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

Why kids love science anyway...

Anonymous — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:29:00 GMT

As much faith as I have in natural laws, I have much less faith in my ability to lasso them as needed in a classroom. I've had some spectacularly loud, messy failures.
Kids like this.

As much as the Arne's and the Eli's and the Bill's want to control curriculum, they cannot control a child-driven experiment. To be fair, neither can I.
Kids like this.

We grow beans and basil in class, edible stuff from the breath they exhale--at first they resist the idea, as any reasonable creature would, and I don't give them any particular reason to believe it, but some do anyway.
Kids like this.

Many of the hypotheses generated in class are as good as mine. A few are better. Now and again a child develops a spectacularly good idea, beyond anything I'd likely generate. Their ideas, crafted within the nature of science, count as much as mine.
Kids like this.

I am wrong a lot. Science teachers in general are wrong a lot. What we "knew" not so long ago is less true than it used to be.
Kids like this.

We have critters that swim, crawl, fly, hiss, poop, pee, and screw pretty much whenever they want to. Kids can't do any of those things without permission during school, except maybe hiss, and even then, very quietly.
Kids like this.

I don't quite know what the word "authentic" means, as much as it is bandied about in edutopia, but I do know that it is impossible to fake science. Children have eyes and noses, they have brains, and they have imagination. They get to use all three, and while there are some days they'd rather not, most of them find pleasure in using their bodies the way nature intended them to be used.

Want more science teachers, Mr. Duncan? Let us teach science....

All photos from B362

The Art and Science of Science and Art

Anonymous — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 18:25:00 GMT

Chris is the guy on the left....

I've had an interesting past few days in Tampa the past few days, celebrating the work of our principal Chris Jennings and our school at the NASSP Convention. We're a MetLife Foundation Breakthrough School this year and we're beaming, much more on that later.

I got to spend a lot of time with a colleague, an art teacher with a strong interest on how science works. We talked, and we listened, not so much on what is called science, though he is interested in that as well, but on what it means to know something in science, or to know anything.

We mostly chatted on the edge of an estuary, under the sun, occasionally stopping to watch a pelican or three glide yards over our heads, to listen to a laughing gull squawk trying to steal a crumb from a naive Iowan.

We paused a lot. (I suspect our neurons branch quicker in the silence than in the noise of human--need both though.)

I think the learned folks call this epistemology--we called it human.

We did what we hoped our students will someday do--that they don't that now is to our shame.

***

We all "know" what an atom is, or at least what the cultural icon we call atom is. When you push the model, it becomes space and energy levels and predictably unpredictable relationships that defy a concrete model. I did more talking than he did.

We all "know" how to draw a cube, what is should look like, that the vertical lines never meet, and the horizontal ones eventually do. My artist friend drew two sets of lines in perspective--I could tell one was better, but I could not tell why. He did more talking than I did.

We worked our way through our epistemological forest using voices, written words on scraps of conference paper. We talked sitting down, we talked standing up, we talked while we walked, while we ate.

We did it because it matters, true, but mostly because we enjoyed it. The line between our disciplines dissolved a bit, like sidewalk chalk drawings on a foggy morning. The lines are still there, but the edges now blend.

I left Tampa with my neurons connected in altered ways. This is not just a figurative statement. Real learning alters the physical architecture of your brain. It takes a lot of energy, it takes cellular materials your body would gladly use somewhere else with a whisper of n excuse.

It hurts. You're not going to do it for some abstract long-term goal--I'm old enough where a few new synapses will not alter my financial circumstances.

You're not going to do it well if there's no joy.

***

As we spun our metaphorical atoms and very physical drawings into various hypotheses on how we are who we are, how our environment affects us, how we affect our environment, well, we learned more on how we learn.

Learning how to draw, how to play a trumpet, how to plant a seed, how to make a paper crane, or how to do just about anything for ourselves takes little pain.

We pretend we do it for the long-term ends, and maybe a few of us do. For me, though, even the awful parts of figuring something out--my first few painful hours blatting on a trumpet also brought pleasure in its joyful noise.

I still have a lot of work to do before I become half the teacher I want to be. I suspect most of us feel the same way, not because we're on some arduous journey to reach the Promised Land of Aypia but because we enjoy getting better.

There is pleasure in creating something new.
There is pleasure in sharing this pleasure.
There is pleasure, real pleasure, in teaching.

