Daphnia dance while the children cry

The anger, the sadness, the tears of students are real.
It's been a long February, but it's more than that.

I spent some time yesterday gazing at a colony of daphnia dancing among the elodea in the last hour of sunlight angling through the glass world they live in. Bubbles of oxygen streamed up from the plants, bubbles made up of broken water molecules, slashed by the sun's energy, now used by the same daphnia as they go about doing whatever daphnia do.

Paul Hebert at the Public Library of Science, via wikimedia (CC)

Eat, rest, move, have sex, make more daphnia, and sometimes (so it seems) doing nothing at all.

I don't do much for the daphnia--just add a little bit of water to the container now and again. I do not know where they came from, and if I were not a modern sort, they'd be enough evidence to persuade me that spontaneous generation is real.

Been an interesting couple of months, reminders of my mortality marked by a heart that beats to its own drummer, and I am no longer so blasé about the tears of the young ones in front of me. I am part of a system that is breaking the kids.

I put no pressure on my daphnia, who dance the day away. They already know how to live.

I put too much pressure on my lambs, who no longer see the daphnia, and would find it strange to see an older man spend so much time staring at a watery world on  a windowsill.

Too few of us know what matters, yet we insist on dictating to young humans just that.

Why AP grates...

Part 1--Part II has the good news!

AP Biology
January 2009

PARADE THROUGH THE KINGDOMS¹

(…more like a death march, than a parade, but it’s Biology! Yay! ☺)

The above is taken from an assignment given at a selective private Catholic girls high school. I recognize the gallows humors, even use it, as I drag my lambs through a similar course. I have to. It's audited by the College Board, and students, parents, administrators, board of education members, and Superintendents will walk through fire to get the coveted AP® Course Audit stamp on a transcript.

I am part of this lunacy. First, the bad news....

I teach AP Biology, or at least try to, to seniors, many who are taking far too many AP courses. There are many good reasons to take AP courses, but no good reasons to take too many. Students feel the pressure of the admissions wars. If both Punch and Judy want a shot at Elite U, and Punch takes an AP science because "it looks good on his transcript," well, Judy thinks she needs to do the same. I get two uninterested seniors for the price of one.

Our school administration encourages children to take AP, as many do, in the escalating war of school rankings. If New Jersey Monthly, a regional rag clearly read by folks with a higher opinion of themselves than I have of myself (just ask them) judges schools by the "number of AP tests offered compared to the total number of juniors and seniors (a calculation designed to avoid penalizing smaller schools)," and your local school board worries as much about property values (as it should), then there will be subtle pressure to push kids into the AP classes.

If you are Gaspar Caperton, President and CEO of the College Board, earning making over $800,000 in compensation a year (about $95/hour for every hour he breathes), you are under a bit of pressure to push your product. And he does. The College Board sells test prep materials for its own tests, materials some of my students cannot afford. The College Board lobbies politicians.

If you are the President of Elite U, and want to keep up your US News and World Report rankings, you need to sell your school to children who have no shot at getting in. Part of your rating is based on the rejection rate of first time college applicants. The more you reject, the higher your score. You're kind of stuck with the numerator, the number of slots you have open, so you best boost the denominator, how many applied. You are under pressure to sell dreams to the impressionable.

Result? We have a generation of public school seniors compromising their health in a battle mutually assured destruction as they struggle to get into colleges that pretend they have a shot.

The CEO of the College Board, the President of Elite U, the editors at NJ Monthly and US News and World Report make good coin, high school administrators keep the board and parents at bay, and the students, literally, break down and cry.

I see the tears. The children are in an impossible place. They live at the pinnacle of human civilization, they have food on the table, roofs over their heads, and youth in their veins, and they are crying.

It's easy to say they're just spoiled, or weak, or lazy, and many of those shepherding them say just that. But when I hear that a student toils away in a mall selling shoes so that she can afford to pay for a series of tests to measure how much she "knows" in subjects she only took out of fear, well, I think of the $16,000 compensation Mr. Caperton pulls down each week.

The College Board logo and the US News and World Report photo are from their respective sites.
And now for the good news.....

Montclair High School will be screening Race to Nowhere on November 30th, at 7:30 PM.
You can register here.

Don't tread on me (or the commons)

I am not inherently opposed to charter schools. 
I am opposed to outsiders narrowing public spaces in my community.
Call me provincial, parochial, or even a local yokel.
We lost much of the commons years ago.I'm fighting hard for what's left.

"If it were up to local municipalities, it would essentially kill charter schools." 

Christopher Cerf, Acting Commissioner of NJ

The commons still exist. We still have community spaces, shared by all, that define who we are. We breathe the same air. We drink the same water--at least those of us who avoid the bottled nonsense.

I clam a tidal flat owned by no one, shared by all. Tidal flats are gifts of nature, of god, of grace. I did not earn it. I limit my haul to what I can reasonably share with my clan before the next low tide.

Public education still belongs, tenuously, to local communities. I pay thousands of dollars a year to support our school system, as do my neighbors. Our board of education meets every two weeks, people who live in town, people who I meet on the street. We work together to create a public school district. It's hard work, and it's not cheap.

Democracy has a price.

***

I just got back from the Bloomfield High Spring Choir Concert. The exuberant young voices brought tears to my eyes (shhh....don't tell anyone). The concert was free.

I've taught 1st generation Haitians and Ecuadorans and Chinese and Dominican Republicans and Filipinos and Albanians and Greeks and Costa Ricans and Viet Namese and British and Bosnians in the few years I've been here.

Imagine a small tidal flat separated into fiefdoms--this flag on the north end, this flag on the south, you get whatever (and only whatever) clams under your flag.

It wouldn't work.

There's a move in a nearby town to set up a Mandarin charter school. About a hundred schools in the States cater to Turkish culture. Folks want to set up a school, well, no law against it, and I have no beef with them. Folks want to spend public money to make them run, though, and now we have a problem.

A very big problem.

