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

Not a good reason to learn science....

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 05:19:00 GMT

There are few good reasons to learn science, but if you want to know the universe outside the nutty human sphere wrapped around most of us in this part of the world, that should be reason enough.

I hear a lot of educated people give inane reasons for learning science. No, you do not need to know science in order to get through life--plenty on folks keep themselves and their bank accounts quite full knowing nothing about the natural world, and a few of them are running for President. (Anyone who advocates sustained economic "growth" needs to stick their head in the sand and get reacquainted with the Earth....)

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, however, offers up one of the lamest (and, alas, most common) reasons why children should study science--jobs.

The sad fact is, most new jobs being generated now require little more than a passing acquaintance with a keyboard, and evolving voice technologies will make even that minimal requirement obsolete within a decade.

If more parents had access to real jobs that provide living wages and enough spare time to spend time with their families, time to learn more about the world outside electronic screens, we would create a more scientifically literate culture.

If we ever did manage to do that, the economy as we know it, an economy that depends on churning consumption feeding insatiable desires, would collapse. Every minute a child spends at the edge of a pond watching a wriggler wend it way through its wet universe is a minute that contribute nothing to the gross domestic product.

That's fine with me. Not sure it's what Dr. Tyson had in mind.

Sustained exponential growth is simply not physically possible.
Anyone with an 8th grade knowledge of arithmetic can figure out that much....

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.

Death in a classroom

Anonymous — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:47:00 GMT

Is part of a public education reminding a child of her mortality?
And if so, would the task fall upon the biology teacher?

It's not a trivial matter. For all the posturing by folks at the national level about our record college enrollment rates, almost a third of graduating high school senior do not go. Many of those that do go are going to juice up their resumes more than their minds.

Would teaching mortality produce a more thoughtful citizenry?

***

All of this, whatever this this is, cannot last for any individual. The oldest known bacteria survived 250 million years, the oldest plant a mere 43,000 years. We tend to think of ourselves as special, a gift (or curse) of our consciousness.

The oldest animal? Maybe the clam--a quahog made it for 405 years. Alas, it was killed by the same scientists who marked its age.

Oldest conscious animal?

A 211 year old bowhead whale leads the list, roaming this Earth since John Adams was President, finally felled by an Inuit.

And good westerners that we are, we oooh and awwww at the record, imagining a life triple life span we have, again forgetting that we truly only live in moments.

How many Saturdays do you have left in a lifetime?

Would folks behave differently if they accepted mortality, accepted limits? Would we be braver? Would we spend hours inside manipulating artificial universes? Would we accept the culture we have?

***

We are all, in a sense, immortal, or at least as immortal as life on Earth. We all share ancestors. We all come from single celled organisms that continues the spark of life for billions of years, long enough for consciousness to develop.

Or maybe consciousness has been around much longer than we know. Bacteria talk to each other.

Dying, I suspect, is a big deal. It doesn't require a whole lot of practice, and just about every one of us will manage to accomplish it whether or not we have graduate degrees, but still, for each of us, it's the end of a universe (at least among the empiricists).

To be fair, I'm a bit warped. I grew up Oirish Catholic, I practiced medicine in the inner city when poor kids were doing their best to die from AIDS before the middle class even heard of it, and I've lost enough people to accept that maybe, just maybe, this death thing is permanent.

***

We relegate death to religion, and otherwise make it taboo. But we all face it.

Biology is literally the study of life--and life is defined by death, the ultimate limit for those of us who pretend to be conscious. A culture that recognizes limits has a chance to be sustainable.

A chance.

Just a chance. Which is more than we have now.....

The skull is from wikipedia, credited to Bernard Bill5
I've watched a lot of people die, most of them young--you will, too.

Ain't Bonnie Bassler wonderful?

Welcome to the terrordome

Anonymous — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 21:04:00 GMT

Caught in the race against time
The pit and the pendulum
Check the rhythm and rhymes
While I'm bendin' 'em
Snakes blowin' up the lines of design
Tryin' to blind the science I'm sendin' 'em
How to fight the power
Cannot run and hide
But it shouldn't be suicide

Public Enemy

What do you teach a young adolescent? How much of the truth do you dare bare?

We are in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction. Technology got us here, and I have my doubts it will get us out.
I have faith in life--creatures live in the deepest depths of the oceans, in scalding hot springs, deep within the Earth's crusts will survive whatever we might do in the next few generations.

