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 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 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 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 Undeniable: Bill Nye is wrong

The Science Guy, via CNN

Unicorns and leprechauns are not real.
Double-wattled cassowaries are.

Bill Nye blames an easy target:
Nye (rightly) rails against money from the Creationism camp used to taint biology ed, but then adds "the concern is raising a generation of children who 'can't think.'"

Cassowary adult, by Victor Burolla, via CC

Fundamentalists are not killing the minds of our children. Our disconnect from what's real is.

Fundamentalism is a sadly predictable result of a people who have as much to gain by paying attention to the dope on screens as they do to the dope proselytizing in a classroom. If you think you can reduce evolution to a two minute discussion using Emojis and cute music, you're just adding to the noise.

If I tell a child that unicorns and leprechauns are imaginary, and double wattle cassowaries are "real," and can do no better than provide a projected image on a classroom screen as I pontificate the difference between what's real and what's not, well, who's the idiot?

Children would question just about everything we teach (at least the way we teach now) if children had something, anything, to center themselves.

Start with the local, with a bug or a plant or a bird or anything real that exists outside a screen. Until that local reality becomes more real than the stream of images and sounds we feed our children, we get the culture we deserve.

I bet I could convince a child that Mr. Nye is a robot.

His overall point is valid--kids need to be able to question things, to think, to be skeptical, in order to learn about nature.

Detail: Undeniable: Bill Nye is wrong

0 On teaching biology: sea urchins

I stumbled upon a couple dozen of these guys this afternoon--I'd seen them before, a few years ago, and (mostly) forgot about them, but here they are, still being sea urchins, in the same spot they were being sea urchins when I was less mortal than I am today.


How do you convey that in a classroom that supposedly teaches biology?

How do you convey that anywhere?

Detail: On teaching biology: sea urchins

0 Why teach biology?

Wheat grown on our classroom windowsill.

Right now you are making water, the real stuff, not some abstraction, from the oxygen you breathed in just moments ago combining with protons and electrons stripped from the the peanut and butter sandwich you ate.

You are breathing in oxygen stripped from water molecules broken apart by the dandelions you tried to poison with Round Up two months ago.

Your food was alive not so long ago--even a Twinkie came from a plant.

Biology is mandatory in public schools in New Jersey. Mandatory anything is rarely a good thing, and mandatory what-passes-for-science in high school is, well, predictably disastrous for many of my lambs.

But if I succeed in getting a young adult to see the connection between what is real and the food in her belly and the air in her lungs and the water she drinks....

• To ponder more than a moment why she, a mammal, must chase abstract ideas that churn the "global economy" in order to guarantee that she will be able to eat in a few years when she is an adult
• To question how the few real things in her life that matter have been so removed from her world that we judge who we are more by how much we extract than by how much we create
• To ask her local politicians why incinerators are built in dense but poor neighborhoods
• To wonder why her in our own town tons of potential carcinogens were pumped into the air just a mile from our school.

Well, I'll have helped create another functioning citizen in this fine land of ours, Arne and his abstract economy be damned.

And who knows, maybe she'll go on to be a scientist, too.

Detail: Why teach biology?

0 First Day of Biology

I chased killifish today with a woman who once had a career studying them professionally, her husband who teaches math, and their daughter. We had no net, and despite various strategies and plenty of opportunity, we caught none.

This was not an abstract exercise

The reason I wanted to catch one was because I learned today that killifish talk in frequencies that most humans can hear. They will chirp at each other when stranded in tide pools. This is the kind of thing that makes biology more interesting to me than comets. Comets are cool, but killies live in my neighborhood.

Killifish are not abstract.

I teach young adults as well as I can, but much of what I am required to teach (as proscribed by law) is the sentimental nonsense of the abstract. That my lambs can chirp about nucleotides and proteins well enough to pass a state-sanctioned exam does not mean they are any closer to understanding the killifish that swim just a few miles away from our classroom.

Biology is not abstract.

That my students can graduate without grasping that everything that breathes is connected to everything else alive, that food comes from the air, that everything alive will die, means I have wasted their time pretending I teach biology.

Not sure how I can fix this, but I am going to try.
Every child walking into Room B361 in two weeks is getting a seed.