***

Anyone who believes the point of school is to improve the workforce available for private business fails to grasp the concept of the commons. Anyone who believes the point of school is to make kids ready for college and the global economy fails to grasp the concept of the commons.

Without a commons, there is no real community, and maybe we're there already. If you know more about the American Idol judges than you do the family across the street, you're a bigger threat to our republic than some ragged Taliban fighter protecting some poppy seeds in a land you cannot pronounce.

He's not likely to plant a flag on my mudflats, our mudflats. But you might.
And I'm going to spend what's left of this lifetime making sure you don't.

Flag photo from USA FlagSupply.com site.
On Monday the Georgia Supreme Court "struck down a law empowering a special statewide commission to approve...charter schools." Go Georgia!

SOS March: Our stories matter

If I could start again
a million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way....

Trent Reznor

My son's toes were cut up pretty good, my daughter's shiner began its inevitable transition from a dull red to the eggplant hue it promises to be. Leslie and I left without any wounds to discuss, but at our age, that's cool. I only had one scuffle, but over the next few days, months, and years, should I be so blessed, it will become another story that defines our clan. Yep, the Dropkick Murphys are in town.

When American Irish get together, it feels familiar--there's a wonderful tension. No one's looking for a fight, but no one's backing off from one either. We share history, mostly consistent with glaring discrepancies--truth matters more than facts.

Our story is not particularly compelling because we're Irish--it's compelling because we're human. Our story is universal, our particulars emanating from an Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger. Just about every culture paying attention, true to its history, can say the same thing.

Every culture that shares stories from more than a generation knows love and death, knows kindness and injustice, knows redemption. The danger, a real one, is believing that only your culture shares these things.

Humans are tribal--just look at Facebook. But we're not immortal--just look at your folks a generation or two ahead. It's a fine line between tribalism and racism, one often crossed, especially when times get tough. The best stories remind us of our worst behaviors.

My sister, when she was still alive, traveled for months through rural Pakistan--she spent an afternoon having tea in a Hunzakut home--and everywhere the same stories, the same shared meals, the same kindness to "strangers," thousands of miles away in the Hunza Valley.

***

I am marching tomorrow because we've lost our way, and I want to see the faces of those who still have stories worth sharing. If the story ended all shiny and happy, I'd stick to my television. Our human story, though, never ends, even as mine winds down.

I teach to share the story.

I am charged with teaching natural history, a small but real part of our history. 

***

Teachers need to be careful about some things--our march is tribal, and if we're careless, our words become exclusionary.

Yes, we work hard, but just about everybody works hard.
Yes, we're losing autonomy in the workplace, but just about everybody else has, too.

I work hard as a teacher, but I worked hard as a dock worker, as a doc, as a lab tech, as a lawn cutter, as a salesperson. We all work hard--we must not ever forget that when anyone one of us speaks, we speak for all.


We need to focus on what we value, because our values are shared values that matter to everyone who loves, everyone who stays true to this human thing, which is intimately tied to the land we walk on, the air we breathe.

If we forget our collective pasts, the joys and the injustices, the happy births and the agonal deaths, the stories that matter, then we lose our reason to teach.

Those who teach just to make a living won't be there tomorrow. Neither will those who teach without passion, without hope, without love. Everyone who shows will have stories to share, stories to bring back home, stories that shape lives.

***

Johnny Cash took Trent Reznor's song story "Hurt," and made it something new, and old. Reznor had reluctantly agreed to let Cash use it, worried about Cash's take on it. He needn't had worried:

I pop the video in, and wow... Tears welling, silence, goose-bumps... I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in, totally isolated and alone. [Somehow] that winds up reinterpreted by a music legend from a radically different era/genre and still retains sincerity and meaning — different, but every bit as pure.

Alternative Press, #194, September, 2004, via Wikipedia

***

Sincerity and the search for meaning keep us (teachers, students, families, towns) together.

Teachers still have a rare privilege in our culture--we tell stories for a living. Classrooms that work are woven with the words of all within the room. I do not want to lose my voice. I do not want my students to lose theirs. So I will march, and I will sing, and chant, and maybe even dance. I hope you do, too.

The Dropkick Murphys are the best paddy punk band in the world.

My sister's birthday

Written by Leslie, my love, about my sister.
She was killed by a Christian missionary who told me it was God's will.

Mary Beth Doyle's birthday falling at the start of the school year is always a reminder to me to approach my classes with the warmth, wisdom, compassion, and humor that she brought to every moment of life. Particularly with the way the world is now, I hope to have the strength she had. I wrote this almost 13 years ago and shared it here before; seems like a moment to share it again:

"I am at work, sitting under my desk, listening to Mary Beth’s voice. I have done this several times this week. It could become a bad habit. There’s hardly room for me and the computer under here. I’m hoping no one comes to the door. It would be difficult to explain why you’re under your desk, listening to your dead sister-in-law speak about avoiding toxins in everyday life, holding back tears, again.

The radio interviewer is good; his voice is warm and clear and he asks pithy questions that open up the conversation to right where MB wants it to be. But her musical, low-pitched voice doesn’t carry well through the desk from the speaker of the computer tucked underneath. Even with the volume up high, I can’t make out her words. So I try sitting underneath, right next to the speaker. This works, and I find out I kind of like it down here.

Mary Beth and I met almost thirty years ago, before I was dating or married to her brother. We did some dumb things together; not lethal or illegal or the kinds of things you don’t tell your kids, just dumb in the ordinary sense. ‘Cause they seemed like they might be fun at the time. Like going up a down escalator. That kind of thing.

One day, way back before real life had set in, we were at a pinball joint on the Jersey Shore in Long Branch with a bunch of friends. Wizard World. My favorite pinball machine was “Old Chicago”, beautiful Art Deco shapes in pink, black, silver and tan. But after hearing the “special” light thunk a few times, I was ready to call it a night. MB was done with whatever she was playing, too, so we walked down to the beach.

