Search results matching tags 'teaching science' and 'death'

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.

Death in a classroom, again

Anonymous — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 01:50:00 GMT

A roly poly died in class this week. That in itself is not unusual. This particular roly poly, however, lived in a terrarium maintained by a student. No rock fell on it. It had food and water. Unless we get an autopsy, it will go down as an "up and died." It was found in the classic dead bug position, even though, technically, it was a crustacean.

The two young women who maintained the tank were a upset, but once I assured them that the roly poly died of old age, they were fine. "Old age" is foreign to the young, as it should be. Besides, I made that up. Nothing dies of old age. Nothing.

***

I am meeting with the governor on Tuesday. I hope it goes well, and I hope he uses his office to promote education, but I know we will not be talking about dead roly polies.

School should be a dangerous place, with dangerous ideas. The young should be pushing us. My students were mere embryos in 1996.

They were born in a world of incomprehensibly destructive weapons. In a culture that values words and contracts over life. In a world defined by systems and machines,

That they do not run out of the building screaming by 11 A.M. shows how much they trust us.

So we'll dither about merit based pay, and education reform, and what education means to democracy, but we won't talk about dead roly polies.

***

I have a dozen or so clams in my belly now, critters that were alive 3 or 4 hours ago. They were delicious, and nutritious. They're now dead.

That's the way it works.

We all die, of course, and we mostly ignore this. We eat to live. I eat the clams, they eat plankton. Most of the clams I raked up today were less than a decade old. I have no idea what clams know, and they have no idea what I know. They know enough to try to escape when I rake.Most living things, conscious or not, make every effort to stay alive.

And if we want to stay alive, and if we do not have chloroplasts, we need to eat other organisms. "Eat," a simple 3 letter word, one we do not ruminate over much, means this: taking into your body the once living body of another, in order that you can keep living.

The alternative is premature death.

***

Peter Singer, an ethicist, waivers on whether eating clams is OK. He seems to think it depends on whether they have interests:

[T]he only legitimate boundary to our concern for the interests of other beings is the point at which it is no longer accurate to say that the other being has interests. To have interests...a being must be capable of suffering or experiencing pleasure. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for disregarding that suffering, or for refusing to count it equally with the like suffering of any other being. But the converse of this is also true. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of enjoyment, there is nothing to take into account.

This is an interesting issue. We could spend weeks in class discussing it. But we won't, not if I want to keep my position.

I doubt a single child in my class worried about the well being of a roly poly before coming into Room B362. I can take no credit for their newfound concern beyond bringing in a few roly polies. Just about all living organisms are more interesting (and complicated) than we know, until we bother to get acquainted with them.

Every organism alive on Earth today has been evolving for the same amount of time. We are not special. And we will die, too.

So I bring a few in, so my lambs can watch them. And they do pretty much what we do. Wander around, eat, drink, socialize, reproduce, and die.

No one knows the why. No one.

***

I teach biology, the study of life. To study life, you need to grasp how we stay alive, which means you need to have a handle on death.

We spend a lot of time talking about meiosis, about biomes, about transcription and translation, about DNA. "Death", however, is not in the New Jersey curriculum standards, except when referring to stars. "Love" is not in the NJCCCS. Nor is "global warming," nor "nuclear warfare."

So what matters?

***

I slaughtered, deliberately, 27 clams tonight. I slaughtered many more organisms while raking for those clams, even more while driving to my sekrit clamming bed.

I can (reasonably) expect to die within the next 20 or 30 years, though I would beat my family average should I live so long.

Microsoft will outlive me. So will Cisco and GM and the US Federal Government, all fabled institutions, all protected by law. I either matter, or I don't. I'm too old to worry about that anymore, so long as i get my clams and my books and my beer, but it's a worthwhile (and interesting) question for my lambs.

Every family in my town pays a huge amount of taxes ts support our local school system. I am thankful that they do. The least I can do is teach things that matter.

If I tell my townfolks I teach about meiosis, and polymerase chain reactions, and other forms of modern nonsense, well, many would believe they're getting their money;s worth, and maybe they are.