I have faith in the sun--it will continue to beam on us for a good few more billion years.

I have faith in love--not that it will save us, but that we're redeemable, all of us.

I do not, however, have faith that the current culture has any inclination towards self-preservation. A bumper sticker on a Prius will not save us, no matter how near zero their emissions may be.

And here on the Fourth of July, in a land blessed with water and soil and a temperate climate, on a day marking the signing of the Declaration of Independence, most of us would starve to death without some sort of cash flow.

The man credited with writing the Declaration of Independence also wrote these words:

The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed... It is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785

What do you suppose he would say in my classroom today? In your classroom?

Photo from Poplicks here.
I have Public Enemy's first album on vinyl, bought before owned a CD player.
They're good, very good.

Unsustainable

Anonymous — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 10:05:00 GMT

Paddling directly into into a 20 mph breeze for 40 minutes burns a lot of calories--figure about 500, give or take 150.We gathered two dozen clams, from little necks to chowders, and probably burned another couple hundred calories.

Our clams provided us with maybe 350 calories.

Oh, we got all kinds of goodness from them, fresh clams scream with deliciousness. We got sunshine, we got salt spray, we got the good kind of sore muscles.

But we also got negative calories. This is unsustainable.

***

What does this have to do with biology?

Food is biology. It provides the stuff and energy that allow us to build a few trillion cells to become who we are. It ultimately comes from sugars built by green plants, carbon dioxide and water joined together, fueled by the fusion of our sun.

If it costs more energy to get food than the food provides, we starve to death.

OK, we get it. Besides, we got plenty of food, we don't have to rake for no clams, the supermarket got everything we need, sheesh, teach, you're weird...

The foods we get from our grocery stores require more calories to produce than the calories they store. This is easy to ignore in a culture that spends billions of dollars a year to shed calories.

We use more energy than we get back using today's industrial farming methods. Petroleum comes from ancient organisms, once food, and the energy released from it was captured from sunlight hundreds of millions of years ago.

Industrial farming feeds a lot of people, but we're living on our savings, calories stored over millennia. Artificial fertilizer takes a lot of fuel to make. Manure works, too, but it is heavy, hard to spread, and the animals are raised far away from the corn these days. The only farms my students "know" no longer exist.

***

We could fix this, of course. A good public school education could teach children where things come from, where wastes go.

We could focus our values on creation instead of consumption. We could teach a child how to grow basil, how to raise and slaughter chickens, how to make compost, all in the name of biology and good citizenship.

I know it's impossible to start a farm in a studio apartment, but it's not impossible to grow a sprig of basil in the window. Education is about possibilities.

We lie to the children and tell them they can grow up to be the President of the United States, that they can be whatever they want to be if they try hard enough, yet rob them of life's experiences as they sit under the hum of fluorescence, learning how to manipulate quadratic equations without once ever shelling a pea pod.

***

I think an hour or two of hanging around outside every day, mucking in clam beds or gardens or just plain mud, would wreck the grade point average (GPA) of some of our finest students. (I also think it would do them a ton of good.)

I think an hour or two of teaching self-sufficiency each week might also wreck the GPA of some of our students--not because of "lost" instructional time, but because a few might start questioning what they are doing in school.

Some of my brightest students never graduate because they started asking what the function of school is before they are mature enough to wrestle with the inconsistencies and paradoxes thinking adults face daily in our culture.

A major goal in my class is getting children to realize that we all know a whole lot less than we think we do, another to help them learn how to make connections, a third simply to teach them how to observe.
I live in the same town as the children I teach. I like to be around happy, autonomous people. If they want to learn how to be sensible, however, they best avoid a teacher foolish enough to kayak in a 17 knot breeze scratching for clams and buy the canned chowder instead.

Donald Hall, biology teacher

Anonymous — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 12:57:00 GMT

Plants strip electrons from water, and use them to help store energy in organic compounds. The left-overs are oxygen molecules. Any schoolchild knows we need oxygen, but few educated adults know why.

If you hold a flame to cool glass, a small patch of condensation forms, a brief patch of fog. It is unexpected, and often missed, unless you look for it. Oxygen is grabbing electrons and protons from the fuel—butane, wax, food, it matters not—and re-forming water.

Along the way the electron has given up energy captured by plants from sunlight—it’s what keeps you alive.