The waves were huge that night; there’d been a storm recently. Salty spray speckled us, so we figured, what the hell, why not walk out on a jetty? The flat black rocks were slippery, but it was a beautiful night, and the view back from the end of to the beach and the boardwalk lights was lovely. Until the first wave hit us.

Now, waves don’t usually break across the jetty; it stands up pretty high. After all, that’s what it’s there for, to limit and control the waves into some kind of polite, sloshy order. But some combination of high tides and offshore storm was sending these waves slap across our path, threatening to knock our legs out from under us.

Cleverly, they’d waited till we were out at the end and coming back to pull off this little bit of theatricality. I can attest that there were no drugs or other mind-altering substances involved, but MB and I thought that this effort by the ocean to bat us off the jetty into possible deaths by skull-crushing rocks or drowning was just the funniest thing ever. We kept plowing forward, laughing, and waves kept crashing around our knees. When we finally made it to the beach, we were soaked to the skin, and still convulsed with laughter.

Her brother, my future husband, thought, I think, that we were nuts—you know, a piece of driftwood in those waves would’ve knocked you both off. But, on the other hand, I like to think we’re two of his favorite people, and he’s been known to do a couple needlessly life-threatening things in his time. Eventually, the three of us ended up at the same college.

Eventually, I married her brother, and our lives followed different trajectories as we became young parents, while MB traveled the world, providing my kids with a really cool postcard collection—who else had regular correspondence from Turkey, Israel, Egypt, France, Germany, Argentina, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh? She was the exotic aunt who swept into our tiny apartment with dolls and elephant puppets from India, and tales of camel rides in Egypt, baby lion pets in Sri Lanka, tea every afternoon for a summer in Turkey. And whenever she visited, everyone danced.

As time passed, she settled in Michigan and became an important mover in the environmental health and justice movement. Two jobs and two kids kept Michael and I pretty busy. No matter what else was going on, though, we knew we’d always see MB in June. Our extended family spent a week every summer at Cape May on the tip of the Jersey Shore. Michael and MB and I bought kayaks and hauled them there, us from North Jersey, her all the way from Michigan. We paddled every chance we could get.

The other time we saw her regularly was Christmas. A nonbeliever, she nevertheless came to Christmas Eve service for a number of years with us. She liked the music and the candle lighting, but especially, I think, she adored the afterwards tradition wherein our family and whoever was visiting drove to the next town to see an elaborate Christmas display including two-story wooden houses filled with Santa’s elves and Biblical characters which moved when a bystander pushed a button, lots and lots of lights, piped-in carols, and live reindeer (really). Now, that was her kind of Christmas celebration!

Afterward, she would wait up with me for the kids to fall asleep to help put the presents under the tree, and roll her eyes at my inability to resist over-consumption despite knowing better. She and I often sat up long after everyone else had fallen asleep, me drinking Amaretto and her Sambuca, watching the tree lights blink, and catch up on each other’s lives.

Mary Beth had an uncanny ability, and this was repeated over and over by speakers at her memorial service, to understand you at your best, and help you through your worst. Some years ago, when I felt my life was falling apart, it was she who strode beside me on the jetty, acknowledging how slippery the rocks were, and how goddamn sneaky the waves had been, but fairly sure, I think, that I’d get back to the beach. Which, in the end, I did.

So when I opened the door to the sight of two policemen on my front porch, on a beautiful Saturday morning last fall, asking if my husband was home, and if he had a sister named “Mary,” nothing in me was prepared to hear of her death on a dark Michigan road the evening before, and I wanted to scream, No, no! her name is Mary Beth, you’ve got the wrong house.

So here I am, now, sitting under my desk, listening to her voice full of reassurance and grace, gently explaining how to protect your children from household toxins, just about a month before she died. The day of her memorial was declared “Mary Beth Doyle Day” by the governor of Michigan, we were told, and a couple months later, a portion of a Michigan bill designed to remove toxic flame retardants from the environment was named after her, because she’d worked so hard on the issue.

And her message on this broadcast, which I listen to over and over, is to be vigilant, to do the best you can, raise your voice for justice, and then sleep well at night. And that’s what I’ll try to do, if I can get out from under this desk, off this jetty, back to the beach."

Some things you just never recover from.

The burning tears of St. Lawrence

The stock market tumbled a bit today.

If I were paying attention, I might release some more stress hormones worrying about retirement. But the plants in my garden grew just the same.

The Federal Reserve is buying more Treasury's, and the sky may be falling.

No matter--tonight the sky is falling, as it has each August, as it will--the Perseids peak. Get outside, look up, and watch pieces of a comet fry as they hit our atmosphere.





Oh, you can look at the purty pictures by National Geographic, and you can blather on about radiants and ZHRs and all kinds of nonsense, but none of that will take you back a few thousand generations as a brilliant bolide breaking across a sky we rarely even notice anymore.

You can feel the oxytocin wash over you as the night's cool air reminds you that we are, after all, part of this world, the real one, the one that will exist long after the words "Dow Jones" fall from our vocabulary.

The Perseid photo is from National Geographic here.

Little Scientists, Inc.

fet·ish/ˈfetiSH/

Noun:

An inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit. A course of action to which one has an excessive and irrational commitment.

Guess the goggles aren't needed for the pre-pubescent crew.
That looks suspiciously like a carboy of homebrew sitting on the scientist's right.

Unless you give a child a reason to want to know something, to know the world, then getting them all gooey-eyed thinking that they love what passes for science in order to please mama is just cultivating a fetish.

If we continue to push science as a religion, a cult with idolized props--the lab coat, the goggles, the geek 'tude--used to induce awe through glorious displays, well, we'll keep getting what we've been getting. Before we can hope to create more scientists, we ought to focus on creating more thinkers.

I'd like to keep our fetishes in the boardroom and the chapel--both indoor places defined by humans, where magical attachment to objects (flow charts and holy books) enhances our worlds of magical thinking. Our magic worlds follow an internally consistent blend of logic and lust, that allows us to makes some sense of the universe on our terms.