I'll let you know how it goes....

Detail: First Day of Biology

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 "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.

Detail: "Greatest achievement of organized science"

0 Computers harm science education

The foundation of science is the natural world. If you minimize a child's exposure to the natural world, you diminish her capacity to grasp science.

We are doing our best to do just that.

The digital world is not the natural world, not even close. An economy based on extraction and manufactured desires depends on children becoming disconnected from what we are, mammals dependent on the natural cycles of the physical world.

If you hope to teach a child anything at all about time, about months, about seasons, about years, she needs to spend her young days under the sun and the moon, not on an iPad playing with a simulator.

***

In 1978, Jerry Mander, an advertising executive with a background in economics, wrote Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television. While some of it is dated, Mander's extensive second argument, "the colonization of experience", extends to much of what we do with children today, both in and out of the classroom. He shows how this colonization supports our extractive economy, and the costs it entails on our sense of well-being.

"We have been removed from the environment within which we evolved and with which we are uniquely designed to interact. Now we interact and coevolve with only the grosser, more monolithic, human-made commercial forms which remain available within our new laboratory-space station. Because we live inside the new environment, we are not aware that any tradeoff has been made."

Fisher-Price Apptivity Seat, photo via Amazon.com

It is very difficult, maybe impossible, to love science, to be truly curious about the world, if you spend most of your awake hours in front of screens. (I am not talking about the Aspergerish behavior of some children who cling to science "facts" like security blankets, garnering adult praise for their trouble.)


It is also very difficult to teach children science if they spend their first decade of schooling in a system geared to game "standardized" tests they face every spring. Every time a district pares down recess, or fine arts, or physical education, or music, or school trips to a local natural landmark, a child's chances of grasping the natural world diminishes.

The eye of a horseshoe crab, from inside the shell.

I'm taking my kids to Sandy Hook in a few weeks to watch horseshoe crabs mate--one of their assignments will be to watch the tide rise. Despite living within 50 miles of the Atlantic, more than a handful of my students have never seen the ocean.

But all of them can dash off a five paragraph essay on nothing.

How can you even pretend to know the ocean if you have never stood at its edge?

Detail: Computers harm science education

0 Math, magic, and machines

All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion.
                                                          Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2117

The Magic Circle, 1886, John William Waterhouse

We once feared magic--it challenged the order of the time.
Kings reigned, Popes pontificated, and we each had a place.
Magic gave those outside the mansions a dangerous tool. There's a reason witches were slaughtered.

Royalty and the church have kept their hold, as they have, and as they will, so long as we remain mortal. Our deepest fears respond to power's siren of promised heavens, so long as we do its bidding.

And we, for all our noise and talk and chatter, do power's bidding.

***

Science has proved far more powerful than magicians. Astrology fell way to astronomy, a man from Galilee to Galileo Galilei. Science levels power, makes democracy possible. Rational thought unleashes its own unfathomable powers.


If the folks used to being in power care to remain in power (with the usual divvying up between various hands of plutocrats, church elders, and royalty), they need to make magic matter again.

It looks like they're succeeding.

***

For a child to have any hope of grasping the universe, she needs a chance to understand how things work.

Some things are easy--clarinets, bicycles, and roller-skates are open-source  machines. You can see the parts, you can directly observe how the parts interact, and you can modify the parts (usually to worse effect) if you want.

Before I learned to drive, my Dad insisted that I learn how a car works, in an era when car engines were still all mechanical, and the parts (mostly) accessible. Cars broke down a lot more then, but we were a lot more capable of fixing them.

All of that is technology, not science, but technology then reinforced the idea that the universe has relationships, and those who mastered those relationships, well, mastered their worlds. When something broke, we had a chance at fixing it, if we  grasped how the parts interacted.

Our world was defined by tangible relationships.

***

Arithmetic is hard, harder than those of us good at it remember.

Grasping it today may be harder, ironically, because of the calculator. In our rush to create little scholars, we toss away memory tricks because memorization is not necessary in a universe that holds our working memory in external devices. Insofar as we're able to slide the work over to machines, I agree.

A math machine--once my Dad's, now mine. Still works.