We teach this in biology, or rather we teach a litany of names, a parade of complex molecules that pass the electron down an energy gradient. We focus on the carriers, and in our earnestness, forget that it’s really all about the electron.

***

If you want to learn biology, read Donald Hall.

In "Poem with One Fact," Hall talks of enzymes and amino acids in a poem, a universe, really, that distinguishes life from what we call living. I trivialize it by trying to explain it--go read it.

***

If I used Donald Hall’s words in class, my lambs would soar—they’d forget the AP Exam as they watched an earthworm rhythmically work its way through mud, the peristalsis of life, of love. They’d tie the rocking to the rhythm of belly aches, to making love in the back seat of a dented Dodge Neon.

They’d stop worrying about future jobs and Jacuzzis lost in a freefalling economy, and get on their knees to sniff the sweet soil, knowing that’s where life starts, and that’s where life ends.

They’d no longer try to impress their impressionable parents with words like nicotinamide dinucleotide or ATP synthase (as powerful and poetic they sound when pronounced with care) and instead would say “eek… ook… oop… umm” to describe the journey of a particle of life, an electron, as it gets kicked around from water to sugar and back to water again.

What did you learn in biology today, love? Her mother asks. I saw on the syllabus you’re studying electron transport chains and chemiosmosis. Have you been keeping up with the reading? The exam is May 10th, we have work to do, no?

Amanda would scream EEK! at dinner, loud enough to make Grandma look over her diamond framed lens to scowl at her mother, who married well, but, well, not well enough.

OOK!—not quite as loud. Dad silently calculates the cost of 6 more weeks of sessions, and wonders if Xanax would be cheaper for this girl at the table, eeking and ooking, a girl who grew breasts and thighs and became this womanchild he does not know, eeking and ooking and eeking and ooking.

Oop—quieter now. Sam, her much younger brother, unplanned (ah, evolution) but not unloved, plays along. oop…oop….oop…oop. Amanda nods, smiles, and once more…Oop.

And now a very quiet umm, melodic, restful. The electron is back home, wrapped in water.

Clearly, the girl is troubled.

She gets up from the table, barefoot, and wanders outside under the rising crescent moon to check on her snow peas, their arched new stems breaking through the earth, just visible in the late dusk light, and thanks she knows not who for giving her light and life, while inside the adults sit in silence. The uneaten dinner grows cold, electrons trapped in brussel sprouts and butter, waiting to be released.

Condensation photo by fmanto, used under CC 3.0.

The beans on Wall Street

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:27:00 GMT

OK, I'll clam up about the quahogs for now, though I might not resist a report on the Great October Clam Hunt coming up in a few days.

***

We are spending time in biology talking about biogeochemical cycles and energy transfer.

Carbon is cycled. So is water. Nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium. We use stuff over and over, yet we depend on other organisms to get it.

We rely on plants to recapture carbon dioxide and merge it with electrons and protons from water. We rely on bacteria to capture nitrogen from the air, to break it back down when organisms decompose.

Energy, however, cannot be recycled. We are creatures of the sun.

***

Each year, plants make enough stuff to keep more than a few billion primates alive. Each year we come closer to learning about limits. While folks panic over a volatile stock market, the local trees are breaking down chlorophyll, preparing for winter. Organic molecules are moved back into the roots, their energy, stored sunlight, held over until February when the sap starts to run again.

I walk to school. By mid-October, I am mostly walking in the dark.

For the last 3 years, I passed a maple that held onto its leaves on a few branches, long after the other leaves had fallen. The leaves bunched around a street lamp. Most of the tree lay dormant, yet a few hundred leaves stayed green, capturing light, making sugars.

This week darkness returned to my morning walk, and I remembered my tree a quarter mile before I got to it. As I ambled to school, I decided I'd take a picture a day, to show students in minutes what I'd seen over months. I could structure a good lesson around my persistent tree.

The tree was gone—sawdust surrounded its hollowed stump, likely cut down within the past week. Judging by the stump, it needed to come down. Still hurt to see it gone.

***

On Friday, my biology classes will plant seeds bought in the local grocery store, seeds still in their packages sold as food. I'll call it a lab. I'll toss in a few critical thinking questions, we will discuss cycles, but the real objective is to get the kids to see something grow over time in front of their eyes.

