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.

"Greatest achievement of organized science"

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.

Clamming, teaching, and flow

Got a mess of clams from the flats today while feeding a few green head flies. Seems a reasonable trade-off.

I've been borrowing my nephew's clam rake--mine needs a quick fillet weld to tighten a pair of rogue tines--and I've been fighting the new rake. It's blades are both sharper and thinner, but the handle much less sturdy. The rake weighs about half what my rake weighs.

I keep worrying that the handle will snap as I drag the tines through the muck, yet I still pushed down on the handle until near its breaking point.

After paddling out to the flat this morning and getting just a few clams after a lot of work, my back tightened. Not good any time, even less good when you're out alone.I figured I may as well get whatever clams I could anyway, and worry about the trip back once I loaded my bucket, but I had to change the way I worked.

Instead of fighting the rake, I let the rake glide over the flat, not because of some newfound wisdom, but because of  cranky erector spinae muscles. *clink*! A clam.

*clink* another and
*clink* another and
*clink* *clink* *clink*

Teaching is a lot like clamming (or skating or writing or anything that needs flow)--when you try too hard to dig for what matters, you're going to get weary in a hurry with just a few morsels of reward.

I forget this regularly.

Lammas, again

Yep, mostly the same post fourth 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.

All learning is local

A slug creeping outside our back stoop.

I suspect that Spinoza was not in love with his God-Nature but rather with his own system of ideas, which, whether true, false, or somewhere in between (as in all systems), seem to be the product of the mind and the library, not of living engagement with persons, places, things, events, all the infinite variety and particularity of the world we actually know.

Edward Abbey, Postcards From Ed

I'd make a lousy teacher in July, not an issue so long as we have summers off. (Yes, folks, we do!) I can fool myself into believing that kids are investing their time wisely sitting under the hum of fluorescence in mid-February, but there is too much light to fool myself now in mid-summer.

I just came in from the edge of the bay--the osprey and the tern diving into the bay even after the sun settled below the horizon reminds me the days are shortening now. (In June, the birds are full by sunset.)

A mid-winter's sunset over the bay.

All living is local.  We can talk to folks many miles away, but when we do, we are talking into a machine that is right here, now. It works because we convince ourselves that that voice, that face, are real. Most of the time, it seems to be enough.

All learning is local. We can talk of alps and oceanic trenches and kookaburras and what once was Rhodesia, but the kids figure out quickly that none of that is more real than the hum of those same fluorescent lights.

I can teach better with a horseshoe crab's tail and a patch of sand than I can with a Smart Board. While part of that reflects my obstinacy, much of it reflects a larger truth. 

A very old clam rake--it still works.

I loved Spinoza back when I studied him, and I love the trappings of systems during our cold winters when the world feels dead outside--but I no longer know what it means to be learned. If I had to give up either my esoteric knowledge of philosophical systems or my ability to rake clams on a misty mudflat, I'd give up Spinoza.

What are we asking the kids to give up?

Teaching What Matters

Written three years ago, but never posted.
Seems like a good time for it.

 

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery,

None but ourselves can free our minds.

Bob Marley

We're at that point now.
We have been there once or twice before in my lifetime. 

I know what fresh bread baked from wheat ground by my hands tastes like.
I know what blueberries off an early August bush taste like.
I know what wild dolphins sound like while I loll underwater in the Delaware Bay.
I know the moment of inevitability as I raise a stone above the eyes of a fish writhing under my hands.

I want to share this.

I know death of loved ones.
I know love.
I know fear in the eyes of a parent.
I know the look when a parent first learns her child is dead.
I know redemption.

I want to share this.

Time for us to stop looking at the one next to us, seeing what he will do.

Time to stop acting in fear.
We're lost, and knowing this liberates us.

Do what's right by your students, by their parents, by your town.
If we've lost the battle for democracy, and it's possible we may have, live well.

The children are watching us--we can, by our actions, give them faith that things will change.





Redemption.

"Blame" the blueberries I picked just a few moments ago.

And Jose Vilson.....

"I want to expand a child's world!"

Aside from my knee-jerk reactionarism to anything that smacks of missionary politics, I do wonder why so many of us assume that we need to "broaden horizons" of young human beings who have lived lives thus far unknown to us. This human stuff goes both ways, or should, anyway, especially since the youngters in a classroom have been coerced to show up.

So, a crank's view of common classroom practices.

New teacher: I want to show my kids the world!

• Do not show photos of galaxies to kids who have never seen more than a dozen stars under city skies.
• Do not read Blueberries for Sal to a child who has never picked fruit that goes directly into her mouth.
• Do not impose a microscope into a child's universe until she has had time to play with a magnifying glass.
• Do not make them do a project on some foreign mammal roaring in some foreign land.
• Do not allow calculators until a child has a need to shave.

New teacher: But I want to expand a child's universe!

Old fart: If you want to expand a child's universe, you're going to need to make a child know a little bit about it first hand. This may cause you, Mr. New Teacher, a little bit of time, money, and comfort:

• Schedule a night class trip to a meadow beyond the city lights. An evening of stars, lightning bugs, and even mosquito bites will last a lifetime longer than the latest fancy NASA photo of Stephan's quartet quintet.
• Find a damn mulberry tree (or whatever equivalent can be found in your neck of the universe) and let the kids munch a few berries. If you can't do berries, find a few dandelions. Or, heck, take another field trip.
• Buy a class set of magnifying glasses for under $15, less than you'll spend for that motivational poster telling kids that they're geniuses. 

A local critter--easy to keep!

• Collect some local  critters that fit in a mason jar, and let the kids care for them. With any luck, they'll learn something about copulation before they stumble on it "accidentally" through a classroom chromebook
• Keep wooden blocks, abacuses, slide rules,compasses, rulers, thermometers and all kinds of other digital devices that require no more power than provided by the hands and brains of their operators.

Not saying you shouldn't do the stuff on your "Expand a Child's Universe" list--just saying you introduce them to the one that exists before tossing them into the one defined by teachers.

Make sure the life you're trying to save is not just your own...