We do not memorize the ways machines do, though. We do not create rigid tables of sculpted data on our brains. We create schema, elaborate networks of gossamer, connecting disconnected ideas with one another in an elaborate fabric where ideas rustle together like the flowing waves in a dancer's dress.

When an idea, a concept, a thought does not fit, it's like a wrinkle on that same flowing dress--we rub at it, press on it, maybe rub some spit on it until it, too, becomes part of out schema, sometimes altering it in ways that the thought no longer has its original meaning.

Or we toss it. We do this all the time. 

When we memorize numbers, when we memorize their relationships, when we struggle with our times tables, we are not simply  chiseling ideas onto stone, we are wrestling with relationships.  It's how we learn.

When we confound the binary code of the efficient calculator--so fast, so accurate, so sleek in design--with the chaotic mess of ideas we struggle to weave into what we already know, we lose a place in our universe, the only one that matters, the one we create in our minds.

***

When we lose our sense of arithmetic--never mind algebra, or trignometry, or calculus--but "simple" arithmetic, we lose our chance at feeling how the natural world works, a world that runs on harmonic rhythms.

The loss of these sensuous rhythms makes high school science a ghost, the class reduced to memorizing incantations of imagined power. E = mc² becomes a mantra, and passing science becomes a sacred rite of passage.

It also becomes pointless.

Christopher Danielson continues to re-alter my schema on how kids learn math: Talking Math With Your Kids

Detail: Math, magic, and machines

0 Our evolving ignorance

 

It gets worse, at least from a biology teacher's point of view:

"About half of those who express a belief in human evolution take the view that evolution is “due to natural processes such as natural selection” (32% of the American public overall)." 

Only about a third of Americans accept natural selection, the cornerstone of biology. That's like "believing in"  chemistry without accepting the concept of atoms, or physics without accepting inertia.

Forget NAEP, forget NGSS, PARCC, and CCSS--forget all of that, because whatever we're doing is not working, and will not work, so long as we continue to treat children as standardized units, as long as we treasure obedience over skepticism, as long as we continue to reward the worst of our behaviors at our highest levels of power.

In the meantime, I will continue to plant seeds in our classroom, both figuratively and literally, until the happy (but not inevitable) day when our children bark at the nonsense we feed them every day at home, in school, in malls, in just about any space where kids encounter adults.

Take a child clamming, gardening, fishing, crabbing, kite-flying, hunting, whatever it takes.

Detail: Our evolving ignorance

0 Maybe I'll try teaching science for a change

Saw a double rainbow just before dusk....

Science did not create Little Boy and Fat Man.
Technology did.

Little Boy

But our knowledge of the natural world made the technology possible.

I do not train engineers, I do not train scientists--I share the natural world with children. Our classroom is just over a mile from where the folks from the Manhattan Project originally purified uranium--the site is still contaminated.

***

Our Superintendent-in-Chief Arne Duncan believes that "we have to educate ourselves to a better economy." In a world defined by the global economy, education is reduced to a tool needed to create citizens worthy of this new world empire.

For this Scarecrow, the degree matters more than knowing

Most of my kids remain blissfully unworthy, still filled with a  joie de vivre that requires taming for success in Arne's world.

I have little faith in Duncan or anybody else who places ambition over love, though I do grudgingly admire their machine-like pursuit of a life not worth living. Such a life gives him the option of not living within a stone's throw of a radioactive field.

Connecting my lambs to the natural world takes more time than the curriculum allows. Seeds simply do not sprout fast enough in ArneWorld to make biology education efficient (though Zeus knows we try--go read about Wisconsin Fast Plants^®).

Every August, as the sunlight dims, I ask myself the same question, and this year I am asking aloud.
What will it be, science teacher?

Wheat, grown in our classroom

"Biology 101" again, or helping young adults build real connections to a deep, deadly, and beautiful universe, connected to and of this Earth, where food and feces trump  finances and fear.

Biology feces much more interesting than the shit we pretend matters....

Detail: Maybe I'll try teaching science for a change

0 Maker Movement hit the underclass generations ago

Rich folks are discovering that the Maker Movement makes for good learning. They want their children to create new things, solve novel problems, to, well, think.

