0 CCSS: Creative, Competent, Social Students

I teach biology, but teach little about living.

You do not need to know anything about mitosis to know how to live.
You do not need to know anything about how to live to learn mitosis.

Too many of us strive to do whatever it is we must do without a thought to why we do anything the way we do it.

It's not learning that matters, it's living. Learning is an evolutionary tool shared by a lot of species better at this living thing than the current version of H. sapiens. Animals who choose to ignore the world around them do not last very long. Humans are no exception.

We have fetishized education as some sort of independent structure, institutionalizing what we think matters without thinking about what actually does matter. Why else care who graduated from where, or class ranks, or SAT scores?

Why do we let a few strangers dictate a "common core" defining what should be learned?

Here's my CCSS--we need to foster competent, creative, and social students. It's not my place (or anyone else's) to dictate a child's life path, but if we must have common standards, here are a few I think are worth sharing:

Students should know what's edible in their area, and how to prepare it. Around here it could be wild cherries, dandelions, squirrel, deer, clams, or hundreds of other fine food sources. Not saying they need to forage like Wildman Steve Brill, but using primary sources for food ought to be at least as important as using primary sources for some term paper no one will read besides a teacher.

Students should know the basics of their dwellings, and be able to use truly digital tools like hammers, screwdrivers, and saws to make and repair the things we need within our dwellings. Knowing how to approach a simple plumbing problem (or any mechanical problem) matters more than knowing how to "apply the Binomial Theorem."

Students should know what they need to stay alive, what goes into them (and where it came from) and what goes out of them (and where it goes). If they don't know this, they literally don't know shit. 

Arne and his pals would like your children to Serve Man....

Our economy depends on sustaining learned helplessness; our current way of schooling does just that.

Our children need to learn to read, to write, to develop reasonable number sense, and to solve problems. They need a reasonable sense of what's real (and what's not), and a reasonable chance to live a happy and productive life.

They also need to live as the animals that they are.

Detail: CCSS: Creative, Competent, Social Students

0 What are you living for?

Every living critter under and over you, in and around you, has a lineage just as long as yours, stringing back billions of years, with the same basic daily goals and needs as you.

Except most of us in our culture have forgotten what those goals are. We've also forgotten (or spend our hours trying to forget) our mortality.

When was the last time kids in your classroom discussed "what are you living for" with a reasonably rational adult?

Lazy ass jelly fish lolling in the Delaware Bay at dusk.

Animals (besides humans) never plan for the future beyond taking care of the business that needs to be taken care of in order to live. Beyond that, most animals fiddle away the day socializing, eating, snoozing, or just watching the shadows move as the sun glides by, the antitheses of the good capitalists and consumers humans cherish in these parts.

Time for Achieve to start cracking down on all those lazy ass squirrels!
Common Core Squirrel Standards, anyone?

Detail: What are you living for?

0 Whose stories are we teaching?

For part of  chilly February afternoon, a chunk of the frozen bay perilously perched itself by the edge of the sea.

It held my attention, this lifeless form, a half ton of water balancing on a small pedestal.

Our minds create stories upon stories, stories that help us survive, help us live, but stories are just that, and the intensity of my interest at this random block of broken berg makes little sense.

Rationally, I know that this is just chunks of ice from the fresh Delaware River above, coalescing from the forces of the tides, but it became my altar of unhewn stone, an evanescent idol.

Delaware Bay, North Cape May, February 22, 2015

We worship patterns, and see gods where none exist, but our stories have been, until now, based on the larger world around us.

We let others manipulate us and our children, replacing our stories of nature with the stories of the abstract, of global economies, of currencies, of hubris. We encourage our children to play with the screens that distort and manipulate our view of the world.

And then we wonder what's wrong with them.....

Detail: Whose stories are we teaching?

0 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.

Detail: Daphnia dance while the children cry

0 The connected child

An essential quality of technology, from the spear to Skype, is action at a distance. Technology enables us to have an effect on people and things far away. In general, the more advanced the technology, the further away it is able to impose an effect. 

Doug Hill, author of Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology

Our lives cost the lives of others. That's always been true, and will be so long as we breathe. Technology allows us to forget this.

As technophiles spew on about a global community, where your value is measured by the number of hits your words register, their hands never touch the blood and feces of the life around them.

You want every child "connected"? So do I. It's what's at the other end of the connection that matters.

All children, every child, should know where the stuff that makes up their bodies comes from, all the way back to the living organisms that fill up, unrecognizable, wrapped in plastic.

All children, every child, should know where their waste goes, through hidden pipes and trucks that rumble before dawn through the neighborhood once or twice a week.

We can do both, I suppose--just make sure you cover up the machines when I bring in a calf (or whatever the cafeteria is serving this week) to slaughter in the classroom.

I could live without my computer a lot easier than living without my knife.

