New Jersey Core Curriculum Science Content Standards, and am amazed a child manages to get to Kindergarten without hating science. The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives--and you've managed to create little adult clones

Use basic science terms and topic-related science vocabulary. 

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift! The terms, science terms if you will, can come later, much later. All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree, yet you do not require a child to know a hog from a horse bristle paintbrush before she splashes exuberant colors on a canvas. If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

Represent observations and work through drawing, recording data, and “writing.”     

Goodness, why not just let a child scribble thoughts in a notebook? What is this "recording data"?  Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.

When you get down to it, the whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. We're talking about toddlers, no?

When I was a little boy, maybe 4, I was amazed, amazed, by a compass--there had to be something behind things, something deeply hidden. I developed a lifelong passion looking at the world. Let's see how your education experts cultivate this love of the world.

 Display curiosity about science objects, materials, activities, and longer-term investigations in progress.

Enough, enough! "Display curiosity" is sufficient, and it is innate. A child, or anyone else who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.


Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.  What has happened to the concept of kindergarten, literally the "garden of children"? Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

 He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. Look at the madness of your standards.  It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

Disconnect me, Doyle! You asked me to read the standards, and now I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference what I think, so long as you pay more mind to data than to wisdom. If you want my opinion, go peek at Arthur Sasse's photo of me. Let me go back to my quantum sleep.

Arthur Sasse/AFP-Getty Images via Neatorama

Anybody want a slice or two of the old man's brain? Is anyone listening anymore?

Bold, italicized lines are Einstein's words, obviously lifted out of context, most from here.

Red, bold left-sided quotes taken directly from the NJCCCS here.

The "brain" photo is everywhere, from the movie The Brain That Wouldn't Die.

What do you care to know about the world?

Teaching matters.

We owe it to our children to get it right.

 What do you care to know about the world?

There's a place for what used to be called boredom, for empty spaces to slide into your mind. It's not particularly unpleasant, but it lacks the dopamine we've programmed our children, ourselves, to crave.

If you sit still long enough outside, you will see things, hear things, smell wondrous things you hardly knew existed. But you need to sit still. Without music, without a screen.  Close your eyes and listen. Sniff. Touch the earth.

We train our children to believe that we have mastered our universe. We teach them how to avert their eyes. We answer their simplest questions ("Why are people poor?") with You're too young to understand...It's complicated...It will make sense when you're older. We actively work to make our children jaded.

Science teachers, like art teachers, have an obligation to teach children how to seek what's true, if we hope to teach them anything at all. We cannot tell them.

Has any young child not been charmed by the edge of a July pond, or by a tray of watercolor paint? Both teem with countless possibilities that cannot be measured or tested. We cede control when we hand a child a paintbrush, a magnifying glass, a few moments of unstructured time.

Before you dare restructure the world of a child--the heart of teaching--dare to ask yourself what do you care to know about this world? If you do not yet know, get out of the classroom until you do.

What do you care to know about the world?

I have stared into the eyes of animals as millions of my triceps muscle cells release calcium ions, triggering almost simultaneous contraction, driving the club between the eyes of the critter I am slaying.

It remains an awful moment for me, that last instant.

Awful comes from agheful, "worthy of respect or fear," full of awe, full of fear, a word now reduced to meaning "very bad." We've long lost our sense of awe, at least those running the show now--if we had it, we'd not destroy the world mindlessly.

Yet when I mindfully take a life, so that I may eat, I slide into a rich universe devoid of words, but not of feelings, in the most basic sense of the word--the rhythmic writhing flesh in my hands now quivers chaotically, if the blow is true.

Yet to do so in a classroom would be obscene, an affront to our children, an act of career suicide, and (*gasp*) a deviation from our lesson plans,. with every minute programmed to match a standard designed by folks who long ago lost touch with what matters.

What do you care to know about the world ?

As fundamental as this is, that we are here on a planet, inextricably linked to each other and to everything else alive, and to many things not, many of us live in worlds that are but shells of the fundamental one held up by the ground.

Just like the earthworm, we eat, we breathe, we toss shite from our backside, we entangle together to share genetic memories we pass on to new life, and we die. We're of the earth, and for those who believe that this is but a tiny journey to bide time until another world finds them, may earthy joy find you before your last breath.

And you will draw a last, agonal breath from this world, the only one we can know, the world of art, of science, of writhing life, of decay, of dirt, of us.

The world worth knowing...

Watercolor tray from Officemax site here.
Other photos ours, usual CC applies.

"Why Smart People Believe Dumb Things"

 

Daniel T. Willingham is not just another pretty face. Robert Marzano, on the other hand, looks like he spends more time on a single eyebrow that Willingham does on his whole head, but to be fair to Marzano, he has a lot more hair to contend with.

