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

The end of winter

Anonymous — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 23:38:00 GMT

Our crocuses bloomed today. A tiny horseshoe crab, smaller than my thumbnail, crawled out of the Delaware Bay. The day lilies are rising again, like Phoenixes from the snow's ashes.

All of this is more real than the nonsense that passes for discourse in the education world. I can still close my classroom door (though I rarely do) and tackle whatever problems we care to tackle that day.

Why is my plant wilting? Hey, sow bug babies! I think my slug drowned.
How come the starfish hasn't moved in three days? Are those mosquitoes?
Look! Peas!

We got kids from Somalia, from Sierra Leone, from Poland, from China, from Ghana. Not third generation, not second. We're talking off the airplane (Newark Liberty International Airport) and into the brink. I taught a child who spoke only Bengali.

And we thrive.

We thrive despite the mandates, the tests, the current climate that forgets the roots of the word public, "pertaining to the people." Our town supported the last budget, despite the struggles of family after family after family.

Families that come from desperate situations know education matters. Families that come from desperate situations value teachers who care about their children. They put their trust in our hands, in our classrooms.

So while the elite press on about this magnet school, that philosophy, the myriad ways to use (and abuse) technology, scouring the US News and World Report for college rankings (and the NJ Monthly for state rankings), most of the rest of us go about our business, getting children ready for loving, happy, and (yes) productive lives.

But never just productive.

I work for Bloomfield, and its families, and for its children. I do not work for Arne Duncan, I do not work for Governor Christie. I give my all every day, because I want my lambs to be happy, in the Jeffersonian sense, and I want them prepared to pursue whatever dreams they hope to pursue.

I wiled away a good chunk of the afternoon on a jetty poking into the bay. I stared at barnacles for a bit, mourned all the oysters scraped off the rocks by this year's ice. The water was exceptionally clear, revealing thousands of comb jellies, floating in with the tides, then floating out again.

My happiest moments are spent on the edges of the sea.

I stumbled upon the horseshoe crab, not much different than its ancestors that wandered these same shores when dinosaurs still roared. It may be still alive, it may be in the belly of a gull now. Tomorrow I will share its story with my students, because for them, these stories still matter.

And then I will test them on meiosis and synapses and centromeres and chromatids, to get them ready for the state exam in May. Those who finish early will be allowed to study their terrariums, their aquariums, to see how their critters did over the weekend.

And the day will not be completely wasted, the last Sunday of February, as the light returns, and all things, all things, again become possible.

All photos taken today.

First one crocuses, then the tiny (and live) horseshoe crab, then the points of a dead horseshoe crab,

then barnacles hanging out waiting for the next tide,

and finally, light as seen through the compound eyes of a horseshoe crab.

Berries

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 21:15:00 GMT

She wrote, simply, "hi mike."

I assumed I was the Michael she meant, but it does not matter, berries are for all of us, so I am using the photo. The hand belongs to Jessica Pierce, the berries to whichever mouth gets them first.

***

Along my walk to school are several cherry trees--the cherries are ripe now. I get to school with a tongue stained purple.

I found two blueberry bushes three blocks away yesterday. The mulberry trees are about to give up ripe fruit in the next week or two. It's a great time to be a mammal (or a bird).

The cherries are small and dark, full of bitter tannins countering their ridiculous cherriness.

When I eat a cherry, I believe in God. Not the wordy omega John God--I keep Him in my pocket in late autumn. I mean the atavistic, prehistoric sun god, the Ra, the one who sets off week-long dancing and unpardonable ecstasy. The mysterious one. The unknowable one. The one found in a June-warmed cherry.

Most of the year, I can talk myself into anything. In June, I simply cannot talk. No need. Life is bursting around us.

***

When I was still young, I feared dying in spring or summer, feared missing what was to come, dying in the midst of plenty.

Now I fear dying in winter. I do not wish to die, few of us do, but when I do, I want to be surrounded by possibility, by sunlight, by berries.

I want to be the bee found nestled in the flower at dusk, her last day spent exhausted and resting on clover petal, a life well spent. I do not want to die in the hive. Even a 5 star accredited hive full of well-intentioned bees trained to transition me to the next life.

I am not transitioning anywhere. In June I am here, and no other "here's" exist. In June William Blake makes sense. W.B. Yeats makes sense. Even death makes sense.

***

The school year is winding down. And what have we learned?

I live in a good town. I teach in the same town. I am paid through taxes given up by my neighbors. I work hard, and so do they.

The least I can do is teach their children the ecstasy of June berries, pursuing the happiness of sweet stained lips instead of the demands of a petulant man-child dictating education policy several hundred miles away.