If I told them that their children were studying roly polies, I am not sure I'd get the same reception. Governor Christie could destroy me with that.

Still, death matters. A lot. Maybe not if you're a corporation, and maybe not if you're a clam, but it does if you're a child.

Imagine what we could do if each and every one of us recognized our own finiteness....

Crocuses and clams

Anonymous — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 22:41:00 GMT

We're a few weeks away from the crocuses. They know the sun is coming back. I do not know how they know but they do. Soon green fingers will break through the corms.

Meanwhile, my clams have settled in for the winter. Not deep, maybe 2 or 3 inches deeper than July, but still deeper, clammed up tight, waiting for the water to warm. Deep for a clam, though.

We still have a few stalks of Brussels sprouts growing, still with a few tiny sprouts left.

At this moment, the tide is just starting to rise again on the mudflats, under a crescent moon dancing between wintry clouds low in the west. The clams are there, under the black water glistening from the sliver of moonlight, as they have been before we came, as they will be when we're gone.

In a few more hours, a few feet of water will rise over the clams, then recede again before dawn.

***

We can teach about tides and the moon, we can talk of gravity, but until a child wrestles a clam from the mud, she knows nothing about them.

Most of what we teach, or pretend to teach, means nothing to a child, but often, sadly, nothing to the teacher as well.

I know of tides, but not the taiga or the tiger.

I know of quahogs, and reasonably well, but my words and pictures cannot replace an afternoon on the mudflats, the pungent sweet smell of life mingling with death, jolting young noses more familiar with Amber Romance and Axe.

A single afternoon on the flats can be ruined if I emphasize the abstract, especially to a generation that knows only the abstract. So I will pretend to care about mantles and siphons and the economic importance of hard shell clams while I hope that a few of the children get curious about this unknowable universe we've kept hidden from them.

And for the next few weeks, I am trapped in their world, until the crocuses come back.

Thanks to PSE&G, about 150 young adults will get to spend a day on a tidal flat in May.

Time matters

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:28:00 GMT

Learning how to play an instrument well enough to enjoy it (which is not to say play it well) requires a fair amount of time, and occasionally money.

I play a few instruments just well enough to amuse myself, though, to be fair, I am easily amused. All require an investment of time. Even the seemingly idiotic ones (I have both a nose and a jaw harp, tin whistles, a wooden flute and a bright yellow banana ocarina somewhere) require practice to get to unconscious joy, when the cerebellum hums loud enough to clam up the cerebral cortex, which is, of course, the point.

I hog 48 minutes a day from a lot of young adults in my town, five days a week.
That's 4 hours a week, not enough to get one to Julliard, but certainly enough to play "Ode to Joy" on a karimba.

If we were immortal, this would be a trivial issue. But we're not.

35 years ago I chose to learn biochemical pathways over the bucket bass. I'm supposed to tell students that they need to do the same, so that they can go to college, and get jobs, and reach their dreams.

And here I am now, in my 6th decade, dreaming of playing the fiddle.

***

Of all the things I do for joy that are human, playing guitar, singing, and doodling are my favorites.

None earn me money; none contribute to the GDP; none got me to college or medical school. All three help make my life worth living.

If our children do not have time to play the harmonica, to doodle away hours, to hear stories about their neighborhood, something is wrong.

If we dedicate our children's time to acquiring the skills and credentials needed to live a "successful" life, cajoling them to give up sports or drama or music to chase success on a report card so that they have a better shot at getting into a "better" college.

Happiness and success intersect in a very small corner of our American universe here. It's nice to straddle both, but if I had to choose one over the other, it's happiness hands down.

***

We've replaced our local stories with mass media. We hardly have time to sit down for meals, never mind trade tales that define us.

Kelly Tripucka played ball in our high school. He graduated in 1977. He still comes round now and again. Kelly is among one of many honored in our school.

His sister, who also had a splendid career, but too early for the WNBA, works in administration across the street from the high school.

His father, an All American himself, recently donated a good chunk of change to help save our local football stadium.