Detail: The connected child

0 Bringing our kids back to the Stone Age

This is my honing stone. 

Before that it was my Mom's. 

Before that it was Grannie's, my Mom's mom.

It has worked, and worked well, for over 50 years, and I expect that it has another half-century left in it.
Behind it is my favorite knife. It is a wedge and a lever, two simple machines. Knives work by separating and ripping through molecules.

I like sharpening my knife. It is an Old World skill. I like the heft of the knife, the sound of steel on stone, the memories of my genetic past that held this same stone.

The honing stone bends the edge of the knife back its ideal position, but at an imperceptible cost.

Over the years, the stone erodes, and each millimeter or two of depression represents years of our lives.

While we spin tales of modern life, urging ourselves to greater heights, rushing through our days, the basics remain (as they ever will) the same.

We eat, we breathe, we grow, we love, we die. The stone connects me to the knife which connects me to the food I will eat. The gap in the stone connects me to my Mom and to her Mom, and will, someday, connect my child to me.

Knives and honing stones are technological wonders. We forget the wonders of steel because so few of us recognize its raw materials, few of us are aware of the tremendous amount of energy needed to create the blade we take for granted. We marvel at high tech machines, yet not one in a thousand of us could make a good steel knife.

If a child cannot sharpen a knife, cannot prepare his own food, cannot imagine the animal slaughtered before it ends up on his table nor the kernel of corn that grew into his corn chips, we are not doing him any favors pushing him into the fantastical world of high tech machines.

Yet that is what we do, every day, in almost every public school.

That stone above will outlive any and all of us.

Detail: Bringing our kids back to the Stone Age

0 Thoughts on finding a mako's tooth

Found today at the edge of the ocean.

We are mammals, all of us, trapped by words of our creation, most of us.
We are human, all of us, trapped by technologies of our creation, most of us.
We are all mortal, all of us, trapped by belief we shall live forever, most of us.

Just a few hours ago I stumbled upon the tooth of a mako shark, a creature likely still very alive within a few miles of here, now sliding through the dark depths of the water, living in a universe as incomprehensible to us as iPhones are to the shark

This tooth has ripped the bodies of other living beings, its serrated edges cutting through flesh not all that different from our own.

An old horseshoe crab, just recently dead.

We credit ourselves with awareness, with knowledge, with wisdom, stored in books and hard drives and stories we share with each other.

If the stories focus on us, as they mostly do, we can still learn.
If they exclude everything but us, however, we'll become as ignorant as the machines that dominate our days.

We're losing our way.

***

[Update: a local biology teacher just told me that this may be a fossilized tooth--
how cool would that be!]

[Update 2: A geologist friend of mine assures me it is a fossil!]

I've never regretted a single moment outside.
Photos by Leslie.

Detail: Thoughts on finding a mako's tooth

0 "Staying in between the lines"

Now and then it keeps you running
It never seems to die
The trial's spent with fear
Not enough living on the outside

Never seem to get far enough
Staying in between the lines
Hold on what you can
Waiting for the end not knowing when

 from "Windfall," Son Volt

Backyard crocuses, 2013

Today marks the last day of the darkest 6 weeks of the year in these parts.
Tomorrow will bring us back to November light.
And Imbolc will be just 3 weeks away.

Under the frozen earth the crocuses next to the old bare oak tree are starting to stir. Chromosomes are replicating, cells dividing, tough spears forming, getting ready to pierce their way to the sunlight.

Not sure they know why they go through all the fuss, not likely a question they they ask, pretty sure the answer wouldn't matter to them anyway.
But they at least know where they're going.

Even if we could decipher the language of plants, we could not grasp their answer to such a question.
It won't involve money or fame or power or self-esteem.
The point may seem without value in a culture that does not value living.

Hard to commodify the thoughts of a flower.

Detail: "Staying in between the lines"

0 Perihelion, again

Just a few hours ago, we got as close to the center of our life force as we are going to get this year, three million (or so) miles closer than we will be in early summer.

North Cape May, ferry jetty

A few thoughts:

• It's amazing that "we" know this.
• It's amazing that the sun is the source of our life's energy. Every breath you take, every thought thunk, is powered by the sun.
• It's amazing that any of us are alive to see it.
• It's amazing that some of us not yet alive will see it next winter, and some of us here now will not.

A matter of perspective, and perspective matters.

Happy Perihelion, folks. Sol Invictus.

Detail: Perihelion, again

0 A song sung

Dave Keeney is a friend of mine, who happens to be brilliant, though that's not a word he'd likely use to describe himself. He's an apple farmer, a musician, a story teller, a mensch.

Dave on the left, Old Town, New Year's Eve
(photo by Derek Daniel)

First time he met my Dad, my Dad (once a fighter pilot) was in bad shape after a series of strokes that made him pretty much unintelligible. Except to Dave. After trading stories, Dave got out his guitar and sang one of the funniest songs I had ever heard, "John Denver's Last Flight."