If we get lucky, if the light is just right, if the plant survives the winter break, and if pollen gets fortuitously dislodged, we may have grow a new bean pod by February.

Carbon dioxide from teachers cajoling students to try a little harder, from kids telling secrets to each other, from sighs, from laughter, will join particles ripped off the water molecules poured on the plants by the students.

And when the students start to pick up on the fears of the generation that mortgaged their futures, as another cycle of greed ends, maybe they will find solace when their bean plants flower in January.

"New Economics" still relies on the old economics--everything we need comes from the soil and the sun. There are limits.

A bean plant never loses its value, no matter what the market's doing. And by late winter, even Wall Street might not amount to more than a hill of beans.

Both photos from the National Archives--the bean picture was taken around 1938. If the boys are still alive, I'd love to hear their story.

SWBAT for 2008-2009 biology

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:11:00 GMT

The New Jersey state curriculum for science opens with this:

The New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards for Science reflect the belief that all students can and must learn enough science to assume their role as concerned citizens, equipped with necessary information and decision-making skills. Students best learn science by doing science. Science is not merely a collection of facts and theories but a process, a way of thinking about and investigating the world in which we live.

State of New Jersey Department of Education
http://education.state.nj.us/cccs/?_standard_matrix;c=5

Teaching science goes back to our fundamental purpose as public school teachers--creating an informed citizenry. I have spent the summer puffing out my chest, thinking grand thoughts on the high meaning of being a science teacher in a high-tech society, dreaming grand plans.

And now today all of a sudden I'm only 3 weeks away from over a hundred new faces waiting to be edumacated, and my high falutin' ideals flee south with the disappearing sunlight.

So in a moment of panic, I am writing down essentials I hope my biology students take away come next June. (Don't worry, I'll get to my physical science students, too.)

SWBAT:

1) comprehend that water is not alive. It is amazing stuff, with all kinds of wonderful properties, not all understood, but...

Water chemistry is given short shrift, with reason--the stuff is amazingly complicated. I spend a period talking and playing with the stuff. I also talk a bit about the Mpemba effect (hot water freezes faster than cold water under some conditions), a phenomenom known to great minds in the past, reintroduced to modern science by a high school student in Tanzania.

I also like to show students water coming out of fire (just sweep a propane torch over cool glass or a mirror--and use, of course, proper safety equipment). Connect it to an exhaled breath, cellular respiration, and away we go!

2) grasp that plants are alive....really...and not just because they have a lot of water.

3) explain why just about everything easily combustible in the classroom ultimately comes from plants

This is fun, and helps seal my reputation as a nut--ask students what materials can be easily lit on fire. (Don't do this on a bad day.) Simply ask what can be burned using simply a match.

Just about everything (wood, paper, cloth, hair, plastics) are ultimately products of photosynthesis, and the heat and light from the flame reflect solar energy captured and transferred by chlorophyll to hydrocarbon bonds.

4a) know where their food comes from....

OK, this sounds like pre-school, but it reflects the huge disconnect between the particulars of the curriculum, and the big picture.

I have spent time, too much time, trying to explain minutiae such as guanine and cytosine having 3 hydrogen bonds while adenine and thymine have two (or is it the other way round) when much of my class is amazed that a bean from a Goya package will grow when stuck in the ground. ("But it's food? How come it grows?")

So each year my class plants. And when 2 or 3 plants survive long enough to produce a few beans, I ask if anyone wants to eat them. And the answer is invariably no

So I do---and you'd think I was swallowing a live goldfish they way the kids respond.

4b)....and where their poop goes

I don't think I am sticking my un-tenured neck out too far when noting that a few things are askew in our environment. We mess things up.

Asking kids to figure out where the local sewage goes opens up new vistas in microbiology, ecology, taxonomy, and general ickiness.

5) visualize numbers

Most of my kids (and, to be fair, most adults I know) have little grasp of numbers beyond a few dozen. "Knowing" the Earth is over 4 billion years old well enough to bubble the right answer on a test is not nearly the same as having some sense of the vastness of time that represents.

I tell my students I will give an "A" for the year to anyone who can count to a billion one number per second. And invariably a few students try, and keep trying, throughout the remainder of the period.

Evolution is a deceptively difficult concept, and it requires some number sense.

If nothing else, a better grasp of numbers might help my future voting citizens have some idea what over 550 billion dollars means.

Photograph from the National Archive