That this flies against what most kids do during most of the chunk of childhood time they wile away in school while the adults in the home drive off to places they'd rather not be doing things they'd rather not does not bode well for education.

The less economically blessed have been fixing things for a long time. Because socioeconomic status and school success tend to sink together, the "low" level academic classes often parallel economic class.

I teach science, or at least try to. I've long preferred doing hands-on lab activities with the lower classes, especially labs that require some true problem solving. (I'm not talking about behavioral issues here--but the few mild disasters I've had over the years add to the stories.)

***

I'm going to generalize now, using anecdotal evidence--feel free to call me on it.

Too many of my top students are afraid to screw up. We've trained them to be timid. I used to believe this was accidental, I'm no longer so sure.

Meanwhile, many of the kids from the wrong end of town attack labs, merrily screwing up along the way, encountering problems, fixing them, creating more problems to fix.

These are the kids who live cracked windows and duct tape. These are the kids who see adults around them patch things up, who know what it's like to wait in a disabled car, to live in a chilly home. They are a bit more immune to the learned helplessness we instill in our better students.

How many times are we we fed feel-good stories of the kid who made good despite the odds?
Maybe they are where they are because of the odds.

Please do not mistake my message--I am not advocating that we toss children into poverty for the sake of developing good ol' American know-how. No developed country does that better than us, and the overwhelming stress of poverty destroys far more too many children.

What I am saying, though, is this--before we get all starry-eyed over a population that pretends to have mastered algebra, how about we think about the myriad problems solved every time a child fixes a hand-me-down bicycle.

Maybe even acknowledge that children who can fix things have valuable skills too many teachers do not.

So yes, the Maker Movement makes sense in schools. Just be aware that a lot of your students and the families have been involuntary members of the movement long before the current fad started.

If a child is hungry, she's not going to learn anything except what "we" think she's worth.

Detail: Maker Movement hit the underclass generations ago

0 A piece of wood

Tell me the story of a piece of wood. How did it come to be?

How did it get to Home Depot? What was it before that?

How did it get to the spot where it grew? Was a squirrel involved?

How many years did it grow?
How deep were its roots?
What sits there now?

Where did the stuff of the wood come from?
What was the carbon dioxide part of before it became part of a tree?
Did it come from an animal's breath? Did it come from yours?
What cell did it come from? Does every tree in our woods hold CO₂ from the heart of a bear?
Did the bear's exhaled breath freeing the CO₂ fog up the chilly December air?

And what did that bear eat, the stuff broken into CO₂ and water?
And how far back can any of us imagine?

Right now the sun is shining on me, energy released as protons lose tiny tufts of mass.
What forces pushed protons together to form helium and release this light?
What forces pushed protons together to form carbon, to form oxygen?
Where was the carbon before it was on Earth?
Hold old is the soul of a carbon atom in one of the neurons firing that allow you to read these words?

Tell me the story of a piece of wood, and I will tell you the story of our universe.

A child could spend a lifetime piecing together the story of a piece of wood, which is, when you get down to it, the story of all of us.

Detail: A piece of wood

0 Ungated communities

"You think you've lost your fur and your tail for a purpose spelled with a capital P and sold to you in some book that explains how everything was just a prelude until you came. If you do, you're happy I take it, and you'd be better off not to be following me or this crab or lifting up stones and looking under them."

Loren Eiseley

I like to follow ghost crabs...photo by Tracy Parris, NPS

Our district is in trouble.

We're facing 10% layoffs, and the possible loss of our extra-curricular activities. We're paying to revamp our technology to enable us to take the PARCC exam in a couple of years, an exam just about guaranteed to demonstrate we're "failing" while we silence our musicians.

Few of those making the big bucks in our district live in our district. Those of us who live in town are subsidizing the lifestyles of folks who would never consider living here.

Our town is not the only one caught in the tidal change in our national economy where the efforts of folks in towns like Bloomfield pay for someone's grapes from Château Margau. Things are getting grim for many of us.

Lifted from All My  Eyes

I can take on Bill Gates mano a mano, but his dollar-driven army (and those of his ilk) will likely win in the public battles that matter. Teachers, parents, citizens have sat silent too long.

***

So why do I bother teaching "science" in a system that has been rigged to fail?