Later, after dinner, I asked Dave to play the song again. He would not.

"Why not?"
"Don't remember it."
"But you just sang it, how could you forget something you know?"
"I made it up."

What's ridiculous (and telling) is that I still regret not ever hearing that song again, and Dave never gave it a second thought. The song is a song while sung, and that's more than enough for Dave, even as I (and I am embarrassed to say it), thought of the song's potential commercial value..

If the product is the goal, then we lose the "we" in this thing we're doing, whatever this thing we're doing happens to be.

Once an object is made, a song sung, a story scribbled down on the back of of an envelope, it's no longer us, merely an artifact of who we were. We become machines, we are machines, in our relentless chase to create the perfect product, make perfection a standard in whatever we do. We want everything to be professional, the new code word for standardized.

The us is in the process, the joy is in the doing.
A song is a song only as a song is being sung.

Fuck professionalism, it's no way to live nor love.
I'm going back to my ancestors' world of artisans,

Detail: A song sung

0 Sunrise, sunset

I watched the sun set yesterday.
I watched the sun rise again this morning.

I don't do this often enough, few of us do.

Just a few minutes after the sun broke through this morning, a twitchy squirrel sat on top of a fence post, still, facing the sun, then resumed his twitchiness.

A vulture flew within 20 feet of me, its under feathers reflecting the sunlight as it banked.

I just watched.
It would have happened anyway.
And it's happening anyway.

And it will keep on happening....

Detail: Sunrise, sunset

0 Biology only matters if life does....

I suppose it's a bit much to ask students to ponder their closeness to plants in a culture where human tribes can barely recognize their similarities with other tribes. Things have broken down.

But I am going to ask you, gentle reader.

• We share the same genetic code--we can make their stuff, they can make ours.
• We both reproduce sexually in a spectacular dance of the chromosomes, mixing us up every generation, so that even the perfect among us are so for only a generation.
• We both rely on ribosomes to build our proteins, microtubules and mitochondria to get us through the day, and an innate will to do whatever we need to see the next sunrise.

Humans and basil share a common ancestor. We share a quarter of the same genes. Many of our proteins do exactly the same thing, others not so much.

But we're pretty damn close at the most basic levels of life. Which is pretty cool.

We're even closer to insects--heck, we're both even animals! We share about 60% of our core genes with fruit flies. 

If something effectively kills plants or insects, and you see no connections between plants and insects and humans, then you likely do not contemplate the tons and tons and tons of herbicides and pesticides poured on our food in our "war" against weeds and weevils.

If you don't contemplate about food or water or folks in your neighborhood, it's unlikely you contemplate much about anything that matters.

Hey, what's on TV tonight?

Detail: Biology only matters if life does....

0 Teacher preacher

I have been wrestling with teaching kids "science" now for years, and it comes down to this:
If a child has no real connection to the natural world, all I can do is preach.
And preaching does not work.

We got plenty of preachers telling all of us what to think believe.
And most of us are devout believers in things we hardly recognize as dogma.

Turn the sound of your television.
Watch the images stream by.
They define us--if they did not, we would not watch them.

Any child with a true interest in the world of the senses, the world of touch and taste, sound and smell and sight, the world that (for whatever reason) flows within patterns of the physical and physics, well, that child has a chance in developing interest in the only real world we have.

A child who  learns to manipulate symbols for extrinsic gain--first to please her parents, then to make a living--can become a proficient scientist without knowing the world. We have plenty of professional preachers who have little connection to The Christ.

If you can't find the ground beneath your feet, you are lost.

(Doesn't mean she will become a scientist--
no one has an obligation to professionalize wherever joy takes them. But she will be a better citizen.)

Detail: Teacher preacher

0 A pill bug prayer

Less than a mile away, in the gray shadows of a closed classroom, a pill bug wanders around some compost, feeling relief as it moistens it gills. It stumbles onto a fellow pill bug, exchanges greetings with a brief twitching of touching antennae, then ambles over to a piece of potato.

Wild pill bug, loitering on a North Cape May driveway.

It sees light we know exists, but no human will see today.
It knows sound we know exists, as an old analog clock ticks a few feet away.
It knows of existence, and the existence of others like it.

Christmas means nothing, of course, to a critter no bigger than a wheat berry.
But living does.

The light is returning.
Amen.

There is joy and wisdom in silence and darkness.

Detail: A pill bug prayer

0 People in the neighborhood

I'm fine now, for now.
Most of us are, for now.
I was not so fine 36 hours ago.
Good to be reminded what matters.

I was treated at our local hospital Clara Maass, and I was treated well.
The people who took care of me played in our local Little League back when I was coaching, had kids in our high school, knew friends of my wife--these are the people in our neighborhood.