We owe it to our children to know this pleasure before we fault them for rejecting what we pretend they ought to know.

Thanks, everybody!

Transformations

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 01:47:00 GMT

Yesterday we fooled a few bacteria into taking in some jellyfish DNA, and now they fluoresce green. Tomorrow I will take a few colonies of these and give them what we all need--food, shelter, and a little security, and I'll get a few million more by Thursday.

This has become old hat in high school biology classes, but it still blows my mind, as it should.

We are all God now. You may laugh, and I can temper this with some off-hand remark, but we're not the same critters we were before we started transforming lifeforms. That we do this with indifference makes it seem surreal.

(I wanted to jump up and down and scream in delight and fear--"Look what we've done!!!!" And, OK, maybe I did, just a little bit....)

***

A few planets are lining up this week, and a few folks are excited. So excited that you can go online and see them.

That planets are visible naked eye is pretty cool, and that they wander against the background of stars even neater. Indeed, that's where the word "planet" comes from--planasthai, "to wander."

To stare at one naked eye, though, is not particularly exciting. They flicker less than stars, and are quite bright, but, well, um--they look like stars.

We have made looking at planets a check list event, a commodity, an "event" simply because it's an event.

A lot of folks cannot fathom anymore why that bothers me, so I guess that puts me in the crank category. A lot of folks cannot fathom what they even want.

Maybe the point of education is to learn what you want, to figure out what's worth seeking. I'm pretty sure it's not to pass a standardized test.

***

Most of my students have never stumbled upon a flickering comb jelly, flashing electric blue as it lies dying on the beach. I have, and I wondered--who was meant to see the light?

I can change the way light is reflected off bacteria, light meant only for a few other humans to see, to reflect our glory of ourselves as we play God.

Some comb jellies flash an electric blue when disturbed, presumably to distract predators. This makes sense, a logical reason to expend energy, fit for our mechanistic view of the world.

Yet when I squat by a dying critter, the rhythm of the wash of waves running through my ears, the salty smell of the dying in my nostrils, the soft forgiving warm and wet sand caressing my feet, this single jelly flashing its last three, brief pulses of light on the edge of the bay matters to me, and I do not know why.

I only saw it because I happened to be there--and it would have mattered even if I had not seen it.

I have no opinion on the existence of God--my people said He is unknowable, and I, to their chagrin, took them at their word. I do not truck with what I cannot know.

But I do know this--we cannot know (and can never know) what we pretend to know today. Hubris does not require the existence of gods.

Tomorrow I will be the destroyer of earths as I kill the same bacterial cultures we worked hard to create. I will pretend this does not bother me.

***

As for the planets, if you think it's worth staring at them online, I have a few other parlor tricks that may interest you.

Cristoforo Colombo used a similar parlor trick to fool the locals of what is now known as Jamaica. The locals had supported Colombo and his crew, but were (understandably) a little annoyed at the murderous actions of some of his crew. Colombo knew of an impending lunar eclipse predicted by Regiomontanus many years before. He attributed the eclipse to the Christian God, the same God Europe used to justify slaughtering those who knew my bay before me.

Stories matter.

Still, a lunar eclipse is about as exciting as the planets lined up in late winter--a parlor show. That they exist (and that we figured out what those points of light mean) are the stories worth knowing.

So tomorrow, an hour or so after my bacteria break down their last molecules of sugar, I will wander outside Bloomfield High, take a look west, and see the string of planetary pearls that got so much attention this week.

Then I'll walk home, knowing I am among the luckiest men alive, feeling the earth below with every step that takes me home.

Hokey smokes! Fluorescent bacteria!!!!

Quahogs, Darwin, and grace

Anonymous — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:26:00 GMT

Today is Darwin Day, honoring a complex man with a stunningly simpleidea that replaced the need for magical thinking.

Folks may hold on to their magic, I know I do, but they can no longer use rational thinking to hold on to the idea that the Hand of God was necessary to craft our appearance here.

The theory of evolution cannot disprove God—no science can.That was never Darwin’s intent.

See, if you grasp science, you grasp that it is not designedto disprove anything outside therealm of the natural world.

It’s not science using theology that causes all the trouble.It’s theology insisting that its stories are scientifically sound.

I like hot sauce and I like fruit, but I don't splash Tabasco on my blueberries.

I like fables, and I like science. I try not to confound the two.