No school should be named after a national figure, no matter how iconic. Every neighborhood has a story to tell, wisdom to share.

I went to Thorne Junior High School in Middletown--Buddy Thorne, a local lad, gave up his life in the Battle of the Bulge. He gave up his life, and earned the Congressional Medal of Honor. The medal sits in the school.

Few folks who did not go to Thorne know anything about the man. I do. He's part of my town, part of my history. We heard his story, and his story became part of us.

Corporal Thorne will remain a part of me until I die.

***

So what matters? You decide. No one else can, and it is important that you do. Mortally important.

Our children need to share their stories, sing their songs, live their lives.

Most of us will be better off if they do, even if the GDP drops perceptibly. It's not real, it's not mortal, and, when we die, it does not matter. And every one of us will die. The idea still surprises me.

But the love of life we leave behind in those who still live does matter, even if we do die, or maybe especially because we do die.

I have your children four hours a week. You tell me what matters.

If you can.

On balance

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 11:08:00 GMT

Theology alert--feel free to jump in....
This was inspired by Father Sean and Brother John and the Reverend Scott.

Balance.

We need balance in our lives. Overwhelmed? Seek balance.

An innocuous philosophy--who could possibly be against balance?

A madman in the back wildy waves hand--and (again) I get sent out of the classroom.

***

The light is failing. Local carbon dioxide levels will rise until late May now, when resurrected plants start reconstructing the molecules back into something we can use again next winter. CO₂ and H₂O, carefully bonded back together into strawberries in June, peaches in July, corn in August, wheat in the September...little left now but the kale and the Brussels sprouts.

Breathe on your hand--you can feel the moisture, the breeze of molecules brushing your hand.

If God can be found, She will be found in the chloroplast, Her heart made of rubisco, the enzyme that puts us together, the most common protein in our known universe. She carefully holds a tiny molecule of carbon dioxide, three atoms of nothing, and glues them to life.

Heart of God?

She takes her life, her energy from the sun. Three times a second, another molecule of CO2 pressed together to a molecule of life, over and over and over again.

Rubisco is everywhere, in every green leaf, and as the leaves of summer fade into fall's glory, She leaves us. We start to drown in our own CO2, waiting for Her return, as She has, as She will. (That's called faith.)

***

You cannot balance a lifetime. You can dance, jump for joy, cringe in fear, curl up, scream, love or hate. There is no balance for love, for fear.

A well lived life is not one where you've balanced your fears with your joys, your love with your hate.

A "well lived" life makes no sense. You cannot "lived"--you can only live, now, this moment. Either the amygdala or the cortex rules a moment. We pretend we can string together moments, we hold on to memories, to words, to pictures, to myths of eternity, and we miss the obvious.

The here and now.

And we wonder why it's hard to teach children in a classroom....

***

A couple of soldier flies erupted from our class terrarium last week. Unexpected. Large critters crawled out of the thin litter layering the glass bottom. The yellow bar splashed on their legs with their waspish wings and fluttering antennae screamed danger. My cortex knows they're harmless, my amygdala makes my fingers stutter when I pick one up.

The last few days a half dozen more came from the same dirt.

When I opened the top to feed my sowbugs yesterday, two flew out and headed for the window. They only live a day or two as adults, and they had been trapped for hours in the terrarium. They flew fiercely, full of desire, and crashed right into the glass.

Instinct, true. Fixed action patterns with proximate and ultimate causes. Memorize this, children, pay $87, and earn your AP Biology credit.

We never speak of desire in other creatures. Of wants. Of needs.

The soldier fly carcasses will sit on the sill until my students return on Monday. I will ask them how they got there. Then I will ask why.

We all need what rubisco gets us--we all feel desire. It's why we burn our energy even though we know December's coming.

***

וייצר יהוה אלהים את האדם עפר מן האדמה ויפח באפיו נשמת חיים ויהי האדם לנפש חיה׃

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and man became a living soul.

We think we're sophisticated and learned and (the worst conceit of the three) immortal. We gorge on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and forget that we are closer to the soldier flies than we are to rubisco.

