Search results matching tags 'life' and 'culture'

What do you care to know about the world?

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 14:13:00 GMT

Teaching matters.

We owe it to our children to get it right.

What do you care to know about the world?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you care to know about the world?

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

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

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

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

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

What do you care to know about the world ?

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

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

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

The world worth knowing...

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

What we risk losing

Anonymous — Sun, 20 May 2012 13:21:00 GMT

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
"The Second Coming," W.B. Yeats

I watched a grackle along the edge of our ocean yesterday.

It gallumphed down the surf's edge like a drunken sandpiper, got smacked with a wave, then fluttered back to the top of the now receding wave.

Over and over again.

I sat on the sand with Leslie, and we chatted about our grackle as it battled the wash. I love grackles, hands down my favorite bird, and this one was being particularly grackly. What would possess a bird to challenge the edge of the sea?

After a few minutes, the grackle answered my question--it nabbed a writhing sand crab, then picked it apart a few feet away. The grackle got its reward, and we got our story.
The sand crab did not fare as well.

***

There is a risk challenging those who hope to transform public education into data farms feeding the intricate morass we still call economics.

Look at the humorless smiles of those running the show, the lupine grins of Arne Duncan, of Bill Gates, of Eli Broad. They may even believe what they are spewing--it takes a certain lack of humor to get to reign over the destruction of things that matter.

They can hurt you, and will if you pose a threat to their goals.

But that's not the risk I am talking about. As much fun as it is to pretend otherwise, a few words shared among a very small community of teachers poses no threat at all to the ed "reformers" who value power over democracy.

The risk is falling into their language, into their world, into their ethos.
The risk is spending too many hours pouring over their dull documents (Next Generation Science Standards, anyone?), trying to parse out meaning of individual phrases when we should be calling out the process that created such a document.
The risk is weighing an offer to make real money sitting at the table breaking bread with them under the hum of fluorescent lights.
The risk is not losing the battle--I am not so blind not to see that any remnants of "public" and "democracy" are likely to be crushed for the foreseeable future--the risk is losing ourselves.

I am a happy person, blessed with the grace of a grackle wrestling with the ocean for its food.
I am a mortal person, as doomed as the sand crab picked apart by the grackle.

A grackle will still be wrestling with the ocean long after I am gone. So long as grackles continue to be grackles, our children will have larger stories to learn than the ones foisted on them in the name of the global economy.

It takes little courage to tweet in an echo chamber.

Live well, be part of your community, grow some food, use your hands, love.

Bill Gates from Seattle Weekly.

Grackle from Wikipedia via CC 3.0 by mdq

Imbolc

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:33:00 GMT

An Cailleach Bhearra wandered around back in the 10th century in western Ireland,
eating "seaweed, salmon, and wild garlic" (my kind of woman), looking for firewood.

If the day was bright and sunny, beware--she had gathered plenty of wood and was set for many cold days ahead.
If the day was gray, she didn't bother, and she will make the days warm up again. Sound familiar?

Imbolc again.
The daffodils have broken through the earth. My words shrink as the sunlight grows.
Groundhog Day has always been a favorite of mine.

***

We are trapped by words.

This week my lambs are being tested. They sit silently as they analyze stylized marks on paper, then fill in 90 bubbles on a piece of paper holding 500.

This is serious business, this thing we do with words. Outside a gull glided by lifted by the unusually warm mid-winter breeze. No one else in class saw it.

What's the use of knowing the word gull if you have no use for the animal?

We pretend our words make us safe. We pretend our words give us control. We pretend that words make us special, and that these words separate us from the bacteria, the fungi, the jellies, and the gull.

***

A few days ago I watched a crow at the ferry jetty caw caw caw at a gull sharing a light post. The gull did not respond. The crow then swooped down, picked up a piece of paper, then returned to its perch near the gull.

The crow carefully ripped up the paper, piece by piece, dropping each piece, one by one, watching each piece until it hit the ground, looking at the gull between pieces as if to say Hey!

When done, the crow cawed once more, and this time the gull squawked back. The crow, now seemingly satisfied, nodded, then flew to a trashcan and cawed at a few humanfolk, one (not me) who cawed back.

I have no idea what that was about, nor could I justify discussing it in my classroom. So I don't.

Curriculum stops at the point where humans are besides the point.

That makes sense if you live in a world of words. It makes less sense at the water's edge.
A child can parrot the Calvin cycle without knowing a thing about a seed, about food, about the billions, trillions of other organisms teeming around him.

If we keep ignoring things where humans are besides the point, we will become just that.

***

I teach biology, the study of life, in a culture that fails to recognize death. The children spray themselves with Axe, yet shy from the pond water and the mud brought in from outside.

I can hardly grade a child on her ability to keep a plant alive in a public building . I cannot ask a child to slaughter a calf in class. I can ask her to tell me how many NADH molecules are generated from one molecule of glucose during the Krebs cycle.