Nature don't play that way.

While many of us have been vicariously living through Natalie and Justin and Prince Harry, a few have stumbled on amazing stuff. Photons erupting out of nothingness, neutrinos defying basic laws of the universe-- a very few among us giving us knowledge we'll probably misuse, again and again.

***

Science for children, for anyone, starts with the flick of a minnow's tail, a dragon fly cocking its head in a child's direction, with a mud pie that falls apart if too wet or if too dry. Before you can learn how to predict, you need to learn how to see.

You don't need iPads or Vernier probes or simulated computer programs. You don't need fancy "scientifical" equipment.You just need curious children (a redundancy),  a door that lets children out as easily as it lets them in,  and an interested adult or two to guide them..

We keep shoving kids in concrete buildings, away from their clan, away from Grandma's stories, earlier and earlier and earlier. Away from sunburn and skinned knees and bruises and tears, away from the air, the sky, the sun, the puddles teeming with life, away from the only laboratory that matters in science--the natural world.

***

Science starts with a child outdoors,  it starts within the sulci of the convoluted mush of nerve tissue sitting in our skulls, it starts with our senses.

You cannot see a whole world in a drop of pond water if you've never seen to see the world you live in. We don't need Junior Scientists© donning their fetish garb to impress adults whose understanding of the universe goes no farther than The Big Bang Theory sitcom.

Children are just as more likely to get there reading W.B. Yeats than they are watching a rocket launch on a monitor. They're even more likely to get there if they're allowed to wander around this fine world of ours, chasing whatever interests their souls outdoors, becoming part of the world so many adults no longer realize even exists as they slowly dissolve in front of their huge television screens, inanimate objects inhabited with the spirits of the famous and the fictitious, the fetish in the living room.

Every time I walk home in the dark, seeing the eerie blue manic light leaking through drawn shades, I wonder how we hope to create anything resembling scientists, or even human.

The photo was by  Matt Stamey for the Gainesville Sun found here.

The definition of fetish came from dictionary.com.

Napkin ed

If you cannot teach someone with no more than a napkin and a pen, or less, you should not teach.

A few reasons why the napkin and pen (or beach and a stick) method is superior to anything that requires electricity:

• The nature of napkin ed requires one to one teaching. Both the teacher and the student are exposed, limits of knowledge tested. As uncomfortable as this may be, it's the heart of education--the ledge of ignorance for both the student and the teacher is an integral part of the process.
  
  
• It's cheaper. I like cheap. Cheap! Cheap! Cheap! I'm not blowing off mountaintops, damming rivers, or splitting atoms.
  
  
• Any drawing used requires intimate knowledge by the teacher. Hand-made drawings matter more than any fancy illustration you can toss up on a Smartboard. The value of the process of etching a drawing live, with the student watching, cannot be overstated. It's not an easy thing to do without an exquisite knowledge of the point you are making. Electric palettes cover a lot of ignorance. (Darwin's On the Origin of Species had one illustration, a crude, hand-drawn picture of a branching "Tree of Life.")

Most of us doing this gig for any length of time can wow our young charges with flashing lights. We are performers, entertainers, dragging bored children through curricula they see as pointless.

So long as our job is to instill a common cultural litany, well, high tech pizazz works just dandy.

If you want to teach a child how to think, though, be careful with the new tools. If you are letting an electronic third party make a point in your classroom, and it does a better job than you can, well, draw your own conclusion.

You can do better. It might take time, it might require more work, it might even cause you to burst out in tears now and again.

You wanted to be a teacher, no?

The first drawing above is by Francis Crick, a doodle of his impression of DNA, a concept he shared with his pub brethren.

The second is by Darwin.
'
Ironically, neither is likely to be featured in a high school science class.

"Think like kidneygartners...."

I have been reduced to stacking up chairs on desks, then knocking them down.

I'm up on the third floor--the whole science wing reverberates when I knock down the furniture.

I stack up the desks--energy in.
I break the bonds with a shove--activation energy.
The desks cascade down, unleashing noise and heat and movement and chaos--ΔG.

Over and over and over again, I implore my sophomores to think like "kidneygartners." I don't want fancy words. I don't want "right" answers. I don't want to hear that energy is "the ability to do work."

Some laugh, now and then one is near tears.
I'm confused!

Good! Now we're getting somewhere.

***

Occasionally I have story time. It's always the same story.

I sit in the middle of the pods. (The students form their own pods of desks at the start of every period. 30 seconds of chaos saves me hours of headaches--I do not have Ann Landers' talents, and larval humans show a remarkable political ability to arrange themselves in minimally disruptive arrangements. I could use some old tennis balls, though....sliding desks make a lot of noise.)

I walk along the class timeline. Humans (just a blip, really)--dinosaurs--plants--bacteria--water--Earth's formation--10 billion more years--Big Bang.

The Big Bang, of course, makes no sense. None. The students get that we have evidence that the universe is expanding. They get that galaxies are farther apart this week than they were back before Hallowe'en. And they grasp why some physicists came up with the model.

But it's only a model, a mythology, and an incomprehensible one at that.

I tell the story over and over again. I emphasize that it is, indeed, a story, told under certain constraints.

And then I topple the desks again.

***

We exist because the sun decays.

(Second Law of Thermodynamics)

We exist because the sun decays.

(Laws are what we observe, consistently, persistently--no explanation needed.)

We exist because the sun decays.

(No worries, the good news is we'll all be dead before the sun gasps its way into a red giant.)

We exist because the sun decays.

(No, I can't answer that--that's a religious question....)

***

Have you spent much time talking to 5 year old children? They'll believe anything but they'll question everything.

My sophomores won't believe everything, but they believe the world will end in 2012, mostly out of convenience.

They won't, however, question much, at least not in school. And that's our fault.

And again I scream "STOP THINKING LIKE SOPHOMORES AND START THINKING LIKE KIDNEYGARTENERS!"