***

Yesterday the soft gray wintry sky spit on the flint gray water. The air was chilly, but the water was still mid-40's, balmy for February.

Clamming in February, somewhere in Cape May County

I pulled just over a dozen quahogs out of the mixof muck and sand that gives them life. My hands were numb, too numb to feel the slice of flesh, but not so numb thatI could not feel the sure shape of a cherrystone nestled in my hand. Perfect.

The more you look at these critters, the more beautiful and sophisticated they appear.

I gently tucked the oldest one back into the muck, one much older than the students I teach. I also tossed back the smallest, not out of sentiment--the small ones are tasty--but out of respect for the law.

Within a few hours, what was left of them sat in our bellies.

***

Here's the thing about science, something Darwin knew, something too many today do not--something does not have to be empirically demonstrated and peer-reviewed to be true, even matters of the natural world.

The natural world exceeds our collective imagination. The science world is limited to the parts of the natural world we have bothered to see. Since what we bother to see is influenced heavily by the wages we get to see it, what we look at represents a tiny, biased view of our universe.

This is true of scientists, this s true of the clergy, this is true of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. It's also true of me, and (if I may be so presumptuous) you.

Pulling up a quahog from the muck on a wet wintry day interests me. Quahogs interest me enough to know, from personal study, that many of the chowder clams I toss back are older than me, no matter what science says.

If I had pursued science research as a career, I would not be playing with quahogs, I'd be playing with telomeres--not because telomeres are more interesting, but because telomeres may unlock the fountain of youth, and (subsequently and more importantly) have some heavy finanacial interests invested in them.

My sophomores feel this. What we call science in high school biology narrows their world view. Their wages (in this case grades) depend on reducing life to a series of incomprehensible and unpronounceable words attached to illustrations of things no human or mammal or any living thing at all has ever seen.

***

You can tell how old a clam is by checking its rings. I have seen several quahogs well into their 60's and 70's, and I mostly toss them back, again not (mostly) out of sentiment, but because they tend to be chewy.

If you Google northern quahog age you'll learn that until recently, "researchers" stated that the oldest northern quahogs were around 40. I knew otherwise, as does anyone else who bothers to gather clams in places too shallow for dredgers, but I lack the sophisticated "sclerochronological analysis" employed by scientists. I do have eyes, though, and a large sample size

An hour ago, they were still in the mud.

Less than a year ago, researchers discovered that my quahogs can live over a hundred years:

Annually resolved growth lines in the hinge region and margin of the shell were identified and counted; the age of the oldest clam shell was determined to be at least 106 y. This age represents a considerable increase in the known maximum life span for M. mercenaria, more than doubling the maximum recorded life span of the species (46 y).

Iain D. Ridgway et al.,"New Species Longevity Record for the Northern Quahog"Journal of Shellfish Research 30(1):35-38. 2011

I could roll my eyes, but this is how science works. And now the "known" recorded life span has more than doubled.

***

But this has always been true. Natural selection has always been true. Gravity has always been true. Our understanding is more recent.

What separates science from the rest of what we know is that it depends on faith in the natural world, and faith in the idea that certain patterns have always been true, and will remain true.

God may (or may not) be a human construct--there's no way to test this empirically, and because it's untestable, it's not only uninteresting to science, it can never be science.

When I feel the perfect heft of an ancient quahog in my hand on a mid-winter day,

when I become part of the gray light, part of the muddy smell,

when my edge of self blends in with the detritus of life in the chilly mud between my toes,

I am unconscious of the rational.

Mercenaria mercenaria, *** sapiens

I am also ridiculously happy, happy to be part of this thing, whatever this thing is, that connects me and the clams and everything that lives to a world we've done nothing to deserve.

Read Charles Darwin's words. Know that he was happiest when absorbing the incomprehensible variety of life around us, of us. The first love of his life left him because he preferred collecting bugs to meeting her family during winter break at college.

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin.

Darwin did not kill God.
Those who persist in using science to prove God exists, though, just might.

Clam photos by us taken yesterday.
Yes, I know, I fubared the html--still working on it....

Siemen's STEM Institute: A Luddite Wants In

Anonymous — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:36:00 GMT

I would like very much to go to the Siemen's STEM Institute this summer, though after today, I'm not sure they'd welcome me in their midst. I've spent hours wrestling with a Flip camera, MS Movie Maker, and and apparent conflict between the chip set in my laptop and the rest of the world (a chip with a chip on its shoulder), and may be disqualified for my inability to produce a simple two minute video broadcasting my Luddite qualities.