So while I appreciated the efficiency and technology of a local hospital humming like a well-run machine, it was not the machine that made it a place of healing.

It is, and always will be, the people that matter.

Bet that matters in the classroom, too.

Detail: People in the neighborhood

0 Seeding time

The plants know.

The lengthening shadows trigger the cilantro, basil, and dill to throw their energies into making seeds for next year, motes of hope, pockets of life that will lie on the hard, cold ground in January. In just days, vibrant green beings fade to oeuvres of ochre.

Every August I collect seeds--some to eat, some to sow next spring, some that will sit in plastic bags, forgotten for a year or two, until I stumble upon them again.

A few, though, will be planted in September by my students, many of whom have never planted anything before. The seedlings will emerge along the window sill and then fade away as the sun slides south toward the solstice.

***

In an unannounced observation years ago, an administrator walked in on a lesson on seasons. One child held a light, another a globe as she "orbited" the sun, and the students in class made observations about the shadows on the globe, particularly the part that marked our place on the planet.

Yes, the lesson is a classroom cliché, but the kids were engaged, and, for a few moments, some kids grasped how summer and winter can exist simultaneously.

My observer later asked why I was teaching seasons when I was supposed to be teaching biology. I explained (more reasonably than I felt) how all science rests on energy and matter, and that the cycles of sunlight define the boundaries of life in a given patch of earth.

If you view the world in compartments, with life as neatly divided as your browser tabs,  you're going to miss a lot of what's going around you.

And yes, I miss too much of what matters.

 

Detail: Seeding time

0 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.

Detail: 長崎

0 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.

Detail: Lammas, again

0 Words as idols

David Coleman and his socks

"As you grow up in this world you realize people really don't give a shit about what you feel or what you think."

David Coleman, Architect of the CCSS 

I gave this sample PARRC question to my sophomores today.

We've been playing in the PARRC in our building, and while a cerebral edge of what's left of my brain loves the idea of extrapolating from a defined piece of text, there's something just slightly off about all this, a Stepford wife kind of feeling.

The cerebral masturbation required for some PARRC questions may be fine for us old folk with a little money in our bank accounts--it's why the New York Times Sunday Crossword exists-- but I'm betting my 17 year old self would have gained less from it than from the wisdoms of the motley crew who served as my teachers during my stint as a public school student over 40 years ago.

I was one royal pain in the ass in the classroom, but so long as my  tangents went somewhere, a student like me was not just tolerated, I was loved by at least a few teachers who recognized life beyond books.

Words matter only so far as they reasonably reflect whatever this Plato's cave we all share outside our skulls. 90% of my nattering on any given day comes down to this: Hey, we're here in whatever this here is and we're here in it together.

That I can parse tremendous amounts of information from the close reading of just about any block of English in front of me has served me well, even got me a gig as a medical doc for a couple of decades, but it always felt a little bit like a parlor trick, great for entertaining the few who could afford to hire people like me to serve in the professional class.

I am also appreciative that with words I can vaguely convey the feelings if joy I have on a mudflat, or the fear I felt while crawling inside the steel skin of a sinking barge, or the anger I feel watching my lambs struggle to find a living in a culture that has lost its way.

I have never viewed words as something more than abstract tools of convenience--they are tricky devils that often fail when we try to say anything beyond Hey, we're here in whatever this here is and we're here in it together..

 I trust shared laughs more than notarized contracts though the latter will get you more money, more power, and (if these things matter to you), a more Stepford-like spouse.

I cannot in good conscience pretend that PARRC view of the universe matters when on Saturday I'll be clamming, drinking ale, and romping with the love of my life--all with no more language than the happy heartfelt grunts of a mammal too happy for his own good.

Words matter, but only because the world matters.
Worshiping words isolated from the world is just idolatry.

Clams have more soul than the suits pushing an abstract world.

Detail: Words as idols

0 A melomel story

My strawberry melomel is near ready for bottling. The yeast are mostly sleeping now, having done what they could with a gallon of honey and a few pounds of strawberries.

Last year's melomel, much of it gone now

The airlock has quieted down. Very little carbon dioxide bubbles out anymore.

The strawberries were not yet strawberries this time last year--as evanescent as my last breath, and made of the same. The honey had yet to be harvested by the honeybees of last summer, all dead now.

We're all of the same stuff, put together into the wonderfully wild beings that bless earth by the grace of the sun, then broken down again, back into pieces to be used again.

Fresh fish in Dublin,no doubt reassembled by now

The sun has returned, the bees a bit wobbly as they waggle out of their hives to gather some of the sugary stuff spun together by plants from our breath, our gasping machines, and an occasional carboy of homebrew.

Our honey is about as local as honey can get, and the strawberries likely came from within a county or two. There's a real good chance that the mead we pour in June will have pieces of us from winters past.

And pieces of those we love who no longer breathe....

Detail: A melomel story