(Yes, I really say "kidneygarteners"--I am lousy at German....)

***

Children like their myths written in stone. We all do. It's why science can suck big time when we pay attention.

Less than 100 years ago, Edwin Hubble made a pretty convincing story that Andromeda is not part of our galaxy, that stuff existed beyond our own Milky Way.

This was (and remains) a big deal.

And yet we teach the Big Bang like we teach The Great Gatsby, which, coincidentally, was published the same year Hubble made his move.

According to the Big Bang model (or myth or theory), something happened about 14 billion years ago.

The state of New Jersey states that I must teach that "according to the Big Bang theory, the universe has been expanding since its beginning, explaining the apparent movement of galaxies away from one another."

Read that again.

It's religion. I say as much in class. And I'm done with it.

***

That we even pretend to separate biology from physics from chemistry at the adolescent level just shows how confused we are.

Most of my kids have no idea how to generate electricity. This week I will bring in a hand-cranked generator, and the boys will shock themselves as the girls wonder how humans ever reproduced at all.

I'm not supposed to do this. I am supposed to teach biology. I can't teach biology if the kids have no idea about the First and Second Laws of thermodynamics. If cranking a magnet in a coil of wire hard enough to transform kinetic energy into the electrical sort strong enough to make sophomore boys squeal makes no impression, no sense pretending we can teach science.

But it will make an impression. It always has. Not for everyone, not all the time, but for most.

Because we're human, and innately curious.

And so long as we remain human and innately curious, I will enjoy teaching, at least until the 2^nd Law does me in, as it will.

Winter solstice

Winter solstice occurred a few hours ago--it's an instant, a unit of Planck time, not a day.

The smallest unit of time is incomprehensible.


We capture it in a mathematical statement, gratuitously plastered above.
We've got a lot of Planck times to get through before Imbolc arrives.

***

I just finished a wonderful novel, Requiem, Mass., by John Dufresne. I won't spoil it here (couldn't if I wanted to), but while I read in the wintry darkness this morning, I stumbled across these words:

We all feel more than we can imagine. We all imagine more than we can remember. We all remember more than we can know. And we all know more than we can say.

Amen.

And then he talks of Planck time. This is a long passage, and perhaps I should ask Mr. Dufresne's permission before tossing it out here.

Any meaning is better than none. Ask any Catholic or Hutterite or Hmong. You believe in a God who, in his exquisite loneliness, created the universe and little you. Or you believe that we, in our terrifying loneliness, created God. Doesn't matter which. Ask any Vietnamese child kneeling in the mud, praying, choking on her tears, feeling the hot muzzle of an M16 at the nape of her neck, hearing the screams of her grandparents, inhaling the sting of smoke and cordite, knowing that this soldier here behind you, dear, is about to make his own meaning by firing a burst of bullets through your head. At that moment there is no arrow of time for you, there is no there, no then. There is only this singularity, this big bang. At that moment you are borrowing energy against time and shaping your brief life into a quantum of meaning.

Not sure this would make sense in June. Makes sense now.

The microscope "e" lab kills science

Telescopes, when introduced too early, kill interest in astronomy. Everything moves the wrong way, the field of view shrinks to impossibly small increments of sky, and, alas, a star is a point of light no matter how powerful the scope. Nothing looks like the pictures (with the startling exception of Saturn, if you can find it).

The first night out ends in tears--Daddy's upset because he bought the most expensive one he could afford, spent an hour setting it up, and now he's standing outside, alone, trying to line up something, anything, that looks interesting enough to justify the money spent on a tool no one knows how to use.
 
He could have saved everyone a lot of grief had he bought binoculars instead--greater field of view, everything's where it's expected to be, right-side up, and it works right out of the box.

Yep, it's not narly as powerful--only magnifies 10X instead of 500X--but it will provide years of enjoyment, its body worn smooth by hundreds of hours of use, while the telescope languishes in the closet.

It's not about power, it's about seeing.

***

Every year students learn the parts of the microscope, and every year we drag them through the infamous "e" lab. Cut out the letter "e" from a newspaper, mount it correctly on a slide, look at it in the scope at various mags, figure out its orientation.

The most interesting part of the "e" lab may be seeing the "e" move left when you push the slide right, up when you push the slide down. But we don't talk about the why, that's for physics, and they haven't had that yet.


We trade stories in the lounge--Can you believe she thought the air bubble was alive? That he cut out an upper-case "E" from a headline? That she couldn't see anything because he forgot to turn on the lamp?


And then we wonder why a few children don't even pretend to care when we finally bring in some pond water full of wiggly aliens, full of life, full of wonder. There's just no reaching some kids.

For the love of Zeus, why  the letter "e"?

***

I just used a coffee maker, and it worked, even though I have no clue what the parts are called. I only used it because I wanted a cup of coffee. I did not learn how to use it until I wanted to make coffee, and I would have thought you mad if you tried to teach me about it before I liked coffee.

***

Here's a microscope lab that works:

1) Use dissecting scopes instead of the traditional compound scope. You can look at things whole, alive, in 3-D. If those are not available, get your hands on magnifying glasses--they do the same thing.

2) Bring in live wiggly stuff. Earthworms, sow bugs, beetles, snails, slugs, mosquito wrigglers, whatever. Give a brief demo on how to use the dissecting scope, let a couple of students peek in, then stand back.

Really--within minutes, the more adept will be teaching the less adept, kids will have a better grasp (and love) of slugs you could ever generate with a Prezi, and the kids will learn how to use the scope proficiently (which really doesn't matter anyway, when you get down to it).

If you've never used a dissecting scope, get your hands on one--it will change your universe.
Microscope quiz lifted from here--it's been passed around since Leeuwenhoek first drew it. 

If my biggest worry is how to grade something like this, well, I'm on the right path.

Great Educators.com wants your soul-wrenching test stories....