I do not know who wrote the Hebew Bible, and I do not know which of the 47 men chosen by King James translated Genesis 2:7, but there's been a huge misinterpretation of "soul" in the last few hundred years.

The soul, at least according to the Words allegedly governing the actions of the dangerously powerful here in the States, is not separate from the dirt. Our "stuff," the polymers of proteins, our layers of lipids, our DNA, our essence, is our soul.

We are mortal and finite. We are living souls, dependent on rubisco, dependent on unimaginable events in the heart of the sun, hydrogen to fusion, mass to light.

You want your children ready for the world of humans, raise them under artifical light. Keep them planted in front of monitors. Feed them impossibly perfect fruit. Keep them shod. Pump them full of music made by machines. Surround them with images of the "perfect" human, and demand they become one.

Don't talk to me about balance.

We are training our children to avoid the window pane, to stay safe, to gaze at the world outside, to create stronger panes. We don't want to see them hurt. We cannot imagine their last agonal breaths.

Me? I want my children to crash into the glass, and if they're bloodied lying on the sill, to get up and crash into it again. Again and again and again.

3 billion years of desire got us to here; a few hundred years of playing God has reduced us chasing photons on screens, practicing religion disconnected from the wiser elders who wrote texts we refuse to read, to believing we are in control.

I may be unhinged, but I am not as unbalanced as anyone who believes in balance.

The sun that sustains me has been dropping lower into the sky day by day, the plants that feed me have lost their leaves, the bees I adore have gone. I am a man of science, I have a good idea why this is so.

I am also a man of faith--faith that the sunlight will return, and that rubisco will return with it come spring.

Photos are mine and Leslie's.
The rubisco model is from Wikipedia, and is in the public domain.

Science snob

Anonymous — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 21:44:00 GMT

This one's for me. No need to read it, nothing to see. Move along, move along....

Everywhere plants
Flourish among graves,

Sinking their roots
In all the dynasties
Of the dead.

Seamus Heaney, from "A Herbal"

I believe, truly believe, that if you pay attention, real attention, to anything, you cannot help but be smitten by Seamus Heaney, soil, or horseshoe crabs.

Or smitten by any number of the seemingly infinite variety of life and circumstance around us.

So call me a snob. A science snob.

***

Yesterday I found two new "wasps" in my roly-poly terrarium. Then I stumbled upon Seamus Heaney's latest book, Human Chain, while warming up in the Montclair Book ~~Store~~ Center. I bought it.

Last night I saw Michael Franti. Hugged him, even. He reminds me why this human thing rocks.

Stared at morning glories at noon, flared open in the dying October light. Our brains tell us that daylight is daylight. The morning glories say otherwise.

Today I got to kick leaves with my toes on the Green.

I chatted with a new security guard at school--turns out I was her doc way back when when the big blue bus visited her neighborhood.

Then I learned that my black wasps were really harmless soldier flies--I got this from The Dirt on Soil, one of my favorite blogs.

All in 24 hours. None of this expected, none of it earned.

The soldier fly on the finger photo from Rock Hill High School, via The Dirt on Soil blog.
The morning glory is mine.

Leslie babysat Seamus' kids over 30 years ago.
Funny how that goes.

Hallowe'en safety is an oxymoron

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Hallowe'en is coming.
I love Hallowe'en--death in small doses can be fun.
The dead reach across the dying sunlight, to tell us what?

The occasional glimpse at death, your death, your inevitable death, can tilt your priorities a bit. Most of us could use having our priorities tilted.

If you read any national, family-friendly magazine this month, you will see the usual, family-friendly articles about Hallowe'en and safety.

Know the neighborhood
Check the treats
Make sure no razors are in the apples (or else just chuck the only decent nutrition in the bag)
Don't wear costumes that drag on the street
Make sure your child can see through the mask
Don't carry a candle (this must be left over from the 1903 edition of Parade Magazine)
Wear reflectors
Don't trick-or-treat alone
Wear flame retardant costumes.