I have a fine 1956 Futura typewriter sitting in my room, ready to type up a cogent argument for my presence. Which may just highlight the problem.

Still, this has not been a pointless exercise.

The thrust for STEM education focuses on things human--help the economy, cure cancer, and screw the Commies and anyone else who is a little less Western-Eurocentric than the fine folk who rule our land.

And that's fine and good, I suppose, but not all my lambs have both the desire and the chops to become STEM All Stars. Each and every one of them, though, lives in this universe. Very few of them realize the same universe belongs to them.

***

Last week was midterms. I got restless, as I tend to do during things like midterms and shopping for underwear, so I grabbed a microscope and tossed a drop of our windowsill pond water on a slide.

A stentor spun a whirlpool in its own universe, a magnificent critter with a reason all its own, pulling in other critters with its vortex, so that it may continue its stentor ways.

I put a camera on the scope, and projected the stentor's world on the screen. Most of the students stopped, stared. I shouldn't have distracted them from their task at hand, but I am glad that I did.

This universe cannot be subdued. The horseshoe crabs will creep out of the bay millions of years after we're gone.

This matters.

I teach what matters, and a lot of what doesn't.
I teach to young folks whose bodies share the same carbon atoms that will, sooner or later, end up in the carapaces of the horseshoe crabs that will outlive us.

I teach science because a child who know her universe is more likely to know joy than a child who does not.
If she happens to cure cancer in the meantime, well, bonus points.

On a good day, nothing, nothing, beats teaching science to young humans.

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.

Slow seeing

Anonymous — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 16:07:00 GMT

If you want to kill a child's interest in astronomy,buy her the biggest piece of glass you can afford the first hour she expresses any interest in the stars. Make sure it's got a computer-guided star finder, and that it "talks" to her as she explores the skies. Better yet, have her log onto a remote telescope where she can "guide" the scope to spectacular deep sky objects, seeing details on a screen that would dazzle Galileo himself.

I wouldn't give a child on a tricycle the keys to a Suzuki Hayabusa GSX1300R just because she's decided she want to advance to a bicycle (even if motorcycles did come with training wheels).

There is a push, a huge push, to digitize classrooms, to get connected, to leap into the 21^st century. It's all quite exciting, and there's plenty of money to be made, and ooh, shiny, shiny!

Many of those who ~~hawk~~ promote the digital classroom, presumably for the best interests of the children, seem particularly prone to a binary view of the universe. If you're not with us, you're against us.

I know they are busy people--so many new gadgets, so little time to master the New Best Thing--but they're screwing up the ed world a bit with their listlessness. I'll make this quick.

A child who cannot see the grace of a caterpillar using only her eyes and enough free time to think will not benefit from a magnifying glass.

Gypsy moth caterpillar, by Materialscientist

A child who cannot see the finer details offered by a magnifying glass, a tool used with the caterpillar still whole (and alive), will gain nothing by looking at a slide of caterpillar tissue under a microscope, and the child might reasonably ask if you really needed to kill the caterpillar.

Here's my point. Put down the iPad for a moment, stop texting, let your scattered thoughts dissipate.

Humans have the same cognitive and sensory tools today that we had a few generations ago. Observing the world is an acquired skill that cannot be learned through a screen. It requires interest, it requires time, and it requires building an internal scaffold that allows the child to make some sense of this universe.

Very few high school sophomores observe well, and it's to our shame that those who do, often do despite their formal education. My best students of the natural world are often the least able to function in a classroom.

Before you jam down the latest version of the Graflex Schoolmaster 750 filmstrip projector into my classroom--and when you get down to it, the Smart Board doesn't add a whole lot to the original concept--make sure you have given me enough time and space to teach the children how to see.

Give that much room, then you can have them to manipulate as you will. If I have done my work well, their excrement detectors will scream at the crap that passes for rational discourse these days. Good teachers--parents, neighbors, school teachers, librarians, the corner philosopher ranting at the #34 NJ Transit bus every time it rolls by--focus on meeting a child where she is in the universe, and just about all children are a decade or two away from mastering a scanning electron microscope or a raging road bike like the Suzuki Hayabusa GSX1300. Some of them will never be ready for either, and that's OK, too.