Great Educators.com wants our stories--"motivational stories that will reach educators across the nation through personal recollection and will bring smiles, tears, and a genuine connection to our own educational experiences."

One of the categories?

Testing

Tell us an encouraging story about testing and your education experiences. Did you learn how to overcome or manage your difficulties in testing? Perhaps you struggled with or worked with students who had a hard time with test anxiety, fear, lack of organization or some other testing issue. Are a parent of a child who succeed on an all-important test?

I don't blame them for trying to make a buck on an absurd situation, but couching the whole mercenary thing in terms of human emotions is just, well, sad.

NCLB does not work. Teaching kids to write like robots does not work.  Pretending that all children can do everything does not work. All the PR in the world does not work.

But obviously capitalism still does....

Thank you, Arne.

I learned about these folks from spam in my school email. 
Live by spam, die by sam.

Tipton apples

One of my last days with Mary Beth ended with her laughing jubilantly on a hill overlooking an old apple orchard in Tipton, Michigan.

Every year the man who made her happier than life itself sends me a box of apples from his orchard, real apples. Northern spies are my favorites.

The aroma of apples fills our home before we open the box. Bees fertilized the flowers back when the sun was still headed towards the solstice. The bees are dead. The apples scream life.

I do not get what this thing called life is all about, at least not when words do not get in the way. I do know happiness even past the grief, and she did, too. She knew.

What's left of her has seeped into that same hill, her dust mixed with our tears.

Wasn't sure I'd ever enjoy eating apples again.
Not sure they ever tasted better than they do now.

In a culture that fears death so much that we pretend it does not exist, rejoicing in the flavor, the texture, the sound of my teeth crunching into a fruit with its own mixed history may seem morbid, and it is.

I eat the whole apple except the stem. The seeds have an amaretto nuttiness, a sweet reminder of death itself--the amygdylin breaks down into tiny doses of cyanide. A few of my mitochondria seize up every time I eat an apple.

Not enough to kill me, of course, but just enough to remind me that I, too, will return to the ground with the bees and uneaten apples and everything else that has known joy.

Amygdalin

It's the end of the year--I keep thinking I'm better, and I mostly am, but after three years it's clear I'm not going to recover completely.

We're cleaning up stuff around here. I found Mary Beth's notebook. She was fierce--just ask Dow Chemical. She was loving--just ask anyone who ever met her, including folks who worked at Dow.

So I'm throwing two essays out here I wrote over a couple of years ago. They are only peripherally involved with teaching science.

Amygdalin shares the same root as amygdala--it means walnut, and reflects the amaretto taste you sense when you chew on apple seeds.

Chewing on apple seeds may be hazardous, but so is riding motorcycles, body surfing, and just plain living.

When I eat an apple, I eat everything but the stem. Sometimes I eat that, too. I did this even before my sister fell in love with Dave Keeney, who knows apples. Like most folks who know something well, Dave knows lots of things well. Mary Beth believed she would love him until she died, and she did.

In a few years I will chew an apple core from a tree that has a tiny bit of my sister in it. Several hundred apple trees at Keeney Orchard already do. You breathe around apple trees, some of your carbon dioxide bound to get mixed up in the apple blossoms.

Life's messy that way.

***

Breathe on your hand. Feel the moist air, now carrying carbon dioxide and warm water vapor. An apple tree will take both, borrow some radiant energy from the sun, and make stuff.

It's what trees do.

Oh, they need a tiny bit of calcium and other minerals. This spring, Dave will plant a sapling next to the stone that now casts an evening shadow towards the pond. He will scatter some bits of calcium from a colorful cardboard box covered with stars, hearts, and painted macaroni he glued there himself.

Mary Beth will feed the tree, and we will water the ground with tears. Our breath and her ground bones will rise from the ground. In a few years, a child not yet born will pick an apple from the tree. And eat it.

***

We stood by her stone, now pink form the fading light. I heard an owl.

Dave asked if cremation destroys DNA.
I didn't know, and said so.
Turns out it does.
***

A hint of amaretto slides through
a chewed apple core.

(A mother tells her child to spit it out. The child grins and chews anyway.)

***

C₂₀H₂₇NO₁₁ + 2H₂O => 2C₆H₁₂O₆ + C₆H₅CHO + HCN

Amygdalin + water => glucose + benzaldehyde + cyanide

Glucose, of course, is sugar--sweetness.

Benzaldehyde gives the nutty taste--turns out it may cause cancer.
Wildness at the cellular level.

Cyanide. Death.

Cyanide blocks a cell's ability to release the energy captured by plants. The energy caught by the apple tree and by algae and by grasses and ferns and moss--the energy that feeds us--cannot be released unless oxygen steals back the electrons plants stole from water.

Cyanide blocks the electrons from getting to the oxygen, deep inside your mitochondria, in the darkest recesses of your cells.

You suffocate inside out.
Before you suffocate, you may feel giddy, even euphoric.

Burning wood releases cyanide. So does burning silk.
A lot of folks who die of smoke inhalation succumb to cyanide poisoning.
I'd like to imagine they were euphoric those last few moments.
I hope I'm euphoric my last few moments.

I keep eating apple seeds.
Benzaldehyde reacts with water; a lovely taste, nuttiness sweetened by glucose, streams through me. A tinge of euphoria lightens me, reminds me I am mortal.

I loved chewing apple seeds before I knew about the cyanide.
Now they taste even better.

Photo by André Karwath via wikimedia.

Study Island

Leslie just came back from a visit with a friend from a neighboring town. Andrea has a child in elementary school. Dana is gifted. She is an A student. And she spends hours on "Study Island."

The folks at Study Island keep track of Dana's answers. They keep track of how much time she spends there. They make this information available to Dana's teachers and administrators. Dana can see a timer window ticking off her time as she becomes a more productive consumer, preparing to compete in the global economy.

Her teacher monitors her time on-line. She has been up as late as 11 P.M. trying to satisfy her teacher's requirements.