With the return of the sun comes the return of my sanity, when I feel comfortable leting go of the words again, learning (again) that what I thought was besides the point is the point.

Photos by us.

National Canine Latin Barking assessments

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 02:00:00 GMT

While immersed in the Krebs cycle in mid-January, pushing biochemical pathways on sophomores who have yet to learn chemistry, I marvel at their persistence, trying to grasp what I know they cannot, but I ask them to do it anyway. (There is something unethical about this....)

Should I ever train a dog to bark in Latin, I will be praised for my remarkable puppy and my methods of puppy training. I could write books about my methods, and others could train their pooches to recite Virgil as well.

I could develop a whole system of tests, the National Canine Latin Barking assessment system, and make those with less educated mutts feel shame.

I would be rich, my puppies would gain universal acclaim, but truth be told (and truth has become a rare commodity), my trained terriers would no more about Latin than I know about the mind of a frisky horseshoe crab clasped onto its partner under a June moon.

My dogs would know nothing more than they did when they only barked, no matter what the NCLB assessment measures.

***

Come May, I will take a few busloads of young humans to watch horseshoe crabs mate at the edge of the bay, to remind them (and me) that there's a whole lot more going on than we can ever grasp in a lifetime, much of it as beautiful as it is incomprehensible.

And we will return to Bloomfield, our Bloomfield, different critters than the ones we were that morning, in ways no standardized test can measure.

Mid-January is as good a time as any to be cranky.

Photo by me using Leslie's point-n-shoot.

Dark

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 23:20:00 GMT

Last week of the sinking sun.

The Earth hurtles closer to the sun, but my little piece of paradise edges more and more oblique to the sun, our source of light, of life. We're in the dark season.

***

The bell still rings at 7:45 in the morning. It's not a bell anymore, but we still call it that. I blew a conch shell as the bell sounded, an old shell that has been around the science wing for years. My students were as amazed by the loud bellowing of the conch shell as I am by their iPhones.

The conch was once alive. It no longer is. Neither is obvious to most of us scurrying under the fluorescent hum of December lights.

***

We're studying photosynthesis now, my absolute favorite subject in biology, except maybe quahogs, which aren't part of the curriculum.

Things are not connecting as well as I'd like, but they rarely do in mid-December. The trees are bare at the moment. We could take a lesson from them--not much happening under the sky when the sun fades away.

ATP synthase. Chemiosmosis. Electron transport chain. I mention the words, knowing that they will roll off my students cerebra as water rolls off a leaf. And that's fine with me.

Everything that burns easily in my classroom does so because of the grace of plants, capturing the energy sent forth by our sun. The plants in the back of the room continue to grow under our fluorescent lamps, trapping any carbon dioxide that wander too close to their chloroplasts, carbon dioxide that arose from the deepest cells of the few animals in the classroom.

Most of the mammals in the area are biding their time, waiting for the sun to hold still in the sky, waiting for it to turn back northward again.

The plants remind me that our breath is real, that what was once part of me is now part of another living being, communion in the classroom.

The sun hardly gets the attention it once did. Not one child in my classroom is the child of a farmer. Not one child in my classroom depends on any harvest within a hundred miles of home.

Every child, though, plants a seed. Every child is reminded what their ancestors knew. A few of them realize what has been lost. Not many, but enough.

It's the enough that carries me through the winter solstice.

Photos by us.

Science for non-science majors

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 01:44:00 GMT

If a child has an insatiable appetite to learn about the world, to pursue patterns and rhythms in the swirl of sensations slipping into her consciousness each day, then it makes sense to teach her the vocabulary of the trade.

If a child chases the rational world with her eyes alit, then it makes sense to teach her the finer points of microscopy, of calculus, of stoichiometry.

We all love those kids in our classes, because we glow in their light.

That's not why I teach science, though. She doesn't need me, she needs a real scientist. I'm just a teacher.

***

Most kids do not wake up in the morning yearning for more science. Most kids would not set their alarm clocks just to make sure they do not miss a single moment of class. Most kids are still more mammal than machine. These are the kids I teach.

We live in a fantasy world, a culture cocooned from reality by Zoloft, Zelda, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, a culture where astrology rules over astronomy, where more people believe in Eva Lonoria than evolution.

So where do I start?

Start with a "miracle"--have a child plant a seed, see water fly from flame, listen to his own heart. Have a child stand at the sea's edge as the tide rises over her feet, an ancient arachnid creeping a few yards away from her. Have a child see the moon, see Jupiter, see a falling star.

Then tell science as it developed, stories of greed as humans tried to make gold but made urine glow instead, stories of wonder as humans tried to explain the light of stars and galaxies above, stories of power as humans realized that their models made accurate predictions possible.