I have read both men far more than most teachers (and administrators have), but for different reasons. Dr. Willingham (PhD, Cognitive Psychology, Harvard) and Marzano (PhD, Curriculum and Instruction, University of Washington) are both smart and credentialed, but only one's career depends on peer-reviewed, open research not sponsored by the very same folks paying for his study. Guess which one?

I've talked about Marzano's magic make-up before, but today I'd rather talk about someone who plugs truth.

***

Dr. Willingham's work will matter long after Marzano's carnival rides on back to Kansas. (Hey, if any souls in Kansas read this, I'll change his destination.) Willingham is not just a scientist, he's a scientist who writes books in a down to earth style that even (*ahem*) we education folk can grasp. (Hey, if you want to see his sciency stuff, go read one of his hundred or so articles in rags like Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.)

He's not as popular as he might be among the ednoscenti--he has diligently shown that Dr. Howard Gardner's (another man with magnificent eyebrows) "theory" of multiple intelligences has little evidence to support it--but his work will last long after he's dead, one of the habits of truths.

Willingham has just released a new book When Can You Trust the Experts?: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education --I can't plug it yet because I have not yet read it (though I will). I can push the first chapter "Why Smart People Believe Dumb Things" though--it's free and well worth reading.

I used to be a doc--we were trained in exactly this kind of thing, early and often, and yet we still fell into traps. That why drug companies gave away schwag. Turns out even physicians are human.

But just because we're human doesn't mean we need to be stupid. No matter how bushy the eyebrows.

One of the most frustrating facets of my ed career has been the herd-like acceptance of any "research" that makes us feel good.
When I screw up, fellow teachers, please speak up. Publicly. Loudly. So we can all learn.

Totally vs. fully human

A big ray washed up on our beach yesterday.

If you had a choice, would you be fully human or totally human? The dichotomy is strikingly simple--do you want to live in an orderly universe defined by human parameters, or do you prefer the dangerously chaotic mess of life we call "nature"? Giving nature a name is as silly as assigning one to a presumed Yahweh.

Names gives us the illusion that we know something about what we're talking about.

But we don't, because we can't, at least not with words like nature, or God, or infinity.

What does this have to do with education? Well, pretty much everything.  The current education reform movement has as many motives as it does players, and money is a huge part of the equation, but it is not the most dangerous part.

What's most dangerous is the belief we have more control than we do, that we spend too much energy debating the means without questioning the ends.

***

While walking along the edge of the bay yesterday, I stumbled upon a school of small fish tossing themselves up on the beach--as the waves licked the beach higher with the rising tide, the fish would again be submerged, then would again beach themselves just beyond the water's edge.

It made little sense until I saw the two eels working their way through the school, now stampeded together in a ball of writhing flesh, trapped between the beach and the slashing teeth of hungry predators.

I held a few in my hand, pondering how many it would take to make a small fish chowder, and how hard it would be to gut these tiny critters as I marveled at their colors, their strength, their liveliness.

Maybe only humans can appreciate the aesthetics of their prey, maybe not, but most of us aren't even capable of that anymore.

 ***

You can go to the mall, with programmed music, piped in aromas, electric light angled to help induce your atavistic gathering impulses, buy something molded by a machine from plastic polymers, and feel pretty good (but not quite good enough) about yourself.

by Kevin Sharkey, Martha Stewart living

Education can be designed for the total human, preparing a child for immersion in a world without limits to growth, a world defined by data and dollars, a world full of human noise and little else, a world nimbly navigated by the "college and career ready" cognoscenti.

Or it can be designed for the fully human, preparing a child for immersion on a place called Earth, a world defined by limits and cycles, a world incomprehensibly complex, a world defined by life and by death, a world we once knew as home.

My home probably looks very much like yours. I am more total human than fully human. I'm working on this. Hundreds of animals breathed their last in my kitchen. Under the counter, millions of yeasts are now churning blueberries and honey into wine. My yard has patches of basil and Brussels sprouts growing on it, started from seed when  the ground was still frozen.

Living can be terrifying, and total humans can spend a lifetime avoiding it.
Life can be mystifying, and total humans share their expertise on how you should live it.


I'm not avoiding living, and I'm not trusting anyone to tell me how to live. Neither should our children. Mr. Duncan thinks I should carve your child into a cog to fit a machine that cannot be sustained. I won't do that.

How can anyone teach anything then? I'm not sure The best I can do is show children how to see things for themselves, things outside of themselves. Hard not to fall in love with the universe when we sit still long enough to see it.

Blue crab claw, recently dead.

What do we get in return for our terror, our uncertainty, our mortality?


We get to dance to our own voices, voices shared by countless critters within the sound of our songs. Our fingers dance on a guitar, clumsily at first, making strings vibrate only as we can. We each have a verse to sing, to add to our universal song.