Study Island is owned by a company in Dallas, Texas--the company brags about the " 960,134 sessions administered per day." They tout their competitive pricing, failing to see the true costs.

Dana may indeed do a little better on the state tests. I suppose the tears and upset tummy are worth all this, because education is all about the test scores, and life is all about out-competing the less-than-American children involved in the global economy.

While Dana works on Study Island, I play on Cape May Island. This past weekend I managed to get stung by a wasp, poked by an errant hook, pinched by a tiny crab, chilled by walking in the surf while it rained.

Meanwhile Dana logged in time on Study Island.

I wasted time watching dolphins eat no more than 10 yards away from me. I dawdled away a sunset or two. I planted some basil that germinated on my dining room table, decidedly less efficient than buying seedlings at the local Megamart.

Meanwhile Dana logged in time on Study Island.

I wasted time trading stories with other adults wiling away time at the ocean's edge. Thankfully the children are kept safe, tucked behind screens, preparing for a real life.

Meanwhile Dana logged in time on Study Island.

On the beach life consumes life--the sun's energy now warms up the local waters, energy that might, in a few months, fuel hurricanes. Summer is a dangerous time--sunburn, jelly fish, and errant drivers.

No worries, though--our Secretary of Education hopes to make summer less dangerous for Dana by extending school:

"Go ahead and boo me," Duncan told about 400 middle- and high-school students at a public school in Denver. "I fundamentally think that our school day is too short, our school week is too short and our school year is too short.

"You're competing for jobs with kids from India and China. I think schools should be open six, seven days a week; 11, 12 months a year."

I'm not sure how much Dana is learning on Study Island, but she's learning this much--her time belongs to others, and others will make sure she does not waste it.

Back when I was a child, I had to worry about God, Santa, and angels peering over my shoulder. As weird as that sometimes felt, I doubt it could compare with knowing your teacher is monitoring you at home.

That's just creepy.

The Second Commandment

We are visual critters.
We know this, and we forget this.

We descended (with modification) from organisms over billions of years.
We know this, and we forget this.

We didn't start drawing on cave walls until about 30,000 years ago.
After we started, a few of us thought maybe we'd be better off if we didn't.

Last week Mark came to visit--he's a film editor, and a good one. His professional life revolves around his vision. He speaks in paragraphs, about a third of which involve discussing ways to manipulate light.

He makes a living creating graven images.

I introduced him to clamming.

When you rake for clams, you feel the bottom of the bay through your handle. When your rake hits a clam, you as much hear it as feel it. You reach into the soft mud, then wrap your hands around the clam. A quahog fits perfectly in your palm. You know you have one before you ever see it.

No words, no pictures, no imagination can capture the satisfaction of feeling the firm curve of a quahog in your palm, fulfilling a desire you did not know you had.

***

When you stare at the monitor, you are catching photons with your retina. Your monitor mixes together red, green, and blue--your eyes and your brain do the rest.

Oh, yes, old man,we know that trick already. So what? It's just sophistry....

And it is, mostly, just sophistry. A decent magnifying glass will show the three colors, you might be amused for a moment, and then you go on.

Bear with me, this will meander back to teaching science.

I grew up Irish Catholic, and wandered into other sects once I started reading the Bible. My world view, for better or worse, is framed by Christendom. Whether Christendom has much to do with the Christ is another story for another time.

Old collections of words that have survived generations upon generations of readers may not reflect truth, but we can learn from ancient worldviews. Not all of us who own Bibles wield them as weapons, though I do confess they work well on centipedes.

(Please do not presume to know my "beliefs" from a single post. Even if you could, they swirl like the morning fog over a mountain creek, and last just about as long.)

I used to go to Sunday school. (Even scarier, I used to teach Sunday school.)

On the wall in Sunday school class was a poster of Garfield the Cat. It was an ordinary poster, nothing special, just paper and ink. Garfield has his usual snarky expression, and every time I looked at it, I had my usual visceral response. I do not like Garfield.

The Ten Commandments came up in Sunday school, as they will. Most of the commandments are easy enough to understand. Don't kill. Don't steal. Don't lie. Do not lust over your buddy's wife. While you're at it, stop fantasizing about his Maserati. Basic stuff.

Then there's the Second Commandment:

You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

The ancients knew the power of vision. What you see becomes part of you.

Yes, I can step back and see that Garfield is just paper and ink, but this requires work. When you look at a photograph, you are in the world of the photograph.

Until 30,000 years ago, if I saw a big cat, it was a real cat, one that posed danger. I reacted. If I did not react, my DNA ended up in the tiger's gut, not a good place to procreate.

For billions of years, the particular strands of DNA that make up me managed to replicate. Eyes have been around for over 500 million years, and offer an obvious advantage to survival. For organisms with vision, seeing is believing. For humans, it is how we learn about the outside world.

I mentioned Garfield the Cat during a discussion about the Second Commandment, and why I thought that this particular commandment revealed a subtle wisdom by our ancestors. I don't think I'll bring up Garfield again should I venture back.

***

And what does this have to do with teaching?

Our children are surrounded by human-generated images. Art. Advertisements. Branding. They make things real by taking pictures.

A child constructs a model rocket, then captures it with a camera. The image is more valuable than the rocket, which has since been discarded.

In science class we throw image after image at our students, without discernment. We throw picture after picture after picture. Here's a rain forest in Ecuador, there's a polar bear, look, a bacterium--each fills the Smartboard screen in vivid colors, one after another, without reference, without discernment.

A photograph of a frog teaches little if the student has never held a frog.

Once we learned to manipulate images, sight became magical. Our children believe in magic, but so do the adults. We have created our own worlds.

If you live life in an artificial world, in front of monitors and televisions and photographs and books, you can have beauty and dazzle and immortality. You can have joy and tears. You can free yourself from boredom. You might even find love.

You will, however, be limited by the imagination of humans. You will also be "freed" from the reality of natural limits, and for many of us this is worth losing.