Ironically, anyone who takes the time to look around can see that we are blindly headed to catastrophe. We cannot afford another generation of Americans who think they'd rather not think.

The Suzuki phot came from Motorcycle Best Picture blog--don't know yet who to credit.
The caterpillar is from Wikipedia by Materialscientist, released under GNU FDL

Another year ends

Anonymous — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 22:32:00 GMT

We're winding down.

Tomorrow I will wander over to the windowsill, pluck a few snowpeas who know only our classroom, and eat them. I will remind the students that their breath was combined with water, using the energy of the sun.

Communion without fanfare, a miracle unrecognized.

And if a few students leave class this week, our last few days of class, pondering the mystery of biology, the flow of energy, the flow of life, well, I've done my job.

***

I spent countless hours as a child trying to figure out transubstantiation. The wafer tasted like, well, a wafer, but the priest assured me it was the body of Christ.

In my head I imagine molecule after molecule substituting another. I did not know the concept did not originate until a thousand years after Christ's death.

This is my body.

And it is, complex organic molecules fused together by plants, abetted by the nitrogen fixing abilities of bacteria. In physical terms, at the molecular level, we are, truly, what we eat.

And everything we eat ultimately gets back to plants. OK, sunlight. Well, yeah, to something over 10 billion years ago.

***

We had some births in class, we had some deaths. Most of our tanks are unfiltered, unprocessed--light in, air in, and the occasional flakes of crushed shrimp. We have 2nd generation peas and wheat and fish and third generation snails and umpteenth generation of transformed bacteria that fluoresce.

We have the shells of horseshoe crabs and land snails, starfish and whelk.

Our class witnessed a starfish consume a snail, a shrimp snack on a hermit crab. None of this planned, all of it inevitable.

I am not a particularly religious man. My faith rests in the sun, in the plants, in life. I do not pretend to grasp the why of anything in science, and I do not ask my students to grasp anything I cannot see myself.

We do a lot of observation in B362. We see more than we can understand. We form hypotheses, we see hypotheses smashed, and we form new hypotheses.

I'm not sure how my lambs did on the state test, though historically they do well enough.

They leave my classroom more confused now than when they entered back in September.
And that's OK. That was the goal.

The world is, well, awesome. A fresh snowpea of a windowsill plant tells me so.

A June song

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 22:59:00 GMT

If I have anything worthwhile to pass onto they young ones, it is this--the world belongs to you, it is you. Not the human world of images and egos, but this vast, incomprehensible, and terrifying and loving ball of energy that surrounds us and the billions (billions) of living critters within arm's length.

It's June. Tonight we feasted on pesto made from basil from the garden, basil that was mere specks of black seeds just a couple of months ago. We ate snowpeas, now climbing to the sky. We ate radishes--pink ones, purple ones, white ones, red ones--riotous rainbows resting in the earth.

Our battle with the Arnes of the world matter, and I am not ceding anything tonight. But I am enjoying a soft June dusk, honeysuckle in the air, belly full of food that erupted from the earth because I spent a few moments putting seeds in the ground.

I'll watch the sun set. I'll play a wooden flute. I'll sing. I might dance, I might not. The lightning bugs will be here any day now. It's June.

Light drives us. Light is finite. We are mortal. A lightning bug blinks in the dusk.

Light, and dirt, and water, and air keep us alive. None of my students need Arne Duncan's nonsense. They need a piece of land, unadulterated air and water, and enough vision to know what they do today will affect their yet unborn children.

If our children can pass tests better than they can plant peas, we have failed as parents, as teachers, as humans. If Arne and Bill and Mike and Eli represent the pinnacle of our culture, then I don't want a part of it.

I believe those of us who dance to what's true will prevail. But if we don't, at least we had a reason to dance. And so we did.

Pictures from the front yard.

Beware the Yabby net

Anonymous — Sun, 08 May 2011 11:21:00 GMT

Thanks to The Violet Hour for pointing me in Michael Leunig's direction.

"I [Richard Lawrence] specifically asked Leunig about the copyright implications of this and he replied that he derives great pleasure from the knowledge that people send his 'toons, poems and prayers to friends all over the world."
--Richard Lawrence, curator of The Curly Flat

And a yabby is some sort of Aussie crustacean: looks like a crawdad to me.