The least I can do is show them our local lichen and hawks and bees, instead of just words in books written by strangers who know nothing about the pair of mallard ducks who slumber on the Bloomfield Green.

The least I can do is show children why I still get excited when the sun rises over our town, our gardens, our homes, and why so many of us choose to stay here. The sun worth knowing is not the one in the textbooks, the one of fusion and distance and solar storms.

The sun worth knowing is the one that keeps us alive, the one that we can feel on our faces, the one that pulls the bay over my clams, the one that blesses the cherries with sugar.

If you want to teach science, start with joy. If you cannot tie joy to wild berries, go play on Wall Street or Pennsylvania Avenue. Real education starts on Bloomfield Avenue.

If anyone asks, say "Limulus polyphemus"

Anonymous — Sat, 01 May 2010 10:02:00 GMT

We're taking a bunch of kids to Sandy Hook.

We will be looking for horseshoe crabs, pipefish, eels, and anything else we can legally catch and release. (Clams, alas, are out--even with a license, raking for clams is illegal in condemned areas.)

Many of my kids have never seen a horseshoe crab. Many of those that have, fear them.

Every day from now until the trip I will remind the children that if anyone asks, we are going to study Limulus polyphemus. I work under great conditions, under a wonderful supervisor, but why start trouble?

OK, what do you say if someone asks why we're going to Sandy Hook?
Limulus polyphemus!
What do you say if someone asks you what we're studying?
Limulus polyphemus!
What do you say if someone asks you how nuclear fission works?
Limulus polyphemus!

Spew out a scientific word and folks go running.

***

Part of teaching is getting observed. I don't mind it so much, and prefer frequent, unannounced visits to formally planned lessons since it gives the administration a better idea of what happens in my class, which (ideally) gives me better feedback. I love gold stars as much as anyone, maybe more (I had a lot of concussions growing up), but I learn most from the occasional disasters. A second pair of eyes helps me dissect them better.

Folks without a scientific background, however, often preface their remarks by saying science is too hard, so they didn't really get the lesson. I don't hear anything else said--I am completely deflated. If I cannot teach an administrator a concept I'm expected to teach to children who still believed in the tooth fairy a few moons ago, what's the point?

(And yes, I get another gold star for my collection....)

***

So here's the point--we live in a wonderfully complex , ultimately inexplicable,universe. (OK, that was too much of a mouthful--go stare at an ant colony for a few minutes and get back to me). This fantastic universe appears to be governed by teasingly simple laws.

If I ever hope to get a child interested in grasping these laws, a child who just rubbed a amgazine advertisement for Stetson cologne on his chest while leering at another child who (it seems) forgot to put something on over her stockings, I need to get them outside themselves by getting them outside.

If the Park Ranger asks if we have a permit, I'll just mutter Limulus polyphemus....

The horseshoe crab photo is from NOAA, via Wikimedia (public domain, eh?)

September light...

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:05:00 GMT

Location: W074 11, N40 48

Daylight March 12: 11 hours, 47 minutes
Daylight September 30: 11 hours, 48 minutes.

St. Francis and the Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on the brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of the earth on the sow,

and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,

down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Galway Kinnell

Almost September light again. Close enough.

Mucking season. Life everywhere, everywhere. Spring breezes warm up tidal flats and fields of mud, and souls rise up again where clay meets breath.

Not generic souls. Not metaphorical souls. Nefesh--living souls, some human, most not. The sun's energy feeds us again as we repay our debts in our lust and ecstasy, as we chase what even words cannot betray.

I am a teacher, a civil servant in a public institution. I cannot, of course, start spinning in a maniacal dance during class, spewing on about souls and life and mystery. We have more serious things to attend to--NCLB, NAEP, HSPA's and SRA's.

I can do this, though. I can ask a student to watch a tree. And I have. I call it The Perennial Project. (The word "project" covers a lot of ground in edumacation circles.)

Some of the children have become attached to their trees. It's been a rough winter, and the trees have been acting pretty dead. A few students are worried that their trees will remain dead.

Now the buds are forming--thickening, succulent, ready to burst. Last year's sap rises again, from the ground towards the sky, botanical resurrection.

If you pay too much attention, you may become useless, intoxicated by life, staring with an idiot smile at a bud about to burst. Life's addictive that way.

Beats staring at a Smart Board.

I do not have formal permission for Galway Kinnell's poem, but I do have a story.

Way back in the late 70's, a few of us studying in Ann Arbor got together and formed the High Spark of Low-Heeled Boys,
and "sponsored" a poetry reading by Galway. Despite a decent crowd, we came up a bit short,
but Mr. Kinnell was gracious throughout--I probably still owe him money.
Go buy a book or two. You will not be disappointed.

The daylight hours provided by the U.S. Naval Observatory.