Here's why: the natural world, the one that matters, the one that feeds us, the one that brings joy, the one that was here long before words were uttered and will be here long after all of us are silent again, that world, is virtually unknown to most of us in our culture.

Know this world, the world that matters, and you can still forage for food, and know grace.
Know this world, the world that matters, and you can still lose yourself, and find peace.
Know this world, the world that matters,and you can still sleep, and feel restored.

Most of the kids I teach face dim prospects if they define themselves by the rules of Bill Gates, if they judge themselves by the shiny objects that drive them to debt, if they cannot see the larger picture.

If my lambs learn nothing else in my classroom, they at least witness the creation of food from their breath and water and little else. They are reminded of death. They are gently prompted day after day after day that there is a world larger than any of us in a drop of pond water, a teaspoon of soil.

Should I ever meet Mr. Gates, I'd give him a basil seed, a small pot of peat moss, and a prayer. I'm sure he "has people" that could do this for him. I'm sure he is reasonably happy, or thinks he is, and really, what's the difference?

 Here's the secret--there's a huge difference. 

Children who know the wild sing more robustly, dance with more abandon, sleep more soundly than children behind the Gates. 


Photo from NPS site, should be fair game...will replace with mine once I find one of the 3 gazillion ghost crab photos we've taken.

Detail: Ungated communities

0 Science is for the birds

If you get upset at the idea that birds are truly reptiles, or cringed when Pluto fell off its planetary pedestal, then you practice science the way most Christians practice Christianity--seeking what's true is besides the point.

I tell my lambs I do not give a rat's behind if they remember anything about DNA polymerase after they hit the NJ EOC exam come May (and even then I'm not sure how much they "need" to remember), but I do expect them to think.

And I am failing at this....

***

A square foot patch of earth anywhere outside our high school carries far more complexity than anything a child can find online. Seeing a patch of earth as anything more than a pixellated version of the digital world requires effort.

Our children are no more lazy than our grandparents were--we are mammals, and when you strip out the frivolities, most of what we do has something to do with getting oxygen, food, and water into us, and getting carbon dioxide, nitrogenous wastes, and undigested food out while avoiding getting killed in the process.

We occasionally a chunk of time out of our day to day survival behaviors to reproduce and rear our young.

The less energy we expend to get the stuff we need in and out of our mammalian forms, the better our chances of surviving. Laziness is not a character flaw, it's a successful part of our evolutionary heritage.

Until a few decades ago.

Steve Paine, under CC

We are visual critters--we react to what we see. All light is real, all images are real, and our brains can hardly be faulted for not grasping that the flashy stuff on our screens is not real. And until a few decades ago, what was real did not change much. When something changed, we reacted quickly--we had to if we wanted to survive.

Science is about challenging what we know to be true based on observations of the natural world. Children spend most of their waking hours connected to a digital world, where the rules of survival are different, dictated by dollars. People make stuff up.

Adults live in this same unreal world, too.
Arne Duncan makes stuff up. Michelle Rhee makes stuff up. Chris Cerf makes stuff up. And it's very difficult to know what's made up when adults no longer care to seek the truth.

Which gets back to the birds. How many school teachers bother to mention that birds are reptiles, not because a naturalist says so, but because of a bird's relationship to a crocodile and a snake?

Such distinctions hardly matter, I suppose, if getting to what's true matters less than restating whatever nonsense is found in some outdated textbook.

In the end it does not matter whether a young child can parrot her teacher's nonsense about where to categorize a parakeet. What does matter is whether a child has the ability (or even desire) to challenge nonsense thrust at her.

***

 What's my solution?

Before we make birds abstract ideas, reduced to pixels on a screen, let a child observe a real bird, for a long time. Give her a pair of binoculars. Go outside. Watch.

Let her hold a bird in her hands, a live one if possible, but a dead one will do.

This one is alive! Debbie Courson,  used with permission.

Save the abstract until she has had a chance to observe the natural world we abandon when we stare at a screen.

I (perhaps naively) maintain that the truth helps set us free. The more I play this game, though, the more I think we're working hard to free us from the truth.

There are no lies in the virtual world.

Detail: Science is for the birds