We get to eat foods exploding with flavor, animals that were alive only hours ago, plants harvested after sunrise, shared by sundown, prepped using our hands, as we share our stories in the kitchen. We can earn our appetite grinding wheat berries, kneading bread, rewarded with warm, filling bread made from wheat alive just hours ago.


We get to drink peach melomel brewed from the work of thousands of bees and millions of yeasts, nectar of the gods for any humans who take the few hours needed to splash together ripe fruit, honey, and water, and feed it to some hungry yeast.

In a word, we get joy.

***

To be fully human threatens those who live in a totally human universe. It hurts to be reminded what we've lost, and it's terrifying to glimpse Chaos, Yahweh against the Leviathan, death, especially living in a culture that fears toilets more than Teflon.

"Destruction of Leviathan," Gustave Doré, 1865

If you would prefer not to, after seeing the joy and terror found in the depths of the living universe, well, that may be the rational choice in an irrational culture, where living (but not dying) is easy.

To educate a child without letting her see what her culture has ripped away, to keep her mind occupied with monitors and machined music, to program her to fit into an abstract concept of economy that takes precedence over life itself, is criminal.

"Career and college ready" makes for a snazzy slogan, and may even be what the totally human crowd (Arne, Michelle, and their gang of billionaires) crave. Me? I prefer a child in love with the universe. Giver her a choice.

Anything less dehumanizes us.

Glowsticks photo from Kevin Sharkey via Martha Stewart website.
Other photos by me, taken yesterday along our bay.


How many of us have tasted bread made from our hands from freshly milled wheat?

Universal truth

"It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.” 

Neil deGrasse Tyson 

I have never regretted a moment under the sky; I have wasted far too many under fluorescent lights.

We are fascinated by our own noise, by our creations, by our feigned immortality. With all the noise today, with fewer private spaces left, a child has to work hard to see the universe.

(Pssst....you cannot see it through a monitor. You cannot smell it in a mall. You cannot hear it through a speaker. You cannot taste it through Doritos. You cannot feel it through a Logitech Rumblepad 2. You can immerse yourself in the human world, true, with all kinds of action to keep you busy until you die, but you'll miss out on the universe.)

We define progress by income, not happiness. We define knowledge by information, not wisdom. Most damning, we define ourselves in terms of other humans alone, erasing who we are, carved out from the clay, the air, the water, and the teeming life that lives on us, in us, through us, particles of matter dancing to the rhythm of the sun.

***

Mid-July, the edge of the bay is littered with horseshoe crab molts--thousands of these ancient critters are shedding their shells within a mile or two, pushing their way through a seam in the front, shedding their old skin.

The critters are still alive--these are just the molts.

This morning I collected a few for class, and also stumbled on a plastic toy giraffe, ridiculously bright under a slate gray sky. The giraffe was made in China, or so it says on its belly. I bet every child in our school could identify it. I bet only 1 in 10 could identify the horseshoe crabs.

What, really, can any of us know about a giraffe, a creature as foreign in these parts as a unicorn? Yet children love giraffes, not knowing it's our own images we've fallen in love with, each of us a Narcissus staring at our reflections on our screens.

Which can we know better, the horseshoe crab or the giraffe?

Narcissus could not see the life teeming below the surface of his reflection. Few of us even look today. Not one of us grasps the vastness of life that surrounds us--a spoonful of fertile soil defies our imaginations.

If teaching science matters in high school, it matters for this--we need to show our children that there exists a universe under the pool that shimmers with false beauty.

I love to show others where to find clams, literally beneath their feet, clams creating their hard shells out of seemingly nothing, taking in countless organisms themselves. Once a child has pulled a clam out of the muck, the mudflat becomes larger than the life the child once knew.

My clam skeleton graveyard, eventually used in the garden.

Before we plunge into STEM education, before we raise yet another generation unaware of where food comes from or feces go, we all need to take a few walks outside, under the sky, unplugged, away from the human noise we pretend means something.

Wild clams

This is an old post, from September, 2008. I liked it then, and I still like it.

I have no idea why I get so excited by clams--every clam I've caught this year has been released. Very few folks practice a catch and release program with clams. Next week's clams, however, may well taste garlic and butter when they open for the last time.

They are gifts. From Creation. From nature. From God. Gaia. Big Bang. Matsya.

Plenty of cultures, plenty of words. None of them work, true, and there was a time I could be drawn and quartered for saying as much, but most local parishes don't properly worship the clam.

Oh, they try. Singing, praise, lovely noise.

But no clams.

I am looking for a church that recognizes the glory of clams. If you can see the sacred in a clam, you can see.

---

One of my students wanted to hold Mr. Clam. She was a little nervous, but I assured her that clams are not particularly vicious. Indeed, few things are as calm as a clam.

When she held it, she was impressed by its heft.

Clams are dense with life. They have all kinds of things tucked inside their porcelain universe--siphons, feet, hearts, gills, even a nervous system.