When I stand in my garden in April, I cannot truly imagine it filling with tomatoes and basil and dill and squash by late July.

Still, by November, most of the plants are dead, no matter how many pictures I take.

As a teacher, I want the children to grasp the limits of their imagination--only then can they start to grasp this thing around us, what "awesome" truly means.

The Garfield image generated more hits than my words ever did.
I removed it, for my sanity, and yours....

What I know now....

If I am going to pretend to be an edublogger, I need to toss an explicit post on teaching now and again.

I've been observed 3 times this past week; either I'm wowing them or they're looking for the bodies. This is my third year. I'm up for tenure.

One of the tragicomedies of American education is the tenure system. This year an innocent comment misinterpreted by a 14 year old can get me looking for a commercial clamming license. Next year, once tenured, anything short of a felony in the classroom (and even then it's even odds) won't warrant the time needed to get me booted.

So I enjoy the parade. Worst comes to worst, I sling a stethoscope around my neck and start succoring the afflicted again.

So, a list. Bloggers love lists.

Here's what I know as a 3rd year teacher I could not possibly have known as a greenhorn.


1. No matter how much you sweat you put into a lesson, it is not the students' obligation to appreciate it.

We've all been there. We put together the lesson of the century, a lesson that would make John Dewey misty eyed.

You spent $126 on the materials.
You have an anticipatory set that could waken your long-dead great grandmother.
You spent 27 hours preparing the lesson, the glow of the monitor highlighting your maniacal grin as you fantasize about the anticipated eagerness of your lambs eating up your lesson.

You forego tickets to the 7th game of the Rangers/Devils Stanley Cup playoffs.
You turn down Willie's invitation to travel for a week on the Honeysuckle Rose.
You even stop playing solitaire.

You are a freakin' professional!

And the kids yawn. In your face.

Welcome to teaching. It's not about you.

2. Stay out of the teacher's lounge.

No, really. It's a trap. If you need to complain, you need to get out.

It's a great field. You get to teach children. You mold future citizens. You get to see a side of children even parents never see.

It's a gift, an honor, a raison d'etre. ( Feel free to add the circonflexe--I'm a Luddite.)

It's easy to complain about the hours (no longer than a laborer picking grapes) or the respect (no less than the security guard sitting in the lobby of your school) or the students (you want to work with humans, you're going to get human behavior) or the pay (hey, I make more per hour as a teacher than I did as a doc).

The lounge kills hope. You need hope to teach.

3. Textbooks are like crutches...wonderful if you need them

Textbooks can save your life (but not your soul) that first year, when even the mere act of micturition requires three weeks of planning.

It gets better by the third year. Really. So much better you can now pee without consulting your calendar.

Textbooks are written by committees. Students don't need committees. They need you. Wean yourself.

If you don't believe this, go join a committee.

(A confession: I still spend too much time using textbooks--I'm working on it.)

4. Teach to the child, not the test.

Turns out the test just isn't that good, at least not around here. And I hear from other bloggers, it's not so go around there, either.

Ben Wildeboer (Sustainably Digital) notes that lousy tests "perhaps do serve a valuable purpose...."

When I start to feel myself get stressed about falling behind and not going over all the required content, remembering that the standardized tests will be poorly written and not do a great job of assessing the standards makes me feel better about not covering everything I’m “supposed” to.
Ben Wildeboer

The child will remain reasonably intact for the next few decades, barring a motor vehicle accident or HIV, or one of the amazingly rare reasons young adults die (but get great press when they do).

Tests, on the other hand, change all the time.

New superintendent? Reform.
New governor? Reform.
New President? Reform.

Kids are fairly stable--a couple of billion years of evolution are not influenced by the thoughts of the newest Administrator in Charge. Keep things in perspective.

5. Use what works, ignore what doesn't.

During my formative years, I had a couple of diametrically opposed adjunct professors. One was an elementary school teacher by day, the other a principal.

(Despite having a career in the "real world", I didn't go the alternate route. I took education classes before I tortured young adults as a student teacher. Nothing--and I say that without apologies--nothing can replace the student teaching experience for folks arrogant enough to believe they can teach.)

The principal had the proper accent and a better command of the language. She preened, she preached.

The teacher knew her stuff, but was not nearly as polished. Here's what she said.

If it works, use it. Put posters over the door to prevent snoopy administrators from peeking in, play the game, but teach your students. That's why you're there.

Never forget you matter.

Not all folks grasping the administrative brass ring are in it for themselves, but enough of them are that you need to interpret motives.

So I teach.

I see what works, and (painfully) dissect what doesn't. Tomorrow is another day. Keep plugging, keep analyzing, keep working, and keep your sense of perspective next to your Excedrin.

6. Keep your educational philosophy within an arm's distance.

I was warned.

There will be days when you wonder why you quit your day job to become a public school teacher position. There will be days when others wonder the same thing about you.

And there will be day's when your biggest doubter will be yourself.

So write that philosophical statement. Read it. Soak it in. Allow yourself to believe it matters. It does.

Keep it handy.

Read it again in November, when the words are blurred by tears, by sweat.

The day you stop believing what you do matters is the day you should quit.

7. Goal directed exhaustion is OK at times (if you don't make it a habit).

You chose this field.
Your field matters.
A hundred years from now, what you do today can matter.
Make it matter.

A few colleagues (usually found in the lounge) may tell you that you are working too hard, that you will learn the hard way, that you will burn out. A (very) few will even brag about never bringing home work as they physically fly out the door 10 minutes after the last bell, a door they flew out of spiritually years ago.

They're right--a lot of us will flame out. Honeybees work themselves to death, but they do worthwhile work.

You are going to die, too. Might as well do something special while you're here.

The Honeysuckle Rose shot is from an avid Willie fan, Linda, innkeeper of the
Stillisstillmoving blog. Wonderful pictures there!

The smoking teacher, the crutch factory, and tired doc pics are from the Life photo collection available at Google.