Whatever you do, never let a class go by without a few moments of observation that defy intuition, without a story or two about what we thought then, what we think now.

Science is not all flash, but it is all wonder.

We really know nothing at all about what the all is all about. Recognize our children as the magnificent mammals they are, and we'll have more scientists in this generation. Keep treating them as machines, well, we'll get more of what we have, faces reflected in screens, exchanging life, bit by bit, becoming the ghosts in the machine.

Pad baby by umpcportal, used under CC.

Life on a limb

Anonymous — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 13:56:00 GMT

We got smacked last week--I still step over a downed line when walking to school, and the curbs are lined with life-like tree limbs. Just seeing all these leafy zombie branches edging the asphalt gives me an odd joy.

I wonder if other biology teachers feel the same way.

The storm was a great reminder why trees scurry to drop their leaves in the fall. Trees that dropped their leaves before the storm, ceding the dying sunshine to their leafy neighbors, stand smugly over the debris of their neighbors.

A couple of mornings ago, on a gray morning so still I felt like an intruder, I stopped to watch a leaf slowly wobble its way to the ground, silently rocking to a lullaby, as though choreographed by a Great Designer.

Watching the leaf fall, its season done, was an obvious reminder of what awaits, but it did not fall for me. The leaves littering the ground suggest that leaves fall all the time without my awareness.

It was the day after the Day of the Dead.

The idea that a leaf's gentle fall cold be choreographed by some Great Designer is a comforting conceit, and could serve (for some) as evidence of אהיה אשר אהיה --as gentle and powerful a description of whatever this whole whatever is.

But all that's unknowable, and I only have so many hours to play, so my mind wanders back to the biology, to what we do know, enough for me. More than enough.

***

There is much to be learned from observing a leaf. A young child can easily discern the thickening at the base of the stem, the veins traveling through the leaf, the various shapes of leaves, the similarity of leaves from a given tree.

That same child can see that some trees give up leaves before others, and that some never seem to give them up at all.

To do this, though, the child needs time to do what looks like nothing. Untestable nothing. Not a whole lot of money can be made from children doing nothing.

***

If you look at the end of the stem of a fallen leaf, it will be smooth, as though the leaf were designed to be sliced off.

As the light fades and the leaf no longer has the energy it needs to make new chlorophyll, the green pigment that catches light, cells actively work to prepare for a leaf's end. The break is not accidental. The leaf remains attached to its twig by the remnants of its main veins. That the vessels are called xylem, and that we require children to memorize xylem, tells us nothing about life, nor biology.

What might interest a child is that cells actively prepare for their own death. What might amaze the same child is that our cells do the same thing--it's part of how we develop fingers.

I happened to be walking by a tree on a still day when the thin threads of xylem finally gave way, at an age when death feels more real than it did decades ago.

A child walking by the same tree might rather run through the leaves already fallen, rustling through the warm leaf smell that reminds her of Halloween, of Thanksgiving, of Grandma--but not death.

However a leaf affect a child, she must first be aware it exists.

Last time I looked, there was not a hint of a leaf's leafiness in our textbook.

The fetal hand is from the Gerontology Research Group--they got it from an IMAX movie "The Human Body" produced by BBC et al.

Life in a drop of water

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:38:00 GMT

I wandered into school despite our Hallowe'en snow day, to prep for lab. I brought in some pond water I foolishly (and joyously) collected in the middle of the storm.

I took a drop, put it on a slide. I never know what I expect to see, and I'm never disappointed.

I saw some critters I had not seen before--first a few translucent "turtles" grazing through strands of algae, then lollygagging off to other pastures.

A few moments later I saw what looked like two flowers on springs slowly uncoiling, getting longer and longer, then undulating in the micro-currents. *snap!* Their stalks coiled back into springs, too quick for my eye to follow. I watched them unravel again, spooling out their stalks, then a minute later, *snap!*

After a session with a drop of pond water, a single drop, I do my best to get the critters off the slide.

Every drop of my pond water is full of life. Watch one or two protozoa go about their business for a few minutes, and the possibility they're sentient creeps in.

We live in an amazing world we do not, cannot, understand.

***

Today marks the anniversary of our first detonation of the hydrogen bomb, "Ivy Mike," obliterating part of the Enewetak atoll. People lived on the atoll before we started testing nuclear bombs on it four years earlier.

People had lived on it since the time of Christ, perhaps even longer. They were forced to leave.

On November 1^st, 1952, we unleashed a blast that was over 400 times stronger than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

What responsibility do teachers have when we share secrets ancients would have held sacred and silent?

What responsibility do teachers have as we give children the tools to manipulate the world as engineers, as scientists, as policymakers?

The atoll is again "safe for habitation," according to the same government that blasted it over 60 years ago.