Well, "system" may be an exaggeration. Peter Singer says it's OK to eat clams because they don't have such a sophisticated nervous system. Professor Singer is a sophisticated human teaching sophisticated ethics at the very sophisticated Princeton University. He's also an avid animal rights advocate, accusing humans (um, that's us) of "speciesism."

But he draws the line at clams.

If I were ever to eat dinner with Professor Singer (perhaps at a clambake) I'd ask if scallops, with their eyes and mobility, get a break.

---

We are talking about energy transfer in biology class--sun to plants to a critter to you. A few thoughtful humans skip the critter. Less taxing on the biomass to skip the middle critter.

I am not a vegetarian. Maybe I could become one if biologists reclassify Mercenaria mercenaria, but until they do, best I can call myself is a clamitarian.

In Richardson Sound just west of Wildwood some little necks are siphoning about a quart or two an hour, trapping plankton that trapped sunlight.They are growing. They are dense. They are good. And tomorrow, a few of them will end up in my bucket.

Teaching biology in public school is a delicate balancing act. I avoid politics. I avoid issues PETA holds dear. I am a timid, untenured teacher.

Until you talk about life. You cannot talk about life without bumping into mystery. I no longer pretend I do not feel the bump.

I do not pretend to know what the bump is all about. No one knows. A lot of folks pretend they do, and they make a lot of money.

But I acknowledge the bump:

Sorry, class, that's a religious question. An important one.
But not for me to answer.

I couldn't answer it if I wanted to. To say even that much, however, might offend those who pretend that they do know the answer.

If I do my job well, though, the kids will figure this out on their own.

---

Today I showed the stock market's climb since the turn of the century. There's a little downward blip in 1929, but overall it climbs about 11% a year. If you were immortal, you could not lose in the stock market.

I'm not immortal.

I talked about net primary productivity, solar energy, and limits to biomass produced here on Earth. There are limits.Then I show the stock market graph.

I had no idea when I was showing it today that the market was crashing. Even if I had a clue, I would not have mentioned it to class. This is biology class.

Still, there are limits. We are all (yep, even the wealthy among us) dependent on how many photons from the sun collide with Earth. Hydrogen fused with hydrogen creates helium, a little less massive than the hydrogen atoms that fused. What's no longer mass is now energy.

Go tell that to your local priest.

---

We tamed the Garden of Eden. Darn near killed it, and may yet.

We will never tame the sea. We may kill it, but it will not bend.

Clams and skates and croakers and jellyfish and fluke and toadfish and anything else with gills surrounded by water are all wild.

I want to bring the sea, the wild, to my classroom. The closest I come is the dozen or so horseshoe crab molts tossed around the room.

It's not close enough. Not nearly.

Garden of Eden picture from Our Day in the Light of Prophecy, W.A. Spicer,via the Gutenberg Project; the clams via Wikimedia Commons (anonymous)

Starving for technology

Just because you're going forwards
Doesn't mean I'm going backwards.

Billy Bragg, "To Have and To Have Not"

We keep pushing new technologies, harder than we push for full bellies and safe homes for our children.

An hour or two bouncing around various social sites shows where our priorities lie. We're more likely to survey our students to learn what "devices" they have at home than to learn what they have eaten the past 24 hours.

It's not a fair dichotomy, true, but I bet a "Luddite" teacher who knows the home situation of each and every one of her students gets better results than a Google Certified Teacher, everything else being equal.

And yes, of course, we can have both, and often do--but you wouldn't know it from the electronic conversations. Of the two, though, only one is necessary.

The original Luddites were skilled craftsfolk who objected to the industrialization of what once was a decent way of life. They used tools themselves. They fought their impending loss of autonomy. And now the term "Luddite" carries with it derision.

***

I can do things with a blackboard I simply cannot do with a SMART Board. The SMART Board can do plenty of things a blackboard cannot. I am not convinced we gained more than we lost, at least for science classes, where drawing matters, especially for a left-handed teacher who loves to use dotted fields. (Our computers cannot handle a staccato of dots, though it is amusing to see the dots fill in a field like stars filling a dusk sky--and about as fast.)

But this is not about whether the SMART Boards should replace blackboards--this is about how we decide which technologies to use. No one asked me if I wanted a SMART Board, and just bringing up a discussion like this brings out deep feelings among the pro-tech crowd.

Read the history of Luddites. Learn why they did what they did.

We're in the process of spending billions of dollars on testing and test prep as our House of Representatives works to cut $16 billion from our Federal food assistance programs.

Here's an idea--ask teachers to fast for a day for every new tool they use in class that costs more than, say, $200. Oh, wait, that would be ridiculous!

We'll ask a few kids to fast instead.

Socrates taught well with a stick and some sand.

And I bet he didn't use UbD, either....