I don't have any real problems with most of the list--even the blade in the apple adds a certain pizazz to the Hallowe'en joy of fear. A fearful citizenry also helps keep Demagogic Party in power, and the world free from democracy.

I do have a quibble with the last one, though: wear flame retardant costumes. Flame retardant clothing (at least the kind found in the I-wanna-be-Hanna-Montana outfit in a box off the shelf in Walmart) may contain PBDEs, a toxin in large doses.

PBDEs may affect development of the nervous system, reduce thyroid function, and mimic estrogen. PBDE levels are higher in children than in adults.

Products containing more than 0.1% PDBE are outlawed in Michigan. It's the "Mary Beth Doyle PBDE Act." You could look it up.

If you're afraid to wrap your child in a plastic Hanna Montana outfit, just make sure she avoids lit candles.

Or you could just make a costume out of wool--I never saw a lamb burst into flames.

***

I've seen a lot of people die, most of them slowly, in buildings reeking of death and bleach. I've seen a few die quickly. Gunshots, MVAs, embolisms, arrythmias.

Dying doesn't look like a whole lot of fun, but dying quickly seems a bit more convenient than lingering.

***

I have smoke detectors all over the home. I do not want to die in a fire.

Each detector has some Americium 241 in it. I paid decent money to put some leftover stuff from a nuclear reactor in my home. It emits radiation.

My detectors will last about 10 years; the Americium has a half-live of over 450 years. (I love that it is called Americium.)

As a science teacher, I have a responsibility to teach my children how to think.

Is Americium dangerous? Do the benefits outweigh the risks? How do you decide?

As a science teacher, I might want to remind children that aged smoke detectors are supposed to be sent back to the manufacturer. (Bet you threw yours away in the garbage.)

***

The Americium in your home sits inside a disc wrapped in gold. The radiation is "minimal"--it is extremely unlikely (whatever "extremely unlikely" means) that it will ever harm you personally.

Americium happens to be water soluble. The Americium in your home will eventually end up in a landfill if you throw it out.

It is reasonable to assume a bit of it may leak into the food web within its lifetime of a few thousand years. You'll be dead before it's a your problem.

***

It has been estimated that "if ionization-type smoke detectors were placed in every U.S. home, they'd result in one additional cancer death every seven years."

No doubt smoke detectors save thousands of lives.

Now for the gruesome, meaningless question: If you were the one who developed the fatal cancer, would you rather die in a fire, or from your cancer?

I am a science teacher. I cannot answer the question for anyone except me, but I can at least point out to students why it's an absurd question. (I'd rather die in the fire.)

It's also an interesting question, not because it solves anything about smoke detectors, but because it exposes how we look at risks.

***

If anything can save our culture, it will be the return of a sense of mortality. All safety is momentary.

When you think of the dead this Hallowe'en, think of the dying. It's a process. What we do to our environment does not affect our chances of getting out alive. They are zero.

Our choices do affect, however, how we go about ~~dying~~ living.

Happy Hallowe'en!

I wrote this one two Hallowe'ens ago.
I'm still here. So are you.
For now.

Flying through ether

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 22:44:00 GMT

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

Robert Frost, from After Apple Picking

I am starting to think the biggest service I can do for my students is to get them connected to the world that will eventually reduce their bodies to dust.

Teaching science in a magical thinking world is tough enough.

How do English teachers approach Frost? How do math teachers approach quadratic equations? How does a phys ed teacher encourage a child to push her body farther than she thought possible when she flew down a ramp with Tony Hawk just last night?

I've flown off motorcycles, sleds, ice skates, swings, September breakers, toboggans, bicycles, skateboards, roller skates. While a few of the landings were a little rough (and a few I will never remember), I know this much:

Hurtling through space surrounded only by air, sound, and light has a way of putting things in perspective, especially if you're still conscious before landing.

Not sure it's worth the lost neurons, but not sure it isn't.
Sure makes reading Robert Frost more enjoyable, though.

Photos are ours--
apples from Tipton, Michigan,
dying cabbagehead jelly from North Cape May a few days ago,
the dead blue claws from last January.