In a few months, some of my students will be transforming bacteria, literally manipulating the code of life, sliding pieces of jellyfish DNA into the bacteria so that the bacteria will glow green under fluorescent light. We do this in high school without thinking twice, because it's biology, because it's technology, because it's flashy, because we can.

Humans are naturally empathic--our culture bleeds it out of our children at our own peril. If we continue to treat children as economic tools, as bits of data, we will continue to have a culture where machines matter at least as much as people. [Almost a quarter (22.8%) of women ages 40-59 years old take anti-depressant medicines!]

President Obama claims that “nations with the most educated workers will prevail."

Prevail at what? We got enough nuclear tonnage to put this planet out, including my lackadaisical pond critters munching away at this moment in a jar on my windowsill. We're pretty good at prevailing.

Maybe it's time we spent more time learning how to live.

Criminy, the zombies are winning.

The YouTube is by zaster79,credits are at the end--the good stuff starts at 0:45.

Exploding trees

Anonymous — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 21:27:00 GMT

The trees are exploding.

We're getting a wet, heavy snowfall, and the broad leaves of our deciduous trees are catching snowflakes as well as they catch photons.

Their vessels are still swollen with sap, carrying nutrients back into the ground, stored in the massive roots of the underground world we fear.

Water starts to expand as it nears its freezing point--that's why ice floats. Still, I've never seen trees explode because of an early frost, so I'll blame the snow.

I stood out in the snow watching my daughter play football. The scene was surreal--several players had dressed up for Hallowe'en, dinosaurs chasing ninjas, Goldilocks chased by a pirate. Some players wore overcoats, a few dressed only in shorts. The snow was blowing sideways.

*CRACK*--a large limb fell from a massive tree just a few feet from me.

Had my brain caught the branch, I would have regretted not finishing a few things, but that's the way it goes. I worked for years in hospitals. Massive trauma, tempered by unconsciousness and ungodly jolts of endorphins, is about as good as it gets for one's final moments.

Now, a few hours later, my numb feet warm again, my skin dry, a few thoughts:

*My daughter turns 29 tomorrow. Watching her intensity playing football, hearing her laughter across the field, reminds me my biggest job is done.
*Had I been brained, the last thing anyone (I cared about) would have worried about would be an unfinished curriculum being written just to meet the demands of some acronym (QSAC) emanating from Trenton.
*We're finite, focus on what matters.

It continues to snow, I continue to breathe. But I appreciate the reminder.

Photo via Baristanet.

Pediatrics vs. teaching

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 23:21:00 GMT

I used to be a doctor, the kind with a stethoscope, the kind licensed to hurt you for you own good. It puzzles children to learn that a physician would walk away from medicine in order to teach, and there are days I am baffled myself.

I liked medicine. I love teaching. I did not know that this would be true when I left medicine, so while it is true, it is not enough to explain why I left. Why leave something you like, especially when it pays ridiculously well?

Every year children ask me this, and so far I have not quite gotten it right. I thought I had it right, but high school sophomores would kind of shake just a little bit sideways. I wasn't fooling them.

I think I got it right now.

***

I saw a lot of bad stuff in hospitals. I saw a lot of good stuff, too, but good stuff can be found in a lot of places. The truly bad stuff has a home in the hospital.

The unlucky (an elderly woman who slowly died from an infection caused by an errant piece of metal ripping through her car's floor, riveting in her thigh).

The doomed (a woman burned over most of her body, still conscious, still talking, immediately before we intubated her, rendering her speechless--we knew she was doomed when we did this. We did it anyway.)

The curious (two babies sharing the same torso, the same heart, the same fate).

The geographically screwed (an Asian toddler who needed a new heart, but who could not afford one, twisting away towards death as she lived in an American hospital as an alien).

The innocent (children wasting away from a virus we barely understood, acquired from a mother's heroin habit or her lover's proclivities).

The unlucky (a stray bullet meant for another, a victim of physics and Euclidean geometry).

I was very good at diagnosis, and not bad at making things better once a diagnosis was made. A few were better than me, but not many.

***

When you are surrounded by hurt, there are two ways to respond if you want to remain functional--fix it, or pretend it does not exist. I did a lot of fixing.

If you do medicine long enough, and if you are paying attention, you give death its due. It's real, it's usually ugly, and it's inevitable.

I can't beat death--took me awhile to get to that realization, but I got there. And it's liberating.

Turns out living isn't the goal--living well is what matters.

I was pretty good at helping people live longer. Now I'm getting good at helping people live well.

I thought my job mattered before, but had my doubts in the pitiful wail of a dying toddler, bruised and bleeding as we laid our hands, our technology, and finally our fists in futile CPR on her tiny body as it cooled its way back to entropy.

A life worth living is our only compensation against the greedy hand of death.

So I help children carve out a life worth living.

I'm a teacher.

If you teach, teach as though lives depend on it. If you think this is excessive, get out.
Photos by me or Leslie--feel free to use under CC.